Vizard Mask As Ladies Fashion Accessory
The word vizard (sometimes visard) is used in Shakespearean English to refer to a visor, a mask, or a disguise (ex. "There, then, that vizard, that superfluous case, that hid the worse and show'd the better face." -- Love's Labors Lost V.ii.387)
Vizards were a fashion accessory for upper-class European ladies - gentlewomen - in the late 16th and into the 18th century. These light-weight masks were intended to protect a lady's face from sunlight while traveling in an open carriage, to preserve the (then) fashionable "look" of pale skin and rosy cheeks. This paleness contrasted with the sun-tanned skin of working-class women. Playwright William Shakespeare mentions this sun-adverse fashion craze in his play of 1590/91, Two Gentlemen of Verona (Act 4: Scene 4): "But since she did neglect her looking-glass; And threw her sun-expelling mask away, The air hath starved the roses of her cheeks; And pinched the lily-tincture of her face; That now she is become as black as I".
The Norwich Castle Museum in England has a rare surviving example of a lady's sun vizard. The plain (unadorned), oval-shaped mask covers the entire face, with two eye-holes and small opening at the mouth. It is made of black velvet, the inside lined with silk and stiffened with white paper; there is a glass bead attached to inside of the mouth opening, an aid to keeping the mask in place by gripping the bead with ones' teeth. The voluminous hairdos worn by ladies at this time prevented the mask from being secured by a ribbon tied around the head.
Read more about this topic: Vizor
Famous quotes containing the words mask, ladies and/or fashion:
“Tom’s great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face—as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; & thought.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Telephone poles were matchsticks, put there to be snapped off at a whim. Dogs trotting across the road were suddenly big trucks. Old ladies turned into moving—vans. Everything was too bright, but very funny and made for my delight. And about half a mile from my long liquid breakfast I turned carefully down a side street and parked, and sat beaming happily through the tannic fog for about an hour, remembering how witty we all had been, how handsome and talented ... [ellipsis in original]”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)
“For the fashion of this world passeth away.”
—Bible: New Testament St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, 7:31.