At Home - Bill Bryson [209]
Toxic potions were popular, too. Well into the nineteenth century, many women drank a concoction called Fowler’s Solution, which was really just dilute arsenic, to improve their complexions. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddal (who is best remembered as the model for the drowned Ophelia in the painting by John Everett Millais), was a devoted swallower of the stuff, and it almost certainly contributed to her early death in 1862.*
Men wore makeup too, and indeed for a century or so were inclined to display breathtaking effeminacy, sometimes in the most unexpected circumstances. Louis XIV’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans, “in spite of being one of history’s most famous sodomites,” in the startlingly forthright words of the historian Nancy Mitford, was a brave soldier, but an unorthodox one. He would arrive at the battlefield “painted, powdered, all his eyelashes stuck together, covered with ribbons and diamonds,” Mitford wrote in The Sun King. “He would never wear a hat for fear of flattening his wig. Once in action he was as brave as a lion, only afraid of what the sun and dust might do to his complexion.” Men as well as women festooned their hair with plumes and feathers, and tied ribbons to each bouncing curl. Some men took to wearing high-heeled shoes—not clunky platform shoes, but slender, spiky heels up to six inches high—and to carrying furry muffs to keep their hands warm. Some carried parasols in the summer. Nearly all drenched themselves in perfume. They became known as macaronis, from a dish they first encountered on Italian tours.
So it is curious that the people who actually brought some restraint to matters—namely, the macaronis’ rival sartorial tribe, the dandies—have become associated in the popular consciousness with overdress. Nothing, with respect to male attire, could be further from the truth, and the quintessence of that muted splendor was George “Beau” Brummell, who lived from 1778 to 1840. Brummell was not rich or talented or blessed with brains. He just dressed better than anyone ever had before. Not more colorfully or extravagantly, but simply with more care.
He was born in reasonably privileged circumstances on Downing Street, his father a trusted adviser to the prime minister, Lord North. Brummell went to Eton and, briefly, to Oxford, before taking up a position in the military in the Prince of Wales’s regiment, the Tenth Hussars. If he had any aptitude for command in battle, it was never tested; his function essentially was to look good in uniform and to act as a kind of companion and assistant to the prince at formal gatherings. In consequence, he and the prince became close friends.
Brummell lived in Mayfair, and for some years his house was the epicenter of one of the more improbable rituals in London’s history—that of a procession of grown men of great eminence arriving each afternoon to watch him dress. Among those regularly in attendance were the Prince of Wales, three dukes, a marquess, two earls, and the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. They would sit and watch in respectful silence as Brummell began the daily process of grooming with a bath. It was generally thought an amazement that he bathed every day—“and every part of his body,” as one witness added with special astonishment. Moreover he did it in hot water. Sometimes he added milk, which itself set a fashion, though not an entirely happy one. When word got out that the withered and miserly Marquis of Queensberry, who lived nearby, was also in the habit of taking milk baths, milk sales in the district plummeted because it was rumored that he returned the milk for resale after he had immersed his crusty and decrepit skin in it.
The attire of dandies was studiously muted. Brummell’s apparel was confined almost entirely to three plain colors: white, buff, and blue-black. What distinguished dandies was not the richness of their plumage but the care with which they assembled themselves. It was all about getting a perfect line. They would