If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley Read Free Book Online Page A

kitchen. A chest was the more likely receptacle for linen or folded clothes, and Georgian ladies write of ‘laying up’ rather than ‘hanging up’ their dresses.
    The birth of the modern, upright wardrobe followed the birth of the coat hanger. Victorian fashions for ladies involved skirts wider than ever before, and all this fabric had to be stored somewhere. Ottomans and hollow stools made their appearance in ladies’ dressing rooms and bedrooms. Finally, the ‘shoulder’, as it was originally known, was invented. This was a narrow, wooden but still recognisable coat hanger, and it allowed clothes to be stored vertically in a cupboard. In 1904, a German visitor noted that in English women’s wardrobes ‘only skirts are hung on hangers and go into the hanging part of the cupboard, all the rest are laid flat, like men’s clothes’. But the wire coat hanger had just been invented, and would sweep all before it: today shirts, coats, trousers and dresses alike are usually hung.
    For many centuries a king or nobleman would put on his undershirt in the room where he slept. After that, a ceremony called the levee would be performed. The king would step out of his bedchamber into a more public room, where his outer clothes would be handed to him by his servants. He had to get used, then, to his courtiers seeing him in his underwear.
    The nature of people’s undergarments is a subject to which we can gain a surprising amount of access. Even the chivalrous,ancient and Noble Order of the Garter actually takes its name from an attempt to cover up a lady’s very public wardrobe malfunction: Edward III created the order’s motto when he chided some courtiers with the words ‘ Honi soit qui mal y pense ’ (‘Evil be to he who evil thinks’) when they rudely laughed at the Countess of Salisbury’s garter accidentally falling to the floor.
    Indeed, underwear has often been put deliberately on display. This can be a sexually predatory action, common to the lacy-shirted male Cavalier courtiers in the 1630s through to the young urban males of today showing their Calvin Klein underpants above low-slung jeans. And Monica Lewinsky discovered that even the most powerful man in America could be reduced to a jelly by the sight of an intern’s thong.
    Generally speaking, though, to have visible underwear is regrettable. A young French housewife was addressed in the closing years of the fourteenth century in the advice book Le Ménagier de Paris . She was commanded to cover up carefully:
be mindful that the collar of your shift, or your camisole, or of your robe or surcoat does not slip out one over the other, as happens with drunken, foolish, or ignorant women.
    Yet to receive someone while imperfectly dressed can even mean that you respect them greatly, and the supremely self-confident Winston Churchill would famously chat to his staff while naked in his bath. On the morning of 17 June 1520, during the conference near Calais being held to celebrate their friendship, Francis I of France appeared unexpectedly in Henry VIII’s bedchamber. He personally handed the English king his shirt as a sign of the close intimacy between the nations of England and France. (This tactful gesture was necessary because Francis had defeated Henry in a bout of wrestling a few days previously, and his brother king was in a royal sulk.)
    In Henry VIII’s case, it was usually an Esquire of the Body who would help the king into his shirt in the privacy of his bedchamber. Henry would emerge ‘loosely dressed’ and enterhis privy chamber, a more public room, next door. Here, his Yeomen of the Wardrobe would have his outer clothes ready, and his Grooms would hand them to the more senior Gentlemen of the bedchamber. It was this latter group who would actually dress the king. The Grooms were warned to handle the king’s garments with great reverence, and not to ‘lay hands upon the royal person, or intermeddle with dressing’, except to warm clothes before