England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [37]
A courtesan needed elaborate, high hair, so a new Kelly girl had to pay an early visit to a hairdresser. Hair salons were everywhere in London, and specialist stylists, such as David Ritchie, author of Treatise of the Hair in 1770, had waiting lists that were months long. The construction of such confections of coiffure took over three hours of skilled work with pins, braids, and curling tongs, and further hours to decorate. Pupils paid a shilling to practice on life-size models in the back of the shop, and at the front two hairdressers put pads made of horsehair on the client's head and then stacked the hair on top in a curving tower of three feet or higher. They looped hair in curls to ornament the style and then added a string of fake pearls, a few long feathers dyed blue or pink or yellow (a style fit only for prostitutes, according to Queen Marie-Antoinette's mother), or even flowers, fruit, or models of houses or boats. The writer Hester Thrale jibed that two fashionable ladies whom she met had the equivalent of two gardens on their heads, "an acre and a half of shrubbery besides slopes, grass plants, tulip beds… and greenhouses." Such hairstyles made hats impossible, so the hair was usually wrapped in a length of gauze for outdoor excursions. The style would remain in place for about three months and was then reset; in order not to crush it in the interim, the woman had to sleep on a special head support. As hair could not be washed or brushed after styling, many coiffures were infested with insects and lice, sometimes even mice. The fashion for high hair began around 1765, and by the early 1780s it was at its most excessive (becoming less popular after a tax on powder was introduced in 1786 and virtually dying out after a law was passed in 1795 that hairdressers had to take out an expensive annual license for powdering). Although commentators mocked it, the style added height, slimmed the face, and emphasized a lovely neck.
Kelly girls were ornately styled and carefully groomed. Emma's dress was a highly fashionable imitation of French court dress: stiff wide skirts of embroidery and brocade worn over heavy corsets, finished off with a heavy train. At Kelly's, however, the bodices were cut much lower. Charlotte's girls looked like impressive brocaded ships and had to turn sideways to pass through doors. Courtesans usually wore pink—peach, coral, sugar pink, and rose—which suited Emma's creamy complexion perfectly. A tightly laced bodice opened over a piece of different-colored material called a stomacher, and a rigid skirt that resembled a jeweled lampshade was worn with a different colorful underskirt. Dresses were padded with false hips and bottoms made from cork, fake breasts were fashioned from porcelain or cloth, and sometimes even a fake stomach bulge was added. Magazines made ribald jokes about the cork rump, showing men finding that their lover was "corked." The overall impression was of an impossibly curvy woman squeezed into a silk dress two sizes too small. Stays were pointed and boned down the front in a way that prevented the wearer from bending forward and made crossing the legs while sitting impossibly uncomfortable. Anyone wearing them always had to sit very upright, and moving from a sitting to a standing position was usually rather painful.
Thick makeup was also very much in vogue, so much so that in 1770 the government passed a law allowing a man to divorce his wife if he could prove that she had fooled him into marrying her by using makeup to hide her ugly looks or even her true age. Courtesans were the most heavily painted women of all. A Kelly girl first applied a base of cold cream and then smoothed a thick layer of white lead paint over her face. Her eyebrows were shaved off and replaced