ENGLISH FASHIONS.
WHO wins for taste, English Ladies or French Ladies? who knows best how to choose their colors, the shape of their garments, the manner of doing their hair, the uniformity or matching of their clothes? who knows best how to adorn their air, their person? We leave this question to be decided by everyone, and we present as a comparison two women’s Busts, shown in this Plate, independently of other Prints that we have given. If, as we tend toward believing, the French Ladies are superior, there will be less to reproach us with for freely inclining toward the Ladies of our Nation. One may be tempted to accuse the Artists of defects of grace and good maintenance which leap to the eyes from this Print: when one has seen the greatest number of English Ladies, especially of those who do not correspond with French Ladies, who do not study their fashions, their manners, one is obliged to agree that these defects are held particularly in their persons, and that the Artists have only rendered what they have seen. Do you want to paint beautiful nature, we said to the Artists, go to find it in places where it is found, where skillful people have met it, where they have confined it, so to speak.
Do not believe that we mean to respond here to the injuries that the English Author of the Fashionable Magazine have made to our Nation. It is the sole truth, it is the love of the truth alone which directs us in our judgement.
The Woman dressed in a pink satin gown with wide green stripes only wears on her head pink and black gauzes posed in the form of a pouf, and an aigrette of plumes of diverse colors, which fall almost on her forehead. Nevertheless a tuft of white gauze hangs as a veil behind the pouf.
This Woman is frizzed in large, separate curls, made upside down or turned underneath, in the place of curls turned up the way the Ladies of Paris wear them. Admit that if it is to change the French Fashion that the Ladies of London have adopted this form, they have not been happy in their change. That can distinguish their Ladies; but will that make it preferred?
Six fat curls break apart on each side of the tapet of this Woman, and two of these curls fall very low on her chest. Her hair in the back is pulled up in a hanging chignon.
She has on her neck a sort of fichu-frise, with very large pleats, fastened at the front with a wide green satin ribbon.
The second Woman, dressed in a chemise gown in capuchin color, only wears, like the first, gauzes posed like a pouf, and forming a very large shell in front. These gauzes are surmounted by five fat plumes, of which two are all green and three are green, pink, and white.
She is frizzed, like the first, in fat, separated curls, turned to the reverse.
Four fat curls, also reversed, fall on either side of the chest.
In her ears hang simple gold earrings à la Plaquette.
In the middle of her corset, in front, is placed a very large bouquet of artificial roses.
Who would doubt now, in seeing this latter Bust, that the Englishwomen and the English, so proud of their spirit of invention, and who wish to give themselves for originals and never for copies, who would fear particularly following us in anything; who would doubt now that they have imitated us? Chemise gown, earrings à la Plaquette, plumes on the head, bouquet in the corset: does this all only prove that when they invent, they copy us?
But, so that their pride doesn’t murmur, we apply ourselves to imitating them; and for one time they take our tastes, we take a hundred times of theirs, in the objects that they excel in.
Mimic of Modes 