An Array Of Clothes

The well-connected owned an array of clothes.  Costume was dictated by occasion, season, and time of day.  Especially tough were country house weekends.  Open saloons were taking the place of horse-drawn coaches.  The most avant-garde sped to their rural venues hidden in baggy dust coats, protective bonnets, veils, and goggles.  Their trunks bulged with essentials for a variety of indoor and outdoor pursuits.  Riding gave women a chance to parade their corseted figures in tailored habits.  Golfing, shooting, skating, tennis, croquet, mountaineering, archery, and bathing all required specific dress.  English designers exploited their reputation for high-quality tailor-made costumes and activity wear.  The best came from Creed, Redfern, and Burberry.
   
Tea gowns were essential to gracious living.  Fashion magazines carried regular reviews of the latest decorative designs and how to wear them.  Edwardian fiction and biographies overflow with wistful allusions to these garments.  Marking a divide between day and evening wear, they allowed women respite from tight corsets at five o’clock, when tea was traditionally taken.  Always picturesque, tea gowns and wrappers were long, flowing, and voluminous, giving the body room to relax.  Custom permitted women dressed in these informal gowns while lounging in their boudoirs, to receive guests.  A boon to budding liaisons.
   
Evening wear was flamboyant and provocative.  Bodices cut low, with narrow shoulder straps decorated by wisps of accordion-pleated silk.  This encouraged an overt display of jewels.  Diamonds and pearls were admired.  Tiaras and bejeweled ornaments glittered in hair.  Long pearl ropes were draped pleasingly over bodices.  For those unable to afford real gems, the market offered first-rate costume jewelry.  Edwardian frou-frou relied on sumptuous fabrics like glossy satins to catch and reflect light.  These were trimmed with pleated voiles, sequined and beaded panels, hand-painted inserts, and lace frills and flounces.  Rustling taffeta petticoats beneath trained skirts concluded the sensual compositions.  Lavish capes with comfy linings shielded their elaborately arrayed occupants from cool evening air.

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