Page:Costume, fanciful, historical, and theatrical (1906).djvu/88

52 a famous cloth merchant of the time of Henry VIII., is described as appearing before that monarch in a plain russet coat and a pair of white kersey slops, the stockings of the same piece being sewn to his slops. Slops was a term developed from "slip," and signified any garment easily adjusted, and an



example of its use occurs in Much Ado About Nothing, a phrase running "as, a German from the waist downward, all slops"; hence may the suspicious glean that the Teuton habit of costume was not mainly trim.

Men yielded to the general craze for an expanded hip, wearing great breeches stuffed with hair or bran or wool, and exhibiting no less than