This is only one of many instances in which royalty has been responsible for inaugurating silly and eccentric fashions from some circumstance of an untoward nature. Thus when Francis I., owing to a wound he received in his head, was obliged to wear his hair short, this became a Court fashion. Charles V. suffered so intensely from headache that he had his hair cut close, and thence arose the mode of wearing it short. Charles VII. of France introduced long coats to hide his ill-made legs, and full-bottomed wigs were invented by a French barber, named Duviller, to conceal an elevation in the shoulder of the Dauphin. Tradition, too, tells how Queen Blanche provided her consort, Louis IX., with a wig to hide his baldness, for, said she, “our bald kings have never been lucky, and it ill befits a sovereign that he should not be better provided with flowing locks than a mendicant at the gates of Notre Dame. It shall never be said that Louis, our well-beloved consort, went about with as little hair on his crown as a monarch retired from his vocation, and shut up in a cloister.” By this incident the perruque was popularised in France, and Louis became the patron of “artists in hair.”
When Louis XIII. succeeded Henry IV. at the age of nine years, the courtiers, because “the new king could have no beard, resolved that they would have none themselves; and every wrinkled face appeared at Court as beardless as possible,” with the exception of the honest Sully, who, although jeered at for his old-fashioned appearance, made no change.
Shoes with very long points were invented by Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Anjou, to conceal a large excrescence on one of his feet, whereas the charming Isabella of Bavaria introduced the fashion of leaving the shoulders and part of the neck uncovered to show off her beautiful skin. The reign of Charles II., it has been remarked, “was the dominion of French fashions,” and the custom of baring the bosom was made the subject of frequent comment by the moralists of the day. Catherine of Braganza, it is said, “exposed her breast and shoulders without even the gloss of the lightest gauze,” and in one of her portraits “the tucker instead of standing up on her bosom, is with licentious boldness turned down, and lies upon her stays.”[117] Anne Boleyn is said to have had on her throat a large mole, which she carefully concealed with an ornamental collar-band, a fashion which was imitated by the ladies of the Court, who had never thought of wearing anything of the kind before. Nor was this her Majesty’s only defect, for it appears she had a malformation of the little finger of her left hand, on which there was a double nail, with something like an indication of a sixth finger. “But that,” says Wyatt, “which in others might be regarded as a defect, was to her an occasion of additional grace, by the skilful manner in which she concealed it from observation.” On account of this peculiarity she wore the hanging sleeves mentioned as her peculiar fashion when in France, a practice which was quickly followed by the ladies of the Court in this country. It may be mentioned, too, that Anne Boleyn had great taste and skill in dress, and we are told that “she was unrivalled in the gracefulness of her attire and the fertility of her invention in devising new patterns, which were imitated by all the Court belles, by whom she was regarded as the glass of fashion.”