Once or twice we caught a glimpse of the light-brown hat formerly worn by all men about to be married, or to add a new wife to their collection of servants; once the custom was wide-spread of painting the hat white in sign of mourning, but to-day black is almost universal, and an excellent foil to the otherwise white garb. Bridegrooms no longer feel compelled publicly to announce their happy status, and there is another and more effective means of showing grief at bereavement,—a mourner’s hat like a large, finely woven, inverted basket with scalloped edges, which completely hides the afflicted face of the wearer. As he ambles along under this ample protection instead of blistering beneath a horsehair cage, surely a feeling of gratitude toward the departed relative must pervade the thoughts of the bereaved, particularly as the Korean term of mourning lasts for three years. There is a still more enormous, very coarsely woven, sunshade worn by peasants in the midsummer months, while Buddhist priests, otherwise indistinguishable from layman tramps and beggars, wear a smaller hat of similar shape to that of the mourners, but raised on bamboo stilts well above the head. The horsehair hat is costly, by Korean standards, the better ones even by our own, and, being put together with glue, is frail and perishable. Water is particularly fatal to it. Let the first drop of a shower fall, therefore, and from within the garments of every Korean man appears a hat-umbrella, a little cone-shaped cover of oiled paper or silk, like a miniature Japanese parasol, which is quickly opened and slipped over the precious hat. As to the rest of the male garb, no damage is possible which cannot be repaired by the return of sunshine or a few hours’ labor by the women at home. Thus on a rainy day the black heads above white bodies characteristic of all Korea turn to drenched cheese-cloth surmounted by oily yellow clowns’ caps.
It is fitting that the wardrobe of the insignificant sex should be simpler, and more easily described. Except that anything in the way of head-dress is denied them, lest they compete with the decorative male, the garb of the Korean women is in the main a crude replica of that of the men. All reasonably available evidence goes to show that the women are never permitted the luxury of wickerwork undergarments. Trousers, socks, and slippers are similar to those worn by the male; above these is the thinnest and slightest of garments, which barely covers the shoulders, and over the trousers is worn a white skirt fastened well up above the floating ribs. In summer at least that is all, except in a few old-fashioned communities, where a muffling white cloak covering everything except the eyes and the feet is still occasionally seen. That, I repeat, is all, and from our puritanical point of view it is not enough. For the Korean woman insists that the waistline is at the armpits, and makes no provision to have the upper and lower garments contiguous, with the result that she displays to the public gaze exactly that portion of the torso which the women of most nations take pains to conceal. Missionaries, who are as prone as the rest of us to lose their native point of view through long contact with other races, assure us that Korean women are extremely modest. In general deportment the statement holds water; but a married lady of Korea, marching down the main thoroughfare of one of our cities in her native garb, would be granted anything but modesty. One might fancy that the costume was prescribed by some lascivious tyrant of olden days; those who have looked deeply into the matter, however, assure us that it is due to the pride of motherhood. The fact remains that, though the precept and example of Western nations have tended to lengthen the upper garment among better-class women of the cities, and particularly among those who have attended modern schools, the great majority of the adult female sex in Korea still wear their breasts outside their clothing. Sun-browned and leather-textured as the face, the plumpness of matrons or the withered rags of age are almost always in plain, not to say insistent, evidence. In fact neither the men nor the women of the masses often succeed in making both garments meet; males below the _turamaggie_ class as habitually display their navels as their wives do their bosoms.