It will in place, by way of illustration, to show in some detail how the
economic principles so far set forth apply to everyday facts in some one
direction of the life process. For this purpose no line of consumption
affords a more apt illustration than expenditure on dress. It is
especially the rule of the conspicuous waste of goods that finds
expression in dress, although the other, related principles of pecuniary
repute are also exemplified in the same contrivances. Other methods
of putting one's pecuniary standing in evidence serve their end
effectually, and other methods are in vogue always and everywhere; but
expenditure on dress has this advantage over most other methods, that
our apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of our
pecuniary standing to all observers at the first glance. It is also true
that admitted expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is,
perhaps, more universally practiced in the matter of dress than in any
other line of consumption. No one finds difficulty in assenting to the
commonplace that the greater part of the expenditure incurred by all
classes for apparel is incurred for the sake of a respectable appearance
rather than for the protection of the person. And probably at no other
point is the sense of shabbiness so keenly felt as it is if we fall
short of the standard set by social usage in this matter of dress. It
is true of dress in even a higher degree than of most other items of
consumption, that people will undergo a very considerable degree of
privation in the comforts or the necessaries of life in order to afford
what is considered a decent amount of wasteful consumption; so that
it is by no means an uncommon occurrence, in an inclement climate,
for people to go ill clad in order to appear well dressed. And the
commercial value of the goods used for clotting in any modern community
is made up to a much larger extent of the fashionableness, the
reputability of the goods than of the mechanical service which they
render in clothing the person of the wearer. The need of dress is
eminently a "higher" or spiritual need.
This spiritual need of dress is not wholly, nor even chiefly, a naive
propensity for display of expenditure. The law of conspicuous waste
guides consumption in apparel, as in other things, chiefly at the second
remove, by shaping the canons of taste and decency. In the common run of
cases the conscious motive of the wearer or purchaser of conspicuously
wasteful apparel is the need of conforming to established usage, and of
living up to the accredited standard of taste and reputability. It is
not only that one must be guided by the code of proprieties in dress in
order to avoid the mortification that comes of unfavorable notice and
comment, though that motive in itself counts for a great deal; but
besides that, the requirement of expensiveness is so ingrained into
our habits of thought in matters of dress that any other than expensive
apparel is instinctively odious to us. Without reflection or analysis,
we feel that what is inexpensive is unworthy. "A cheap coat makes a
cheap man." "Cheap and nasty" is recognized to hold true in dress with
even less mitigation than in other lines of consumption. On the ground
both of taste and of serviceability, an inexpensive article of apparel
is held to be inferior, under the maxim "cheap and nasty." We find
things beautiful, as well as serviceable, somewhat in proportion as
they are costly. With few and inconsequential exceptions, we all find
a costly hand-wrought article of apparel much preferable, in point
of beauty and of serviceability, to a less expensive imitation of it,
however cleverly the spurious article may imitate the costly original;
and what offends our sensibilities in the spurious article is not that
it falls short in form or color, or, indeed, in visual effect in any
way. The offensive object may be so close an imitation as to defy
any but the closest scrutiny; and yet so soon as the counterfeit
is detected, its aesthetic value, and its commercial value as well,
declines precipitately. Not only that, but it may be asserted with
but small risk of contradiction that the aesthetic value of a detected
counterfeit in dress declines somewhat in the same proportion as the
counterfeit is cheaper than its original. It loses caste aesthetically
because it falls to a lower pecuniary grade.
But the function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does not end
with simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable goods in excess of
what is required for physical comfort. Simple conspicuous waste of goods
is effective and gratifying as far as it goes; it is good prima facie
evidence of pecuniary success, and consequently prima facie evidence of
social worth. But dress has subtler and more far-reaching possibilities
than this crude, first-hand evidence of wasteful consumption only. If,
in addition to showing that the wearer can afford to consume freely and
uneconomically, it can also be shown in the same stroke that he or she
is not under the necessity of earning a livelihood, the evidence of
social worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree. Our dress,
therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually, should not only
he expensive, but it should also make plain to all observers that
the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor. In the
evolutionary process by which our system of dress has been elaborated
into its present admirably perfect adaptation to its purpose, this
subsidiary line of evidence has received due attention. A detailed
examination of what passes in popular apprehension for elegant apparel
will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the impression
that the wearer does not habitually put forth any useful effort. It
goes without saying that no apparel can be considered elegant, or
even decent, if it shows the effect of manual labor on the part of the
wearer, in the way of soil or wear. The pleasing effect of neat and
spotless garments is chiefly, if not altogether, due to their carrying
the suggestion of leisure-exemption from personal contact with
industrial processes of any kind. Much of the charm that invests the
patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat,
and the walking-stick, which so greatly enhance the native dignity of
a gentleman, comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot
when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and
immediately of any human use. Elegant dress serves its purpose of
elegance not only in that it is expensive, but also because it is
the insignia of leisure. It not only shows that the wearer is able to
consume a relatively large value, but it argues at the same time that he
consumes without producing.
The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of
demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive employment. It
needs no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant
styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work
impossible than does the man's high hat. The woman's shoe adds the
so-called French heel to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded
by its polish; because this high heel obviously makes any, even the
simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult. The like
is true even in a higher degree of the skirt and the rest of the drapery
which characterizes woman's dress. The substantial reason for our
tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this; it is expensive and it
hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful
exertion. The like is true of the feminine custom of wearing the hair
excessively long.
But the woman's apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern man
in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it also adds a
peculiar and highly characteristic feature which differs in kind from
anything habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the class of
contrivances of which the corset is the typical example. The corset
is, in economic theory, substantially a mutilation, undergone for the
purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently
and obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs the
personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered on that
score is offset by the gain in reputability which comes of her visibly
increased expensiveness and infirmity. It may broadly be set down
that the womanliness of woman's apparel resolves itself, in point of
substantial fact, into the more effective hindrance to useful exertion
offered by the garments peculiar to women. This difference between
masculine and feminine apparel is here simply pointed out as a
characteristic feature. The ground of its occurrence will be discussed
presently.
So far, then, we have, as the great and dominant norm of dress, the
broad principle of conspicuous waste. Subsidiary to this principle,
and as a corollary under it, we get as a second norm the principle of
conspicuous leisure. In dress construction this norm works out in the
shape of divers contrivances going to show that the wearer does not and,
as far as it may conveniently be shown, can not engage in productive
labor. Beyond these two principles there is a third of scarcely less
constraining force, which will occur to any one who reflects at all
on the subject. Dress must not only be conspicuously expensive and
inconvenient, it must at the same time be up to date. No explanation at
all satisfactory has hitherto been offered of the phenomenon of
changing fashions. The imperative requirement of dressing in the latest
accredited manner, as well as the fact that this accredited fashion
constantly changes from season to season, is sufficiently familiar to
every one, but the theory of this flux and change has not been worked
out. We may of course say, with perfect consistency and truthfulness,
that this principle of novelty is another corollary under the law of
conspicuous waste. Obviously, if each garment is permitted to serve for
but a brief term, and if none of last season's apparel is carried
over and made further use of during the present season, the wasteful
expenditure on dress is greatly increased. This is good as far as it
goes, but it is negative only. Pretty much all that this consideration
warrants us in saying is that the norm of conspicuous waste exercises a
controlling surveillance in all matters of dress, so that any change in
the fashions must conspicuous waste exercises a controlling surveillance
in all matters of dress, so that any change in the fashions must conform
to the requirement of wastefulness; it leaves unanswered the question
as to the motive for making and accepting a change in the prevailing
styles, and it also fails to explain why conformity to a given style at
a given time is so imperatively necessary as we know it to be.
For a creative principle, capable of serving as motive to invention
and innovation in fashions, we shall have to go back to the primitive,
non-economic motive with which apparel originated--the motive of
adornment. Without going into an extended discussion of how and why this
motive asserts itself under the guidance of the law of expensiveness, it
may be stated broadly that each successive innovation in the fashions is
an effort to reach some form of display which shall be more acceptable
to our sense of form and color or of effectiveness, than that which it
displaces. The changing styles are the expression of a restless search
for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but
as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of
conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is
somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful,
or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it
must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness.
It would seem at first sight that the result of such an unremitting
struggle to attain the beautiful in dress should be a gradual approach
to artistic perfection. We might naturally expect that the fashions
should show a well-marked trend in the direction of some one or more
types of apparel eminently becoming to the human form; and we might even
feel that we have substantial ground for the hope that today, after
all the ingenuity and effort which have been spent on dress these many
years, the fashions should have achieved a relative perfection and
a relative stability, closely approximating to a permanently tenable
artistic ideal. But such is not the case. It would be very hazardous
indeed to assert that the styles of today are intrinsically more
becoming than those of ten years ago, or than those of twenty, or fifty,
or one hundred years ago. On the other hand, the assertion freely goes
uncontradicted that styles in vogue two thousand years ago are more
becoming than the most elaborate and painstaking constructions of today.
The explanation of the fashions just offered, then, does not fully
explain, and we shall have to look farther. It is well known that
certain relatively stable styles and types of costume have been worked
out in various parts of the world; as, for instance, among the Japanese,
Chinese, and other Oriental nations; likewise among the Greeks, Romans,
and other Eastern peoples of antiquity so also, in later times, among
the peasants of nearly every country of Europe. These national or
popular costumes are in most cases adjudged by competent critics to
be more becoming, more artistic, than the fluctuating styles of modern
civilized apparel. At the same time they are also, at least usually,
less obviously wasteful; that is to say, other elements than that of a
display of expense are more readily detected in their structure.
These relatively stable costumes are, commonly, pretty strictly and
narrowly localized, and they vary by slight and systematic gradations
from place to place. They have in every case been worked out by peoples
or classes which are poorer than we, and especially they belong in
countries and localities and times where the population, or at least
the class to which the costume in question belongs, is relatively
homogeneous, stable, and immobile. That is to say, stable costumes
which will bear the test of time and perspective are worked out under
circumstances where the norm of conspicuous waste asserts itself less
imperatively than it does in the large modern civilized cities, whose
relatively mobile wealthy population today sets the pace in matters of
fashion. The countries and classes which have in this way worked out
stable and artistic costumes have been so placed that the pecuniary
emulation among them has taken the direction of a competition in
conspicuous leisure rather than in conspicuous consumption of goods. So
that it will hold true in a general way that fashions are least stable
and least becoming in those communities where the principle of a
conspicuous waste of goods asserts itself most imperatively, as among
ourselves. All this points to an antagonism between expensiveness and
artistic apparel. In point of practical fact, the norm of conspicuous
waste is incompatible with the requirement that dress should be
beautiful or becoming. And this antagonism offers an explanation of that
restless change in fashion which neither the canon of expensiveness nor
that of beauty alone can account for.
The standard of reputability requires that dress should show wasteful
expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste. The
psychological law has already been pointed out that all men--and women
perhaps even in a higher degree abhor futility, whether of effort or
of expenditure--much as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the
principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile expenditure;
and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore
intrinsically ugly. Hence we find that in all innovations in dress, each
added or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by showing some
ostensible purpose, at the same time that the requirement of conspicuous
waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming
anything more than a somewhat transparent pretense. Even in its freest
flights, fashion rarely if ever gets away from a simulation of some
ostensible use. The ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details
of dress, however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and
their substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our
attention as to become unbearable, and then we take refuge in a new
style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of reputable
wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently becomes as odious
as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy which the law of waste
allows us is to seek relief in some new construction, equally futile and
equally untenable. Hence the essential ugliness and the unceasing change
of fashionable attire.
Having so explained the phenomenon of shifting fashions, the next
thing is to make the explanation tally with everyday facts. Among these
everyday facts is the well-known liking which all men have for the
styles that are in vogue at any given time. A new style comes into vogue
and remains in favor for a season, and, at least so long as it is
a novelty, people very generally find the new style attractive. The
prevailing fashion is felt to be beautiful. This is due partly to the
relief it affords in being different from what went before it, partly
to its being reputable. As indicated in the last chapter, the canon
of reputability to some extent shapes our tastes, so that under its
guidance anything will be accepted as becoming until its novelty wears
off, or until the warrant of reputability is transferred to a new and
novel structure serving the same general purpose. That the alleged
beauty, or "loveliness," of the styles in vogue at any given time is
transient and spurious only is attested by the fact that none of the
many shifting fashions will bear the test of time. When seen in the
perspective of half-a-dozen years or more, the best of our fashions
strike us as grotesque, if not unsightly. Our transient attachment to
whatever happens to be the latest rests on other than aesthetic grounds,
and lasts only until our abiding aesthetic sense has had time to assert
itself and reject this latest indigestible contrivance.
The process of developing an aesthetic nausea takes more or less time;
the length of time required in any given case being inversely as the
degree of intrinsic odiousness of the style in question. This time
relation between odiousness and instability in fashions affords ground
for the inference that the more rapidly the styles succeed and
displace one another, the more offensive they are to sound taste. The
presumption, therefore, is that the farther the community, especially
the wealthy classes of the community, develop in wealth and mobility and
in the range of their human contact, the more imperatively will the law
of conspicuous waste assert itself in matters of dress, the more will
the sense of beauty tend to fall into abeyance or be overborne by the
canon of pecuniary reputability, the more rapidly will fashions shift
and change, and the more grotesque and intolerable will be the varying
styles that successively come into vogue.
There remains at least one point in this theory of dress yet to be
discussed. Most of what has been said applies to men's attire as well
as to that of women; although in modern times it applies at nearly all
points with greater force to that of women. But at one point the dress
of women differs substantially from that of men. In woman's dress there
is obviously greater insistence on such features as testify to the
wearer's exemption from or incapacity for all vulgarly productive
employment. This characteristic of woman's apparel is of interest, not
only as completing the theory of dress, but also as confirming what has
already been said of the economic status of women, both in the past and
in the present.
As has been seen in the discussion of woman's status under the heads
of Vicarious Leisure and Vicarious Consumption, it has in the course
of economic development become the office of the woman to consume
vicariously for the head of the household; and her apparel is contrived
with this object in view. It has come about that obviously productive
labor is in a peculiar degree derogatory to respectable women, and
therefore special pains should be taken in the construction of women's
dress, to impress upon the beholder the fact (often indeed a fiction)
that the wearer does not and can not habitually engage in useful work.
Propriety requires respectable women to abstain more consistently from
useful effort and to make more of a show of leisure than the men of the
same social classes. It grates painfully on our nerves to contemplate
the necessity of any well-bred woman's earning a livelihood by useful
work. It is not "woman's sphere." Her sphere is within the household,
which she should "beautify," and of which she should be the "chief
ornament." The male head of the household is not currently spoken of as
its ornament. This feature taken in conjunction with the other fact that
propriety requires more unremitting attention to expensive display in
the dress and other paraphernalia of women, goes to enforce the view
already implied in what has gone before. By virtue of its descent from a
patriarchal past, our social system makes it the woman's function in
an especial degree to put in evidence her household's ability to pay.
According to the modern civilized scheme of life, the good name of the
household to which she belongs should be the special care of the woman;
and the system of honorific expenditure and conspicuous leisure by which
this good name is chiefly sustained is therefore the woman's sphere.
In the ideal scheme, as it tends to realize itself in the life of
the higher pecuniary classes, this attention to conspicuous waste of
substance and effort should normally be the sole economic function of
the woman.
At the stage of economic development at which the women were still in
the full sense the property of the men, the performance of conspicuous
leisure and consumption came to be part of the services required of
them. The women being not their own masters, obvious expenditure and
leisure on their part would redound to the credit of their master rather
than to their own credit; and therefore the more expensive and the
more obviously unproductive the women of the household are, the more
creditable and more effective for the purpose of reputability of the
household or its head will their life be. So much so that the women have
been required not only to afford evidence of a life of leisure, but even
to disable themselves for useful activity.
It is at this point that the dress of men falls short of that of women,
and for sufficient reason. Conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure
are reputable because they are evidence of pecuniary strength; pecuniary
strength is reputable or honorific because, in the last analysis, it
argues success and superior force; therefore the evidence of waste
and leisure put forth by any individual in his own behalf cannot
consistently take such a form or be carried to such a pitch as to argue
incapacity or marked discomfort on his part; as the exhibition would in
that case show not superior force, but inferiority, and so defeat its
own purpose. So, then, wherever wasteful expenditure and the show of
abstention from effort is normally, or on an average, carried to the
extent of showing obvious discomfort or voluntarily induced physical
disability. There the immediate inference is that the individual in
question does not perform this wasteful expenditure and undergo this
disability for her own personal gain in pecuniary repute, but in
behalf of some one else to whom she stands in a relation of economic
dependence; a relation which in the last analysis must, in economic
theory, reduce itself to a relation of servitude.
To apply this generalization to women's dress, and put the matter in
concrete terms: the high heel, the skirt, the impracticable bonnet, the
corset, and the general disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an
obvious feature of all civilized women's apparel, are so many items of
evidence to the effect that in the modern civilized scheme of life the
woman is still, in theory, the economic dependent of the man--that,
perhaps in a highly idealized sense, she still is the man's chattel. The
homely reason for all this conspicuous leisure and attire on the part
of women lies in the fact that they are servants to whom, in the
differentiation of economic functions, has been delegated the office
of putting in evidence their master's ability to pay. There is a marked
similarity in these respects between the apparel of women and that of
domestic servants, especially liveried servants. In both there is a very
elaborate show of unnecessary expensiveness, and in both cases there is
also a notable disregard of the physical comfort of the wearer. But
the attire of the lady goes farther in its elaborate insistence on the
idleness, if not on the physical infirmity of the wearer, than does that
of the domestic. And this is as it should be; for in theory, according
to the ideal scheme of the pecuniary culture, the lady of the house is
the chief menial of the household.
Besides servants, currently recognized as such, there is at least one
other class of persons whose garb assimilates them to the class
of servants and shows many of the features that go to make up the
womanliness of woman's dress. This is the priestly class. Priestly
vestments show, in accentuated form, all the features that have been
shown to be evidence of a servile status and a vicarious life. Even
more strikingly than the everyday habit of the priest, the vestments,
properly so called, are ornate, grotesque, inconvenient, and, at least
ostensibly, comfortless to the point of distress. The priest is at the
same time expected to refrain from useful effort and, when before the
public eye, to present an impassively disconsolate countenance, very
much after the manner of a well-trained domestic servant. The
shaven face of the priest is a further item to the same effect. This
assimilation of the priestly class to the class of body servants, in
demeanor and apparel, is due to the similarity of the two classes as
regards economic function. In economic theory, the priest is a body
servant, constructively in attendance upon the person of the divinity
whose livery he wears. His livery is of a very expensive character, as
it should be in order to set forth in a beseeming manner the dignity of
his exalted master; but it is contrived to show that the wearing of it
contributes little or nothing to the physical comfort of the wearer,
for it is an item of vicarious consumption, and the repute which accrues
from its consumption is to be imputed to the absent master, not to the
servant.
The line of demarcation between the dress of women, priests, and
servants, on the one hand, and of men, on the other hand, is not always
consistently observed in practice, but it will scarcely be disputed
that it is always present in a more or less definite way in the popular
habits of thought. There are of course also free men, and not a few
of them, who, in their blind zeal for faultless reputable attire,
transgress the theoretical line between man's and woman's dress, to the
extent of arraying themselves in apparel that is obviously designed to
vex the mortal frame; but everyone recognizes without hesitation that
such apparel for men is a departure from the normal. We are in the habit
of saying that such dress is "effeminate"; and one sometimes hears the
remark that such or such an exquisitely attired gentleman is as well
dressed as a footman.
Certain apparent discrepancies under this theory of dress merit a more
detailed examination, especially as they mark a more or less evident
trend in the later and maturer development of dress. The vogue of the
corset offers an apparent exception from the rule of which it has here
been cited as an illustration. A closer examination, however, will show
that this apparent exception is really a verification of the rule that
the vogue of any given element or feature in dress rests on its utility
as an evidence of pecuniary standing. It is well known that in the
industrially more advanced communities the corset is employed only
within certain fairly well defined social strata. The women of the
poorer classes, especially of the rural population, do not habitually
use it, except as a holiday luxury. Among these classes the women have
to work hard, and it avails them little in the way of a pretense of
leisure to so crucify the flesh in everyday life. The holiday use of
the contrivance is due to imitation of a higher-class canon of decency.
Upwards from this low level of indigence and manual labor, the corset
was until within a generation or two nearly indispensable to a socially
blameless standing for all women, including the wealthiest and most
reputable. This rule held so long as there still was no large class of
people wealthy enough to be above the imputation of any necessity
for manual labor and at the same time large enough to form a
self-sufficient, isolated social body whose mass would afford a
foundation for special rules of conduct within the class, enforced by
the current opinion of the class alone. But now there has grown up a
large enough leisure class possessed of such wealth that any aspersion
on the score of enforced manual employment would be idle and harmless
calumny; and the corset has therefore in large measure fallen into
disuse within this class. The exceptions under this rule of exemption
from the corset are more apparent than real. They are the wealthy
classes of countries with a lower industrial structure--nearer the
archaic, quasi-industrial type--together with the later accessions of
the wealthy classes in the more advanced industrial communities. The
latter have not yet had time to divest themselves of the plebeian canons
of taste and of reputability carried over from their former, lower
pecuniary grade. Such survival of the corset is not infrequent among the
higher social classes of those American cities, for instance, which
have recently and rapidly risen into opulence. If the word be used as a
technical term, without any odious implication, it may be said that the
corset persists in great measure through the period of snobbery--the
interval of uncertainty and of transition from a lower to the upper
levels of pecuniary culture. That is to say, in all countries which
have inherited the corset it continues in use wherever and so long as
it serves its purpose as an evidence of honorific leisure by arguing
physical disability in the wearer. The same rule of course applies to
other mutilations and contrivances for decreasing the visible efficiency
of the individual.
Something similar should hold true with respect to divers items of
conspicuous consumption, and indeed something of the kind does seem to
hold to a slight degree of sundry features of dress, especially if such
features involve a marked discomfort or appearance of discomfort to
the wearer. During the past one hundred years there is a tendency
perceptible, in the development of men's dress especially, to
discontinue methods of expenditure and the use of symbols of leisure
which must have been irksome, which may have served a good purpose in
their time, but the continuation of which among the upper classes today
would be a work of supererogation; as, for instance, the use of powdered
wigs and of gold lace, and the practice of constantly shaving the face.
There has of late years been some slight recrudescence of the shaven
face in polite society, but this is probably a transient and unadvised
mimicry of the fashion imposed upon body servants, and it may fairly be
expected to go the way of the powdered wig of our grandfathers.
These indices and others which resemble them in point of the boldness
with which they point out to all observers the habitual uselessness
of those persons who employ them, have been replaced by other, more
dedicate methods of expressing the same fact; methods which are no less
evident to the trained eyes of that smaller, select circle whose
good opinion is chiefly sought. The earlier and cruder method of
advertisement held its ground so long as the public to which the
exhibitor had to appeal comprised large portions of the community who
were not trained to detect delicate variations in the evidences of
wealth and leisure. The method of advertisement undergoes a refinement
when a sufficiently large wealthy class has developed, who have the
leisure for acquiring skill in interpreting the subtler signs of
expenditure. "Loud" dress becomes offensive to people of taste,
as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained
sensibilities of the vulgar. To the individual of high breeding, it is
only the more honorific esteem accorded by the cultivated sense of the
members of his own high class that is of material consequence. Since
the wealthy leisure class has grown so large, or the contact of the
leisure-class individual with members of his own class has grown so
wide, as to constitute a human environment sufficient for the honorific
purpose, there arises a tendency to exclude the baser elements of
the population from the scheme even as spectators whose applause or
mortification should be sought. The result of all this is a refinement
of methods, a resort to subtler contrivances, and a spiritualization of
the scheme of symbolism in dress. And as this upper leisure class sets
the pace in all matters of decency, the result for the rest of society
also is a gradual amelioration of the scheme of dress. As the community
advances in wealth and culture, the ability to pay is put in evidence
by means which require a progressively nicer discrimination in the
beholder. This nicer discrimination between advertising media is in fact
a very large element of the higher pecuniary culture.