Lace in Fashion - part 1
Those who have made a study of old portraits, prints, and costume plates, realize how much lace has been used. Lace was always considered by the fashionable world, the most exquisite of adornments. This was shown again and again in the portraits by Porbus, Coques, Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck. Frans Hals loved to paint with sure, swift strokes of his magic brush and capture the lace exactly.
What a bewildering array of lace-trimmed articles and of wide ruffles and fineries made of lace comes to memory as we think of the "Fashion Parade" of the past! Here they come: great circu-lar ruffs, collars and cuffs, falling collars, Medici ruffs, cravats, scarves, garters, shoe-roses, lace-trimmed boots, shirts, handkerchiefs, masks, fans, caps, aprons, lappets, flounces, wrist-ruffles, berthes, shawls, parasols ~ in all styles and shapes, and many patterns, textures and weaves. Where should we begin a short survey of artistic lace - where should we end?
We see the hundreds of portraits in European galleries showing the subject holding in his (or her) hand, a lace-trimmed handker-chief. A cuff of lace framed the hand itself, it becomes easy to believe that the artists loved to paint lace as much as their sitters loved to wear it. The enormous ruff tipped with lace that came into fashion about 1540, and which in England was called the "French ruff" and in France the "English monster," was edged in England with "Bone lace," much of which was made by the Flemish refugees in Dover and Honiton. These ruffs required much lace, but not so much as those that Queen Elizabeth wore. Twenty-five yards of Bone-lace were necessary to trim just one of those huge filmy butterflies rising above her head. The Queen had a yellow neck, and the style helped her hide it. So she wore higher ruffs than anybody in the world except the Queen of Navarre; and she piled finery on them of jewels, pearls, lace and golden threads. Her special taste was for the laces of Flanders and the "cutworks" and "points" of Italy. Her court followed her taste, although much "Bone-lace" and Spanish lace were also worn.
Though the Puritans frowned on lace, it is curious to note that when Cromwell's body lay in state it was draped with the most splendid Flemish Point lace. In the reign of Charles II, the English court wore lace in pro-fusion. Nobles even filled their wide boot-tops with rich ruffles, Cinq-Mars who died in 1642, left three hundred lace-trimmed boots.
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