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beginning of this movement looked askance at the decadence represented by changing fashions.
Ordericus Vitalis, for example, complained of Normans who grew their hair long like women, and crisped their hair and beards, wearing on their faces "the tokens of their filth and lust like stinking goats."8
In 1175, Prior Geoffrey of Vigeois was attacking the richness and preciousness of civilian costumes, where clothes were coloured according to the mood of the wearer, the clothes having their borders cut into little balls and pointed tongues, so that their wearers looked like devils in a painting.9
In the mid-thirteenth century, the German Franciscan Berthold von Regensburg orated satirically against the snares set by women's costumes: Women, he said, were as well created for Heaven as men, and need it as much as men; they have more compassion, go to church more readily than men, and earn indulgences more quickly.
But Woman's one failing is vanity.
Why, he thundered, women would spend as much money on seamstresses as on the cloth of the dress itself. It must have shields on the shoulders, be flounced and tucked around the hem, and pride is shown in the very workings of the buttonholes.
Veils - you twitch them hither, you twitch them thither, you gild them here and there with gold thread. You will spend a good six month's work on a single veil - all that a man may praise your dress.10
And on and on he thunders.
But the genie, as it were, was out of the bottle, or in this case the cloth was out of the garderobe.
Fashion had arrived, thanks largely to the intercourse between East and West, and it has remained ever since a major theme of western life.
The mills of Ypres, the weavers of Bath, the merchant ships of Venice and the silk stalls of Florence were thundering and chattering and clattering and racing with the news that the world had changed.
1. D. Yarwood, English Costume Batsford, London, 1961, p.41.
2. M. Hamilton Hill and P.A.Bucknell, The Evolution of Fashion: Pattern and Cut From 1066 to 1930 Batsford, London, 1967, p.10.
3. G. de Courtrais, Women's Headress and Hairstyles in England From AD 600 to the Present Day Batsford, London, 1973, p.14.
4. Ibid., p.18.
5. Yarwood, English Costume, p.42.
6. Ibid., p.44.
7. Ibid., 46
8. R. Barber, The Knight And Chivalry Cardinal, London, 1970, p.78.
9. Ibid.
10. Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages , p.64.
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