Title: Women's Accessories in the 1700s - Geri Walton
Headings: Women’s Accessories in the 1700s
Women’s Accessories in the 1700s
Content: “ [T]his offspring of fancy … like the clouds, is ever changing; the fashion of to-day is thrown into the casting-pot to-morrow. The buckle seems to have undergone every figure, size, and shape of geometrical invention … [and is] the ton of 1781.” [ 4]
Yet, as popular as the buckle was, by the latter part of the 1700s, buckles were suddenly replaced by shoestrings. This so upset the manufacturers, who at the height of buckle production were producing annually some 2,496,000 pairs, they “sent a deputation to the Prince of Wales … with a petition stating the distressed situation of thousands of persons who had been engaged in various departments of the buckle manufacture.” [ 5] The Prince sympathized and resolved to wear nothing but buckles, even ordering his household to do the same. “ But neither his example nor his influence were sufficient to stem the tide of fashion, and in a few years the use of shoe buckles was discontinued, except among the aged.” [ 6]
Spectacles —Spectacles were made by hand and could be held in place by hand or by exerted pressure on the nose. These women’s accessories came in two versions — old sight and young sight — and the modern style glasses, with temples passing over the ears, did not appear until 1727 and were not immediately adopted. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, scissor-glasses (used to correct distance-vision and mounted on scissoring stems) or lorgnettes (handled spectacles) were popular.