Painted Gentilmen

The tailor by Giovanni Battist 1570

... ready to cut the cloth on pattern lines marked out with some white substance, either chalk or soap.

 

Tailoring seems to have been an exclusively masculine craft in the sixteenth century. 

Painted Ladies - Elizabeth I,  The Ditchley Portrait, c1592

French Farthingale

It' was worn under formal farthingale dress on formal occasions consisted of a seperate bodice and skirt.Like its spanish predecessor, it was a canvas or linen petticoat with circular hoops of cane or whalebone set at regular intervals from waist to the ground.

Painted Ladies- Frank Cardigan Cowper  Vanity 1907

 

"Pre - Raphaelite hair, like Pre-Rahaelite face and body, was one of he truly original images invented by nineteenth century art. Thick and abundant female hair safely conveyed a vivid sexual message in an atmosphere of extreme prudery, as did shapely tight corsets under buttoned-up bodices." Anne Hollander - Seeing Through Clothes

Painted Ladies - Marie Henriette of Austria

 

Portrait by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

Marie Henriette of Austria wearing a Victorian Costume - hoop skirt