Frock Consciousness

Rosemary Hill

• The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Fashion Writing edited by Judith Watt
  Viking, 360 pp, £20.00, November 1999, ISBN 0 670 88215 1
• Twentieth-Century Fashion by Valerie Mendes and Amy de la Haye
  Thames and Hudson, 288 pp, £8.95, November 1999, ISBN 0 500 20321 0
• A Century of Fashion by François Baudot
  Thames and Hudson, 400 pp, £19.95, November 1999, ISBN 0 500 28178 5
• The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860-1914 by Christopher Breward
  Manchester, 278 pp, £45.00, September 1999, ISBN 0 7190 4799 4
• Black in Fashion by Valerie Mendes
  Victoria & Albert Museum, 144 pp, £35.00, October 1999, ISBN 1 85177 278 2

In A Journal of the Plague Year Defoe’s narrator keeps an eye on premises belonging to his brother, who has taken his own family out of the stricken city. Walking one day towards the warehouse in Swan Alley near London Wall he meets, in the otherwise deserted street, three or four women coming toward him wearing high-crowned hats. Reaching the warehouse he finds it broken open. Inside, half a dozen more women are trying on a consignment of the hats, meant for export, ‘fitting themselves ... as unconcerned and quiet as if they had been at a hatter’s shop’. It is a dream-like scene: the fashionable looters, each looking for her size, while around them London rots and grass grows in the Strand. It is also a striking demonstration of Freya Stark’s maxim that ‘there are few sorrows through which a new dress or hat will not send a little gleam of pleasure however fugitive.’