A Most Beguiling Accomplishment

November 20, 1786 ENGLISH FASHIONS. Will we censure the English Fashions, in order to raise ours over theirs? Will we establish a comparison between them, in order to always give the preference to ours? Will we reproach English attitudes, in order to give ourselves a dogmatic air? Will we approve or fault everything which has a foreign air? One or the other of these two options would properly announce our French character. Will we describe the English Fashions simply, in order to make them known, leaving each person the liberty of approving them? Accustomed to boldly faulting what appears bad or defective to us, and to frankly approving what appears good and worthy of praise, we will give ourselves on the English Fashions the same rights that we have over French Fashions: sometimes as censures, sometimes as  praisers , sometimes as simple describers, sometimes as appreciators; we will be free to choose. We will permit ourselves the comparison on occasion, and we will allot t...

September 15, 1786 WE represented in the sixteenth Issue  a man ready to ride a horse; we would have perhaps had to represent immediately, in the seventeenth , a Lady equally ready to ride; and in coming back today what we gave in this  seventeenth , we see that we would have the same, because it was never as important to paint the two women in  robes à la Turque , very different, it is true, in taste, but similar in form, that to bring order to our Issues. It is a fault, we confess, and maybe it will not be the last that we commit. Our good faith makes us pardon it. But what is good with us, is that when we feel our wrongs, we rush to repair them. One doesn't believe that we resemble these people who hasten to confess in advance their faults, when they perceive that they are going to be reproached, in order not to be forced to correct them, and in order that their ingenuity becomes them favorably. It would be necessary to read all the archives of the world, alwa...

The young and amiable Cephise dressed en Amazone  and coiffed with a hat trimmed with aigrettes and panaches. 1. Hat edged with flowers, surmounted with gauze and trimmed with ribbons and pearls. 2. Hat trimmed with oval sequins with two follette*  plumes. 3. Hat à la Harpie, trimmed with flowers, and surmounted with gauze. (1786) "Women come closer as much as they can to our practices.  They actually wear suits, as they engage in male occupations; with the difference, however, that they seem only to adopt such suits and such manners that men have abandoned.  We no longer cover ourselves with long, three-collared redingotes; women wear them.  Our watches are now trimmed with simple cords; women burden their with a quantity of trinkets.  Our Petit-Maîtres  of the latest taste work their hands into their pockets or their arms dangling ; women play with a toy or a light cane in their hands; their hair is now tied very low in a large cadogan,...