Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [575]
One subset of male New Yorkers did keep the older love of plumage alive. “Dandies”—usually sons of the wealthy—promenaded on Broadway and attended fashionable events dressed in up-to-the-minute Euromodes, with an attention to detail (monocles, canes, gold chains) that contemporaries considered effeminate. Dandies were also pioneers, however, as they began sporting mustaches in the 1840s, a full decade before luxuriant beards became generally acceptable.
Most of the pleasures and burdens of dressing up fell to the ladies. In public, genteel women still went about virtually veiled, muffled head to limb in bonnets, shawls, skirts, and gloves, all of muted colors. In two venues only did women discard such selfeffacement and display their silks and satins: when promenading on Broadway; and at Easter-time, when some fine ladies began showing off their new dresses in an unofficial after-church stroll along uppertendom’s Fifth Avenue.
At home or church, however, as at dinner parties, balls, the opera, and summer spas, wealthy New York women demonstrated clear mastery of the latest French fashions. Fabrics grew steadily more voluptuous (gauze, tulle, organdy, brocade, velvet) and their colors more intense (crimson, maroon, purple). Hemlines on stylish gowns and dresses fell steadily as skirts ballooned outward on layer after layer of petticoats—as many as fourteen. Changing tastes (and the arrival of the sewing machine) required and supplied more and more ruffles, fringes, flounces, lace, and artificial flowers, and sent dressmakers into a frenzy of braiding, pleating, puffing, and tucking. By the late fifties skirts ran to six feet in diameter (department stores widened their aisles accordingly), and a cotton dress required thirty to forty yards of material on the average; counting petticoats and other undergarments, the total could reach a hundred yards or more, eight times what it would have been half a century earlier.
Society women escaped utter immobilization only through the introduction of the cage crinoline, an undergarment into which were sewn narrow steel hoops capable of supporting the massed weight of the garments above. A godsend in helping one walk, the crinoline could all too easily get tangled up in carriage wheels, and wind gusts could blow a woman off her feet. Even more problematic were the tightly laced corsets that produced the stylish eighteen-inch waist, along with headaches, fainting spells, and assorted internal disorders.
The vast consumption of assorted fabrics was a great boon to the city’s dry-goods trade but a breathtaking expense to the consumer. James Fenimore Cooper, writing to his wife in the winter of 1850, described a party where one woman wore “a dress that cost, including jewels, thirty thousand dollars”—a fantastic sum at a time when skilled mechanics and craftsmen took home between $1.25 and $2.00 a day in wages.
Jewelery embellished many a costume—Mrs. Belmont attended the opera wearing a gold crown decorated with “clusters and flowers of emeralds and rubies, spangled with dew-drops of diamonds”—and among those hastening to supply these new needs were two young New Englanders, Charles L. Tiffany and John P. Young. Back in 1837 they had opened a stationery and dry-goods shop on Broadway, then slowly switched to more spectacular offerings as the boom took off. At first Tiffany and Young offered only imported goods: English silver and Continental crystal, gold jewelry, and Swiss watches. In 1848, a year of European revolutions, the firm purchased the jewels of Maria Amelia, wife of the recently deposed French king, and put them on display, winning for Tiffany the title “King of Diamonds.” That same year the firm