To All Appearances

THE BOOK OF COSTUME (two volumes, 958 pp.) -- Mi Ilia Davenport -- Crown ($15).

The first of the 2,778 illustrations in these volumes shows King Or-Nina with his family, neatly gotten up in the latest Sumerian style of 3,000 B.C., i.e., bare feet and chest, a rather hefty skirt made out of hanks of wool, and a basket fitted snugly on his head. One of the last illustrations shows President Lincoln receiving at the White House in 1865.

To filling the gap between the Sumerian palace and the Civil War White House Millia Davenport devoted seven years. The result of her labor of love will impress the couturier and fascinate the housewife. The Book of Costume is also more instructive than many a history book, because it does not stop at tracking flares and gussets down through the ages. It is a history of the ornaments used by-men & women to add the finishing touches to their apparel--enameled watches, canes, necklaces, lap dogs, etc.

It is also an examination of weather through the ages--of how people dressed to meet it and how they were helped and hindered in doing so by the architecture of their homes and the demands of current fashion (Queen Elizabeth's habit of ripping her stylish, padded blouse open right down to the navel on warm days greatly shocked the French ambassador). All the elements that have influenced human clothing are touched: war, poverty, industrialization, poetry, hero worship, religion, royal mistresses.

Mrs. Job's Hat. Author Davenport, a costume and stage designer, is a first-rate researcher, and her chief sources are the western world's painting and sculpture. Such painters as Bruegel, Hogarth and Carpaccio, who filled their canvases with a crowd of characters and worked in every last detail of period settings, are her richest gold mines.

What is often comic, but always instructive about this book is Author Davenport's way of reversing the normal scale of values. No matter how largely they may figure, art, literature, history, the soul of man itself here becomes secondary to the prime concern--surface appearances. When Author Davenport looks at a medieval painting of the martyrdom of Saint Alban, she merely observes, with an artist's pure detachment, that the saint's collar "shows the new interest ... in the vertical line and in the center-front." In another such painting, Job's boils are ruthlessly ignored in favor of Mrs. Job's hat ("the turban which spread so rapidly from Persia"). The glories of the Medicis and the Italian Popes simply show that "the bodice is gradually taking on importance"; the Renaissance reaches its peak with a striking innovation named "the handcouvre-chef"; and gothic cathedral frescoes offer the well-dressed lady "a dramatic cuff."

The Passionate English. The Book of Costume also clearly documents how greatly the distinctive characteristics of nations change with the centuries. Fifteenth Century Italians were clean, reserved, austere: they were shocked by the filth of the Germans. Erasmus was bowled over by the vulgar English tendency to display passion and emotion in public. On the other hand, while skirts rise and fall and puffed knee breeches slowly work their way into peg-top trousers, many surprising similarities exist between far-separated cultures. The woman in the Greek wedding procession, bowling along in her chariot, might almost be on the way back from buying a work dress in a country store; and in a letter quoted from a lady of Chaucer's day to her husband, the cooing tone of the gentle gold digger sounds clearly through the medieval prose: "I would you were at home, liever than a gown, though it were of scarlet."

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