evening supper.

During the earlier years of this period, elegance of personal
appearance was believed to rest more upon the texture of garments than
upon their shaping. A silk dress needed no remodelling when it was a
year or so old; it remained distinguished by merely remaining silk.
Old men and governors wore broadcloth; "full dress" was broadcloth
with "doeskin" trousers; and there were seen men of all ages to whom a
hat meant only that rigid, tall silk thing known to impudence as a
"stove-pipe." In town and country these men would wear no other hat,
and, without self-consciousness, they went rowing in such hats.

Shifting fashions of shape replaced aristocracy of texture:
dressmakers, shoemakers, hatmakers, and tailors, increasing in cunning
and in power, found means to make new clothes old. The long contagion
of the "Derby" hat arrived: one season the crown of this hat would be
a bucket; the next it would be a spoon. Every house still kept its
bootjack, but high-topped boots gave way to shoes and "congress
gaiters"; and these were played through fashions that shaped them now
with toes like box-ends and now with toes like the prows of racing
shells.

Trousers with a crease were considered plebeian; the crease proved
that the garment had lain upon a shelf, and hence was "ready-made";
these betraying trousers were called "hand-me-downs," in allusion to
the shelf. In the early 'eighties, while bangs and bustles were
having their way with women, that variation of dandy known as the
"dude" was invented: he wore trousers as tight as stockings, dagger-
pointed shoes, a spoon "Derby," a single-breasted coat called a
"Chesterfield," with short flaring skirts, a torturing cylindrical