The Seven Deadly Sins of London

Thomas Dekker fiercely inveighs against the fashions in his "Seven Deadly Sins of London." "Women," he says, "will not be behind men in any newfangled fashions. If men get up the French standing colllars, women will have the French standing collar too. If Doublets with little thick skirts, women are thick-skirted too." "The starched gallant," the "fashion-mongering boy "-- the fop or "masher" of the period--is the individual who meets with the most scathing satire and abuse...
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Thomas Dekker fiercely inveighs against the fashions in his "Seven Deadly Sins of London."
"Women," he says, "will not be behind men in any newfangled fashions. If men get up the French standing colllars, women will have the French standing collar too. If Doublets with little thick skirts, women are thick-skirted too."
"The starched gallant," the "fashion-mongering boy "-- the fop or "masher" of the period--is the individual who meets with the most scathing satire and abuse from the moralists, dramatists, wits, and satirists of the Elizabethan period. He was always "neat and trimly dressed, fresh as a bridegroom; and his chin new reaped. He was perfumed 'like a milliner, and 'twixt his finger and his thumb he held a pouncet box." This "walking frippery" placed a mirror in his hat, put jewels in his ears, and "wore three men's livings in the shape of a seal ring on his thumb." His hair "he had knit up in silken strings with twenty odd-conceited true-love knots." "The spruce silken-faced courtier" fastened his mistress's favor--a little three or four inch square lace-edged handkerchief--with a fair jewel in his beaver felt, and would "stand every morning two or three hours learning how to look by his glass, how to speak by his glass, how to court his mistress by his glass." He was "a mincing marmoset made all of clothes and face one who dares not smile beyond a point for fear to unstarch his look: that hath traveled to make legs," and who would "lie ten nights awake, carving the fashion of a new doublet." The barber's ingenuity, like the tailor's. ran mad in the invention of fashions for wearing,the beard. They were worn twisted like a rope, hammer cut, spade or fork cut, circular or pointed stiletto fashion:--

"That heights, depths, breadths, triform, square, oval, round,
And rules geometrical in beards are found."

-- Public Opinion, Volume 21