The Eccentricities of Gentlemen

Illuminated copper engraving, 1705, by Maria Sibylla Merian. Wikimedia Commons. The traveling bug lover, in the earliest days of insect study, brought back from foreign...

Vogue, a century or so ago, often featured the “fancy dress balls” of the day, especially as they pertained to charity events and the idling of the rich—the magazine proclaimed such costume parties (in the 1913 article “On With the Masque!”) to be a “whirling vortex of  merriment in  the guise of bird, beast, or flower, or as the elements of nature, or in plumes borrowed from many nations.”

“Down with the pretty ladies of the old school! Down with the old masters! Away with the pretty ladies!” Ken Russell’s Dante’s Inferno (1967), a...