This fantastical folly was in all degrees, from the courtier down to the tarter.  “It is a world to see the costliness and the curiosity, the excess and the vanity, the pomp and the bravery, the change and the variety, and finally the fickleness and the folly that is in all degrees; insomuch that nothing is more constant in England than inconstancy of attire.  So much cost upon the body, so little upon souls; how many suits of apparel hath the one, or how little furniture hath the other!” “And how men and women worry the poor tailors, with endless fittings and sending back of garments, and trying on!” “Then must the long seams of our hose be set with a plumb line, then we puff, then we blow, and finally sweat till we drop, that our clothes may stand well upon us.”

The barbers were as cunning in variety as the tailors.  Sometimes the head was polled; sometimes the hair was curled, and then suffered to grow long like a woman’s locks, and many times cut off, above or under the ears, round as by a wooden dish.  And so with the beards:  some shaved from the chin, like the Turks; some cut short, like the beard of the Marquis Otto; some made round, like a rubbing-brush; some peaked, others grown long.  If a man have a lean face, the Marquis Otto’s cut makes it broad; if it be platterlike, the long, slender beard makes it seem narrow; “if he be weasel-beaked, then much hair left on the cheeks will make the owner look big like a bowdled hen, and so grim as a goose.”  Some courageous gentlemen wore in their ears rings of gold and stones, to improve God’s work, which was otherwise set off by monstrous quilted and stuffed doublets, that puffed out the figure like a barrel.

There is some consolation, though I don’t know why, in the knowledge that writers have always found fault with women’s fashions, as they do today.  Harrison says that the women do far exceed the lightness of the men; “such staring attire as in time past was supposed meet for light housewives only is now become an habit for chaste and sober matrons.”  And he knows not what to say of their doublets, with pendant pieces on the breast full of jags and cuts; their “galligascons,” to make their dresses stand out plumb round; their farthingales and divers colored stockings.  “I have met,” he says, “with some of these trulls in London so disguised that it hath passed my skill to determine whether they were men or women.”  Of all classes the merchants were most to be commended for rich but sober attire; “but the younger sort of their wives, both in attire and costly housekeeping, cannot tell when and how to make an end, as being women indeed in whom all kind of curiosity is to be found and seen.”  Elizabeth’s time, like our own, was distinguished by new fashionable colors, among which are mentioned a queer greenish-yellow, a pease-porridge-tawny, a popinjay of blue, a lusty gallant, and the “devil in the hedge.”  These may be favorites still, for aught I know.