vesture

plural vestures

1. A covering of, or like, clothing.

   It pencilled each flower with rich and variegated hues, and threw over its exuberant foliage a vesture of emerald green.

   1852, The Ark, and Odd Fellows' Western Magazine

   2 more examples

   His broad-brim was placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he seemed absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume.

   1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “chapter 16”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC

   The clock in the Warden’s drawing-room had just struck eight, and already the ducal feet were beautiful on the white bearskin hearthrug. So slim and long were they, of instep so nobly arched, that only with a pair of glazed ox-tongues on a breakfast-table were they comparable. Incomparable quite, the figure and face and vesture of him who ended in them.

   1911, Max Beerbohm, chapter II, in Zuleika Dobson

present singular third person vestures · participle present vesturing · participle past vestured · past vestured

1. archaicTo clothe.