Alaskan Range: Fashions Fade
Librarian and columnist Greg Hill subscribes to the view that fashions fade, but style is eternal.
A DVD documentary from the library on Lady Gaga was viewed at our house last weekend to see what the fuss is, and to us it seems only foppery at play. Earlier I happened to be perusing a 1690 English tome, “The Ladies Dressing-Room Unlock’d, and Her Toilette Spread, Together with a Fop-Dictionary, and a Rare and Incomplete Receipt to Make Pig, or Puppidog-Water for the Face.” Finding it an impossible-to-resist title, and having a healthy interest in dictionaries, I was especially drawn to the Fop-Dictionary. A “fop,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is “a man who is preoccupied with and often vain about his clothes and manners; a dandy.”
The dandies of Yankee Doodle days, fops of Restoration England, 1940s zoot-suiters, and the poseur hipsters I encountered on a recent foray to Seattle provide ample testimony to the immutable foolishness of man. My curiosity was gratified by reading “Ladies Dressing Room” online, courtesy of Emory University’s Women Writers Project Resource Collection. The Project is “a collection of edited and unedited texts by women writing from the seventeenth century through the early twentieth century,” and it allowed me to discover that “Gris” is “Grey Furr of Squirrels bellies,” a “Loo Mask” is “an half Mask,” and “a certain Knot in the Hair, which ties and unties the Curls” was known as a “Murderer.” Moreover, one’s pocket-cloth was a “Mouchoir,” for “It were Rude, Vulgar, and Uncourtly, to call it Handkerchief.”
Wikipedia says “Ladies Dressing Room” is “a satirical guide in verse to Fancophile fashion and terminology” that was written by the relatively unfamiliar Mary Evelyn. She’s the daughter of John Evelyn who’s known for his diary and the scope of his knowledge and publications. Evelyn’s diary overlaps his contemporary and friend Samuel Pepys’ 1660-1669 diary by decades, but Evelyn’s is nowhere near as interesting. Both diarists describe the restoration of the British monarchy, the Great London Fire, and the black death plague, but where Pepys wrote his diary for himself, describing every personal sin, connivance, and misdeed he committed in private code, Evelyn clearly wrote his for posterity, carefully choosing words and portraying himself in the best possible light.
Glorifying himself was Evelyn’s main concern. He wrote on a huge array of topics – trees, navigation, ancient architecture, sculpture, and “the State of France” among many others, but, as related in Guy de la Bedoyere’s online essay titled “John Evelyn and the Art of Quoting,” Evelyn peppered his writings with unattributed quotations by classical and contemporary writers. He generated such a quotational flood that it wasn’t only difficult to tell when his words were his own, he obviously used them to bamboozle his readers.
For example, Evelyn sent his 1661 translation of a French work, “Instructions Concerning the Erection of a Library” to Pepys, whose diary records on October 5, 1665 that he’d been “reading a book of Mr. Evelyn’s … about directions for gathering a Library; but the book is above my reach.” Pepys was intellectually keen and an adept scholar, but Evelyn was a first-rate obfuscating plagiarist, and, like most everyone else, Pepys confused Evelyn’s furious hodgepodge of questionable assertions as superior intelligence. “Evelyn was adept at making it appear he was better read than he actually was,” as de la Bedoyere wrote, using “near-verbatim translations” without crediting the original authors, “cramming the text with every anecdote or quotation” he could find.
Pepys’ rearranged his library just fine without Evelyn’s false expertise, but a few centuries-worth of actual librarian experience is behind the changes to Noel Wien Library’s shelves that visitors have noticed. The tall reference book shelves have moved to make more space for people and to move parts of the collection to new, more user-friendly locations. The graphic novels and comic books are being consolidated near the Young Adult area.
Its roof and plumbing may be leaky, the siding peeling off the walls and the fire alarm system on its last legs, but our old library’s still timeless, comfortable, usable, helpful and packed with customers. It’s also wired for fiber optics, connected to powerful databases, full of digital and analog information. As Yves Saint Laurent said, “Fashions fade, style is eternal.
