ents worn.

It was an age of draperies.

This age must call up pictures of bewrapped people swathed in heavy
cloaks of cloth of Flanders dyed with the famous Flemish madder dye;
of people in silk cloaks and gowns from Italy; of people in loose
tunics made of English cloth.

This long reign of over fifty years is a transitional period in the
history of clothes, as in its course the draped man developed very
slowly towards the coated man, and the loose-hung clothes very
gradually began to shape themselves to the body.

The transition from tunic and cloak and Oriental draperies is so slow
and so little marked by definite change that to the ordinary observer
the Edwardian cotehardie seems to have sprung from nowhere: man seems
to have, on a sudden, dropped his stately wraps and mantles and
discarded his chrysalis form to appear in tight lines following the
figure--a form infinitely more gay and alluring to the eye than the
ponderous figure that walks through the end of the thirteenth century.

Up to and through the time from the Conquest until the end of Henry
III.'s reign the clothes of England appear--that is, they appear to
me--to be lordly, rich, fine, but never courtier-like and elegant.

[Illustration: A MAN OF THE TIME OF HENRY III. (1216-1272)

Heavy cloak and fulness of dress characteristic of this time.]

If one may take fashion as a person, one may say: Fashion arrived in
1066 in swaddling-clothes, and so remained enveloped in rich cloaks
and flowing draperies until 1240, when the boy began to show a more
active interest in life; this interest grew until, in 1270, it
developed into a distaste for heavy clothes; but the boy knew of no
way as yet in which to rid himself of the trailings of his mother
cloak. Then, in about 1272, he invented a cloak more like a strange,
long tunic, through which he might thrust his arms for freedom; on
this cloak he caused his hood to be fastened, and so made himself
three garments in one, and gave himself greater ease.

Then dawned the fourteenth century--the youth of clothes--and our
fashion boy shot up, dropped his mantles and heaviness, and came out
from thence slim and youthful in a cotehardie.

Of such a time as this it is not easy to say the right and helpful
thing, because, given a flowing gown and a capacious mantle,
imagination does the rest. Cut does not enter into the arena.

Imagine a stage picture of this time: a mass of wonderful, brilliant
colours--a