The creed and the fallacy of fashion, it seems to me, have seldom been
better expressed than in the retort once made to a friend of mine,
in one of our more conservative New England towns. Sojourning there
for a time, she had reason to order a hat from a local milliner. When
she tried it on, it did not resemble in the least the headgear of the
metropolis. “They are wearing hats very low, this year, you know,” she
protested. “Ah,” was the unperturbed reply, “they are wearing them
high in Newburyport.” I do not remember the fate of the hat--which is
unimportant; but the statement has remained with me for years as one
of the most significant imaginable. It was at once the glorification
and the _reductio ad absurdum_ of modishness. My friend and the
milliner spoke in the same spirit. For provincialism in dress consists
merely in adhering rigidly to the _avant-dernier cri_. The object
of allegiance may be, in the provinces, a little tardily come up with;
but the rigidity is precisely the rigidity of the rue de la Paix.
Fashion is not simply a question of longitude.
The sense of mode might be considered, as so many other things have
been, the possession that distinguishes man from the beasts. The
peacock is no proof to the contrary; for if, as scientists suggest to
us, all radiant plumage has been developed as a means of attraction,
at least the ideal of adornment has been, in the case of the birds,
consistently æsthetic. The feathery fashions have always been
intrinsically good. Whereas (to be flippant) the attraction exercised
by the latest mode would seem usually to point to some principle of
unnatural selection. The bird of Paradise, who is probably irresistible
in his native forest, can be positively repellent on a hat. Yes; the
sense of mode is curiously different from the sense of beauty. Let us,
however, be serious.
Preachers of all time--and satirists, who are lay-preachers--have
declaimed against female extravagance in dress. It must be confessed
that the sex of the more peaceful pursuits has been the more
exuberantly adorned. The male costume worn, say, at the court of
Henri III, was every bit as bad as anything that contemporary ladies
could have boasted; but even in the time of Henri III, a man had to
hold himself ready for the saddle and the tented field. Some part of
his life was bound to be spent in garments as rational as he could
conceive them. It was the female sex that could expand, unchecked and
unpruned, into such wild tendrils, such orchid-like incontinent bloom,
of “changeable apparel.”
From the earliest times, it is the woman who has been designated as the
sinner in this respect. On this point, the Old and New Testaments are,
for once, agreed; Isaiah and St. Paul are at one. “The chains, and the
bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets ... and the earrings ... the
mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping-pins ... the fine linen, and
the hoods and the veils,” the one accuses; “broidered hair, or gold, or
pearls, or costly array,” complains the other. Ezekiel thunders against
“the women that sew pillows to the armholes” (the _gigot_ sleeve
in the reign of Zedekiah!) “and make kerchiefs for the head of persons
of every stature, to hunt souls.” And the tradition has remained. It
is perhaps the only subject on which St. Ignatius Loyola and John Knox
would have been thoroughly sympathetic. One is certainly at liberty to
infer from the chorus that it is easier for a camel to pass through the
needle’s eye than for anything really _chic_ to enter the Kingdom
of Heaven.
All these gentlemen, to be sure, seem to have objected to the fact
and purpose of feminine adornment, rather than to rapid changes in
the methods adopted. But I cannot believe that St. Paul, who scored
the Attic curiosity born of the Attic _ennui_, would not have
preached even more violently, had he foreseen the need, against fashion
than against beauty. And is it not fashion rather than beauty that is
subtly discriminated against by all religious orders? The nun, like
the Quakeress, must adopt a single color and a single mode; though nun
and Quakeress, both, often find their chosen garb the most becoming
they could possibly wear. No dress could be more beautiful than that
which I remember from my childhood’s convent. It fell in rich and
simple folds of _violet_--_violet_ being neither purple nor
crimson, but something indefinably magnificent midway between--enhanced
by white linen _guimpe_ and cream-colored veiling. It gave the
daughter of a French duke, I remember, the aspect of a queen regnant.
Yet it represented poverty, chastity, and obedience. No one is
especially concerned with the nun’s being unbecomingly clad. A subtler
mortification is supposed to lie in her engaging to dress in exactly
the same way all her life. The mortification is of course heightened
by the fact that she shares her style of dress with the rest of the
community, regardless of type. But in any case the first thing that the
postulant renounces is fashionable clothing. They leave her curls to be
cut off later.
It is not, however, with the moral aspect of fashion that I am
concerned. The moral question, indeed, has ceased to be very poignant;
even our Calvinist great-grandmothers permitted a shy predominance of
trimming on the “congregation side” of their bonnets. The moral aspect
of fashion disguises itself nowadays as an economic consideration. With
economic considerations, again, I have no special concern. They are
writ large over half the printed pages of our time. Some statistician
every month proves to us something appalling: either that,
... since our women must walk gay, and money buys their gear,
materials are adulterated, or sewing-women are starved, or shop-girls
seek the primrose path, or husbands die of the strain in their early
forties. To much the same music, the New York Customs officials stage,
each day, an elaborate melodrama on the steamship piers. We know that,
from “Nearseal” to “Near-silk,” the poor will sacrifice comfort to cut,
and that a really “good” milliner makes a profit of a hundred per cent
on each hat. These things are all true; and Heaven forbid that one
should shirk the economic question! But I very much doubt if either
moralist or statistician will turn the trick. Yet they have only, it
would seem, to enlist a few other facts as good as their own, to be
quite sure of success.
For not even the cynic will pretend that the real object of fashions
is to disfigure. It is quite without intention that M. Worth and
Mme. Paquin and all their prototypes, congeners, and successors,
have become the foes of beauty. They have simply never stopped to
consider that the very notion of the changing mode is the negation of
all aesthetic law. The most damning thing about fashions is that they
make inevitably, nine years out of ten, for the greatest ugliness of
the greatest number. And this is the real Achilles tendon of _la
mode_. Can anything be more absurd than to impose a single style on
the fat and the thin, on the minimum wage and the maximum income?
I admit that no fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean
purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker’s ideal is undoubtedly the
thin millionairess. But the fat woman and the lean purse must make the
best of each style in turn, as it comes along. And if one has ever
seen a fat woman in (for example) a hobble skirt--even in an academic
edition of a hobble skirt--one knows that this is not a light thing to
say. As for the lean purse, it is not only in alarmist articles that
the working-girl goes without half her luncheons to buy a rhinestone
sunburst. One has known the cases. Nor is the coercion purely
psychological. The cheapest Eighth Avenue suit, which, ready-made,
costs something-and-ninety-eight cents, is sure to be a hasty and
sleazy imitation (at many removes, and losing something with each) of
a Fifth Avenue model. It is one of the few true paradoxes that people
who must dress cheaply must dress “in style.” And that is a hard fate
for the hypothetical poor woman with intelligence, who secretly desires
a garment that will be no more conspicuous next year than this, and
longs to put some of her money into good materials. It is only a very
good (and expensive) dressmaker whose handiwork can both elude the
exaggerations of the present fashion and foreshadow the essentials of
the next. That is another thing that every woman knows.
The hypothetical poor woman with intelligence must content herself with
looking a travesty on the successful chorus-girl. This, unfortunately,
she comes only too easily to do. “But,” some one might object, “the
poor woman is precisely an economic, not an æsthetic consideration.”
Granted: yet since we must all dress, why not invent dresses that are
widely adaptable--to different materials, to different occasions, to
different human types? It would purge our streets of many a sorry
and sordid spectacle, and in that sense would be an æsthetic service
both particular and public. But, as it is, we must all dress alike:
_blonde_ and _brune_, fat and thin, tall and short, rich and
poor. The socialists have threatened us with no more rigid sisterhood
than this.
The principle of fashion is, as I have intimated, the principle of the
kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the
same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin over.
Recently we have had rather a Napoleonic tendency. Occasionally we are
Colonial. We have been known to be Japanese. Now and then we have a
severe classic moment--usually very unbecoming to all of us. We used to
hear from our grandmothers of silk dresses that could “stand alone.”
What we need now is a silk dress that could somehow manage to run.
There is no reward, in the world of woman’s dress, for a successful
experiment. The most charming design in the world has no future. One
is seldom tempted to apostrophize a fashion with, “Verweile doch! du
bist so schön!”; but if one were, the adjuration would be as vain as
ever. And that is another sin against beauty, for it deprives a woman
of the privilege of dressing as best becomes her. There is something
peculiarly bitter in watching the superseding of a mode that wholly
suits one. Now and then a woman confides to me her intention of keeping
to some style that is especially adapted to her. “It suits me, and I
am going to stick to it,” she declares. She has found that it makes
the most of all her “points”; it has given her, perhaps, renewed
respect for her appearance and fresh zest for life. Such a woman is
always, I believe, sincerely congratulated by her friends. They do not
imitate her, but they really and unmaliciously envy her her point of
view. She is proud of herself, and keeps to her decision for--say--a
year. I never knew a woman to try such an experiment longer. She
finds herself invariably conspicuous--and no well-bred woman likes to
be unnecessarily conspicuous. For modesty’s sake she must adopt the
extravagance of the moment. Otherwise, she discovers herself to be not
rational but “queer,” and her attempt at wisdom to be the worst of
affectations. It may be ironic that a woman who looks best in the mode
of the Empress Josephine should be forced to dress _en chinoise_;
but it is more than ironic when she has to dress _en chinoise_ one
year and _en grecque_ the next. I have once or twice known elderly
women who achieved something like a fixed costume for themselves; but
they were semi-invalids. The consistent costume is, like the nun’s
habit, the best possible proof of having renounced the world.
And into what pits do the great _couturières_ not fall in the
search for something “new” enough to destroy the eligibility of all
last year’s frocks! I never knew what ladies patronized, a few years
since, the London woman who invented “emotional dressmaking”; but I
can testify to having seen, in a show-window of one of the largest
department stores in America, a model from her--is not the word
“atelier”? A large group of plain women were gathered, staring at
it. I joined the group and read the legend. The name of the dress
was “Passion’s Thrall.” At least, as the White Knight said, “that
was what the name was _called_.” Within the shop, in the spirit
of curiosity, I followed a similar group to the “department” where
such things live. Again, the emotional dressmaker. Isolated in a
glass drawing-room, stood two draped figures: “Her Dear Desire,”
and “Afterwards.” I could have imagined some one’s buying “Her Dear
Desire”--it was of sad-colored chiffon. But I could not imagine any
one’s buying “Afterwards”; and it was inconceivable that the name
should help to sell it. I am bound to say that eventually I found
myself alone in the contemplation of this sartorial drama. The crowd
had followed a living model who was illustrating the possibility and
method of walking in the new “Paquin skirt.” The gravity of every
one concerned was unbelievable. Mr. Granville Barker has done some
admirable satire on dressmaking in _The Madras House_; but his
third act is positively less poignant than a reality like that.
Yet this is not the worst. Even if we said to ourselves, “Let us be
always--but varyingly--ugly,” we should not have phrased our greatest
danger. Our greatest danger is simply the loss of all standards of
beauty in dress. “Why do all the women walk like ducks this year?”
was the question put to a friend of mine, years since, by a younger
brother. He did not know that a quite new kind of corset had suddenly,
during the summer months, “come in.” To wear it meant change of gait
and posture, eventually actual change of shape. Yet we all wore it--and
doubtless went on praising the Venus of Melos as we did so. The notion
that, after we have learned from the scientists to deal in evolutionary
periods of millions of years, we ought not naïvely to expect to alter
the human form in a season or two, never occurred, I fancy, to any of
us. “Business is business,” men are credited with saying, when invited
to apply abstract laws of honor. “Fashion is fashion,” women would
surely say if invited to apply abstract laws of beauty.
The worst thing is that the drapery or the trimming that is lovely and
desirable in our eyes one year, is unspeakably offensive to our gaze
the next. (Consider, for example, the chequered history of fringe!--its
career like that of a French Pretender.) Fashion has vitiated our
taste to that point. Our welcoming raptures are as sincere as our
shuddering rejections. There was a time when sleeves could not--I say
it advisedly--be too large. I remember seeing a girl turn to edge
sideways through a large door, for fear of crushing the sleeves of
a new bodice. Her brothers laughed; but I--I was very young--felt a
pang of clear, unmitigated envy. I remember at that time prophecies
that tight sleeves would never come in again--they were so ugly. Yet
how many times, since then, have tight sleeves come in--and gone out?
While, if one dared to make any prophecy about the clothes of the
future, it would be that those _very_ large sleeves would never
again be worn: they are so hideous.
There is no point in pretending that one is superior to this
fluctuating standard. One is not. Ideally speaking, every woman should
keep the language of fashion and the language of taste rigidly apart.
“Fashionable” and “beautiful” should not be used interchangeably.
Theoretically, we all acknowledge the difference; but it is another
matter when we are faced by the actual product. There may be, here
and there, a woman who can say with sincerity, “She wore a hideous
thing she has just got from Worth”; but where is the woman who could
ingenuously report: “She had on a lovely frock made in the style of
year before last”? I could not do it myself; nor, I fancy, could you.
We may not like the new mode the very first time that we see it; we may
pity before we endure; but we end by embracing. The bravest of us can
do no more than criticize for its ugliness something fashionable. When
it comes to praising for its beauty something unfashionable, the words
stick in our throats. Clothes that are unfashionable simply do not look
beautiful to us. Presently they may, when the kaleidoscope has been
turned again; but not now. And that means that we have given up a good
deal of intellectual freedom.
I have called the loss of æsthetic standards our greatest danger.
One would prefer to think that it is. One likes to believe that the
“prestige value” of the current mode is due to an honest if mistaken
conviction of its beauty, not to the implications of income that
both fashionable and unfashionable clothes make so definitely. It
is pleasanter to say to one’s self that the woman who refuses an
invitation to dinner because her best frock is two years old fears
criticism of her taste, than that she fears an estimate of her
dressmaker’s bill. The code is more alluring. But even assuming
this to be the cause, the result is no less unfortunate: namely, an
almost universal social timidity on the part of unfashionably dressed
women--by which I mean, for the moment, nothing worse than women in
frocks that were fashionable a season since. And that is a pity.
One does not, on the whole, regret history; and our institutions are
by this time historic. I offer the suggestion as one who is glad,
rather than sorry, that John Adams was not (according to his reputed
desire) created Duke of Braintree. But an hereditary aristocracy serves
some charming minor purposes, one of them being, perhaps, the social
countenancing of dowdiness. A duchess may be as dowdy as she likes;
and other women may with impunity be the less smart in a land where
there are always duchesses being dowdy. I am sufficiently American,
myself, not really to admire the typical Englishwoman’s clothes. Half
a dozen queer necklaces and a perfectly irrelevant bit of lace pinned
on somewhere, do not atone to me for a faded straw hat at Christmas
and a skirt that is six inches shorter in front than in back. Not many
years ago, I went, with the briefest possible interval, from a British
suffrage meeting to a dress-rehearsal at the Comédie Française. The
resulting sensation amounted to a shock. “Frenchwomen could not dress
like Englishwomen without conviction of sin,” I said to my companion.
“And ought not to,” was his firm rejoinder. At the moment, I agreed
with him. But there is something fine, after all, in the attitude of
the woman who, having occasion to go to some “function” of a kind
that she usually avoided, brought out a frock from her ten-year-old
trousseau, and had it furbished up by a sempstress. The frock, I should
say, had passed from her mother’s trousseau into her own, having served
for the former’s presentation at court on the occasion of her marriage.
It may be that an untitled woman could not have done it so debonairly.
It would certainly be hard for a good American to follow her example.
But the very idea brings one such a hint of freedom as it takes--they
say--a limited monarchy to give.
Sensible people realize that children should not be overdressed, and
a few schools in this country have adopted the conventual method of
putting their pupils into uniforms. But the uniforms are, I fear, only
another turn of the kaleidoscope. I know that in one such school,
at least, the girls wear the school costume all day, but dress in
the evening as variously and as elaborately as they choose. A rule
like that is _magnifique et pas cher_. For grown-ups, there is
no uniform at all. The fact is that we are uncomfortable if we are
not fashionably dressed. No man understands the subtle and complex
significance of the phrase “nothing to wear”--witness the distressed
but utterly puzzled expression that overspreads a man’s face at the
words. He knows that his wife or his sister looks charming in “the blue
one,” or “the lace one,” or “the one with the jet.” She has looked
charming in it often enough for him at last to identify it--and that,
unless he is an exception to his sex, is very often. He is cheerfully
getting into his evening coat for the fiftieth time. No wonder he does
not realize that some frock which, the first time it was worn, made for
triumph, should, the tenth time, make for humiliation. But the most
strong-minded woman--the woman who will, if necessary, go to the opera
on a gala night in a coat and skirt--at heart exonerates the woman who
so foolishly, for the reason mentioned, stops at home.
There is much to be said, whether in the fifteenth century or the
twentieth, for the aristocracy of wealth and all that it can do for
the community in which it prevails. Neither Florence nor New York,
probably, if consulted, would wish, or would have wished, to give up
its Magnificent. But there are minor ways in which an aristocracy of
wealth makes us all more sordid. Obviously, in these conditions, one’s
income must constitute one’s claim to distinction, and, obviously, one
can give mannerly evidence of one’s income only by the amount visibly,
not audibly, spent. How more silently and more visibly than by personal
adornment? Is all this too trite to say? It behooves the man, for
many reasons, not to adorn himself--perhaps, even, not in any merely
personal way to outshine other men--while his wife may not only please
herself but render his reputation a positive service by out-shining
other women. She makes no indiscreet disclosures of fact, but she
rustles with pecuniary implications. In an aristocracy of wealth, Paris
may go far to make a peeress of her.
I do not wish to imply that this is the sole American standard: there
are communities in which “family” counts; and there are the academic
backwaters where strange-scaled fish constitute among themselves
aristocracies of intellect. It need hardly be said that in the latter
places dress counts least of all. One may go to hear even the most
distinguished lecturer in any rag one has; and we are judged rather
by the obvious intention of a frock than by its actual achievement.
There is so much of Oxford in any of our college towns. But no one can
deny that the aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of
wealth. It is developed in places that are really too small to afford
an aristocracy at all. I myself have known women whose fathers carried
dinner-pails and whose husbands have never even stopped to regret that
their own education ended with the grammar-school course, who simply
did not feel that the shabbily or simply dressed woman could be in
their class. She may be descended from a half a dozen Signers, and be
at home in every picture-gallery in Europe, but she is some one to
whom, socially, they cannot but condescend.
I am told that precisely the same standards prevail in the newer
urban civilizations of England: it would seem to be an inevitable
immediate result of the supremacy of riches. There is perhaps no
limit to the sophistication that vast wealth can eventually give to
its own possessors; but this law of fashion is what, consciously or
unconsciously, they impose on the seething estates beneath them. I
have known tragedies in smallish American cities that began and ended
in dress: women deprived of their all too infrequent intellectual and
social delights, simply because they could not bring themselves to face
an assembly in which other women whose authority their own taste could
not acknowledge, knew their “best” dresses by heart.
I have said that the economic considerations are no concern of mine;
nor are they, Yet it may not be amiss to suggest in this context
that the women who are responsible for the almost unpaid toil of the
slum-children over “willow” plumes are not the rich women who will
give for their willow plumes any price that is asked of them. It is
the harpy of the suburbs, the frequenter of bargain-counters and
Monday morning “sales,” the woman whose most instructive reading is
done among the designs and patterns of the “women’s” magazines, who
is responsible. From what one reads, one is certainly compelled to
infer that if these little children are to be saved, willow plumes
should be put at prohibitive prices. “But since our women _must_
walk gay,” the aristocracy that is rooted in democracy can hardly do
without its willow plumes. Fashion has got itself into a position of
such importance as that. It is so terrible a thing to be unfashionable
that the vast majority of women--and the vast majority of women are
not rich or anything like it--stretch every nerve to be in fashion.
They miss, if they are not, too much that is legitimately theirs.
The requirement is irrelevant, is absurd; but it is made. They will,
therefore, pay what they can; but they cannot pay much. The logic is
clear. They go to the great shops to demand their willow plumes, and
their Irish-lace collars, in the very spirit which took the Dames de la
Halle to Versailles. Hence many of the conditions of labor about which
we read so many lurid articles. For demand creates supply.
The American woman of moderate income is alternately congratulated on
her “smartness” and scolded for her extravagance. She cannot very well,
as things stand, be smart without being extravagant. But the fact that
chiefly gives one pause is this: that a woman cannot mingle comfortably
with her equals unless she can clothe herself each season in a way that
both to her and to them would have looked preposterous a twelvemonth
before. It has luckily become, in the strictest sense, vulgar, to be
_endimanchée_; but most people are--by definition--vulgar; and
I have known women, again, who stayed at home from church because
they could not so clothe themselves. Not unadvisedly, I am tempted
to say; for in one of the most famous churches of America, I have
seen the shabbily dressed woman seated, by the usher, with reference
solely to her costume; and I have heard, too, the testimony of other
women of her kind, turned into “stay-at-homes” because precisely that
thing they could not endure. An odd battle of pride with pride; and
there are better uses to put pride to than that. More blatant and
less grim is the authentic anecdote recently told me concerning a
Newport “colonist.” She and her daughter entered the church one Sunday
morning, marvellously dressed in contrasting shades of red. “There
will be no one else in our pew this morning,” she murmured graciously
to the usher; “put some one in with us, if you like--any one in white
or black.” What could not Dean Swift have done with that! One does
not wish to make tragedy out of what is essentially comic. Yet it may
fairly be said that comedy has its rough side, and that a comedy retold
from the point of view of the comic character himself, would often make
melancholy stuff. It would be possible, over this matter of fashion, to
shed the bitter tears of the satirist.
It is odd that “dress reform” should always have meant something ugly.
There would be so tremendous a chance for any one who wished to reform
dress in the interest of beauty! But the most amused and disgusted of
us will, very likely, forever shrink from the task. “The pilgrims were
clothed with such kind of raiment as was diverse from the raiment of
any that traded in that fair. The people, therefore, of the fair made
a great gazing upon them: some said they were fools, some they were
bedlams, and some they were outlandish men.” There are two reasons why
we shall shrink from it: we should have to begin with ourselves; and we
should certainly be called bedlams. But oh, the pity of it!