front. The sleeves were often laced to the armholes. The doublet was laced to the hose. The hose was laced. Sometimes even the shoes were laced. A man could not dress himself without assistance. Fashionable dressing, or "making-ready," was such a formidable undertaking that, once accomplished, a man was glad to keep the same clothes on his back all day long. Women carried dress to an even greater extreme than men. They put on a complete framework of whalebone and wire before they began to assemble the outer garments. When the process was completed, all resemblance to a human figure had disappeared. Women were wide and round, stiff and rigid as if made of metal, and their dress abounded in straight lines and sharp angles.
What women achieved by means of wire and bone, men accomplished by means of wadding. Wool, hair, rags, and often bran, were used to pad out the doublet and hose. A writer in 1563 (Bulwer, Artificial Changeling) tells a story of a young gallant "in whose immense hose a small hole was torn by a nail of the chair he sat upon, so that as he turned and bowed to pay his court to the ladies, the bran poured forth as from a mill that was grinding, without his perceiving it, till half his cargo was unladen on the floor."
Holme in his Notes on Dress (Harl. 4375),
