"The first one is _appropriateness_. Colors and forms and modes, in
themselves graceful or beautiful, can become ungraceful and
ridiculous simply through inappropriateness. The most lovely bonnet
that the most approved modiste can invent, if worn on the head of a
coarse-faced Irishwoman bearing a market-basket on her arm, excites
no emotion but that of the ludicrous. The most elegant and brilliant
evening dress, if worn in the daytime in a railroad car, strikes every
one with a sense of absurdity; whereas both these objects in
appropriate associations would excite only the idea of beauty. So a
mode of dress obviously intended for driving strikes us as _outre_
in a parlor; and a parlor dress would no less shock our eyes on
horseback. In short, the course of this principle through all
varieties of form can easily be perceived. Besides appropriateness
to time, place, and circumstances, there is appropriateness to age,
position, and character. This is the foundation of all our ideas of
professional propriety in costume. One would not like to see a
clergyman in his external air and appointments resembling a
gentleman of the turf; one would not wish a refined and modest scholar
to wear the outward air of a fast fellow, or an aged and venerable
statesman to appear with all the peculiarities of a young dandy.
The flowers, feathers, and furbelows which a light-hearted young
girl of seventeen embellishes by the airy grace with which she
wears them, are simply ridiculous when transferred to the toilet of
her serious, well-meaning mamma, who bears them about with an
anxious face, merely because a loquacious milliner has assured her,
with many protestations, that it is the fashion, and the only thing
remaining for her to do.
"There are, again, modes of dress in themselves very beautiful
and very striking, which are peculiarly adapted to theatrical
representation and to pictures, but the adoption of which as a
part of unprofessional toilet produces a sense of incongruity. A
mode of dress maybe in perfect taste on the stage, that would be
absurd in an evening party, absurd in the street, absurd, in
short, everywhere else.
"Now you come to my first objection to our present American
toilet,--its being to a very great extent _inappropriate_ to our
climate, to our habits of life and thought, and to the whole structure
of ideas on which our life is built. What we want, apparently, is some
court of inquiry and adaptation that shall pass judgment on the
fashions of other countries, and modify them to make them a graceful
expression of our own national character, and modes of thinking and
living. A certain class of women in Paris at this present hour makes
the fashions that rule the feminine world. They are women who live
only for the senses, with as utter and obvious disregard of any moral
or intellectual purpose to be answered in living as a paroquet or a
macaw. They have no family ties; love, in its pure domestic sense, is
an impossibility in their lot; religion in any sense is another
impossibility; and their whole intensity of existence, therefore, is
concentrated on the question of sensuous enjoyment, and that personal
adornment which is necessary to secure it. When the great ruling
country in the world of taste and fashion has fallen into such a state
that the virtual leaders of fashion are women of this character, it is
not to be supposed that the fashions emanating from them will be of a
kind well adapted to express the ideas, the thoughts, the state of
society, of a great Christian democracy such as ours ought to be.
"What is called, for example, the Pompadour style of dress, so much in
vogue of late, we can see to be perfectly adapted to the kind of
existence led by dissipated women whose life is one revel of
excitement; and who, never proposing to themselves any intellectual
employment or any domestic duty, can afford to spend three or four
hours every day under the hands of a waiting-maid, in alternately
tangling and untangling their hair. Powder, paint, gold-dust and
silver-dust, pomatums, cosmetics, are all perfectly appropriate where
the ideal of life is to keep up a false show of beauty after the true
bloom is wasted by dissipation. The woman who never goes to bed till
morning, who never even dresses herself, who never takes a needle in
her hand, who never goes to church, and never entertains one serious
idea of duty of any kind, when got up in Pompadour style, has, to say
the truth, the good taste and merit of appropriateness. Her dress
expresses just what she is,--all false, all artificial, all
meretricious and unnatural; no part or portion of her from which it
might be inferred what her Creator originally designed her to be.
"But when a nice little American girl, who has been brought up to
cultivate her mind, to refine her taste, to care for her health, to be
a helpful daughter and a good sister, to visit the poor and teach in
Sunday schools; when a good, sweet, modest little puss of this kind
combs all her pretty hair backward till it is one mass of frowsy
confusion; when she powders, and paints under her eyes; when she
adopts, with eager enthusiasm, every _outre_, unnatural fashion that
comes from the most dissipated foreign circles,--she is in bad taste,
because she does not represent either her character, her education, or
her good points. She looks like a second-rate actress, when she is, in
fact, a most thoroughly respectable, estimable, lovable little girl,
and on the way, as we poor fellows fondly hope, to bless some one of
us with her tenderness and care in some nice home in the future.
"It is not the fashion in America for young girls to have
waiting-maids,--in foreign countries it is the fashion. All this
meretricious toilet--so elaborate, so complicated, and so contrary to
nature--must be accomplished, and it is accomplished, by the busy
little fingers of each girl for herself; and so it seems to be very
evident that a style of hair-dressing which it will require hours to
disentangle, which must injure and in time ruin the natural beauty of
the hair, ought to be one thing which a well-regulated court of
inquiry would reject in our American fashions.
"Again, the genius of American life is for simplicity and absence of
ostentation. We have no parade of office: our public men wear no
robes, no stars, garters, collars, etc.; and it would, therefore, be
in good taste in our women to cultivate simple styles of dress. Now I
object to the present fashions, as adopted from France, that they are
flashy and theatrical. Having their origin with a community whose
senses are blunted, drugged, and deadened with dissipation and
ostentation, they reject the simpler forms of beauty, and seek for
startling effects, for odd and unexpected results. The contemplation
of one of our fashionable churches, at the hour when its fair
occupants pour forth, gives one a great deal of surprise. The toilets
there displayed might have been in good keeping among showy Parisian
women in an opera house, but even their original inventors would have
been shocked at the idea of carrying them into a church. The rawness
of our American mind as to the subject of propriety in dress is
nowhere more shown than in the fact that no apparent distinction is
made between church and opera house in the adaptation of attire. Very
estimable and we trust very religious young women sometimes enter the
house of God in a costume which makes their utterance of the words of
the litany and the acts of prostrate devotion in the service seem
almost burlesque. When a brisk little creature comes into a pew with
hair frizzed till it stands on end in a most startling manner,
rattling strings of beads and bits of tinsel, mounting over all some
pert little hat with a red or green feather standing saucily upright
in front, she may look exceedingly pretty and piquant; and, if she
came there for a game of croquet or a tableau party, would be all in
very good taste; but as she comes to confess that she is a miserable
sinner, that she has done the things she ought not to have done, and
left undone the things she ought to have done,--as she takes upon her
lips most solemn and tremendous words, whose meaning runs far beyond
life into a sublime eternity,--there is a discrepancy which would be
ludicrous if it were not melancholy.
"One is apt to think, at first view, that St. Jerome was right in
saying,
"'She who comes in glittering vest
To mourn her frailty, still is frail.'
But St. Jerome was in the wrong, after all; for a flashy, unsuitable
attire in church is not always a mark of an undevout or entirely
worldly mind; it is simply a mark of a raw, uncultivated taste. In
Italy, the ecclesiastical law prescribing a uniform black dress for
the churches gives a sort of education to European ideas of propriety
in toilet, which prevents churches from being made theatres for the
same kind of display which is held to be in good taste at places of
public amusement. It is but justice to the inventors of Parisian
fashions to say that, had they ever had the smallest idea of going to
church and Sunday school, as our good girls do, they would immediately
have devised toilets appropriate to such exigencies. If it were any
part of their plan of life to appear statedly in public to confess
themselves 'miserable sinners,' we should doubtless have sent over
here the design of some graceful penitential habit, which would give
our places of worship a much more appropriate air than they now have.
As it is, it would form a subject for such a court of inquiry and
adaptation as we have supposed, to draw a line between the costume of
the theatre and the church.
"In the same manner, there is a want of appropriateness in the
costume of our American women, who display in the street promenade
a style of dress and adornment originally intended for showy
carriage drives in such great exhibition grounds as the Bois de
Boulogne. The makers of Parisian fashions are not generally walkers.
They do not, with all their extravagance, have the bad taste to
trail yards of silk and velvet over the mud and dirt of a pavement,
or promenade the street in a costume so pronounced and striking as
to draw the involuntary glance of every eye; and the showy toilets
displayed on the _pave_ by American young women have more than once
exposed them to misconstruction in the eyes of foreign observers.
"Next to appropriateness, the second requisite to beauty in dress I
take to be unity of effect. In speaking of the arrangement of rooms in
the 'House and Home Papers,' I criticised some apartments wherein
were many showy articles of furniture, and much expense had been
incurred, because, with all this, there was no _unity of result_. The
carpet was costly, and in itself handsome; the paper was also in
itself handsome and costly; the tables and chairs also in themselves
very elegant; and yet, owing to a want of any unity of idea, any grand
harmonizing tint of color, or method of arrangement, the rooms had a
jumbled, confused air, and nothing about them seemed particularly
pretty or effective. I instanced rooms where thousands of dollars had
been spent, which, because of this defect, never excited admiration;
and others in which the furniture was of the cheapest description, but
which always gave immediate and universal pleasure. The same rule
holds good in dress. As in every apartment, so in every toilet, there
should be one ground-tone or dominant color, which should rule all the
others, and there should be a general style of idea to which
everything should be subjected.
"We may illustrate the effect of this principle in a very familiar
case. It is generally conceded that the majority of women look better
in mourning than they do in their ordinary apparel; a comparatively
plain person looks almost handsome in simple black. Now why is this?
Simply because mourning requires a severe uniformity of color and
idea, and forbids the display of that variety of colors and objects
which go to make up the ordinary female costume, and which very few
women have such skill in using as to produce really beautiful
effects.
"Very similar results have been attained by the Quaker costume, which,
in spite of the quaint severity of the forms to which it adhered, has
always had a remarkable degree of becomingness, because of its
restriction to a few simple colors and to the absence of distracting
ornament.
"But the same effect which is produced in mourning or the Quaker
costume may be preserved in a style of dress admitting color and
ornamentation. A dress may have the richest fullness of color,
and still the tints may be so chastened and subdued as to produce
the impression of a severe simplicity. Suppose, for example, a
golden-haired blonde chooses for the ground-tone of her toilet a
deep shade of purple, such as affords a good background for the
hair and complexion. The larger draperies of the costume being
of this color, the bonnet may be of a lighter shade of the same,
ornamented with lilac hyacinths, shading insensibly towards
rose-color. The effect of such a costume is simple, even though
there be much ornament, because it is ornament artistically
disposed towards a general result.
"A dark shade of green being chosen as the ground-tone of a dress, the
whole costume may, in like manner, be worked up through lighter and
brighter shades of green, in which rose-colored flowers may appear
with the same impression of simple appropriateness that is made by the
pink blossom over the green leaves of a rose. There have been times in
France when the study of color produced artistic effects in costume
worthy of attention, and resulted in styles of dress of real beauty.
But the present corrupted state of morals there has introduced a
corrupt taste in dress; and it is worthy of thought that the decline
of moral purity in society is often marked by the deterioration of the
sense of artistic beauty. Corrupt and dissipated social epochs produce
corrupt styles of architecture and corrupt styles of drawing and
painting, as might easily be illustrated by the history of art. When
the leaders of society have blunted their finer perceptions by
dissipation and immorality, they are incapable of feeling the beauties
which come from delicate concords and truly artistic combinations.
They verge towards barbarism, and require things that are strange,
odd, dazzling, and peculiar to captivate their jaded senses. Such we
take to be the condition of Parisian society now. The tone of it is
given by women who are essentially impudent and vulgar, who override
and overrule, by the mere brute force of opulence and luxury, women of
finer natures and moral tone. The court of France is a court of
adventurers, of parvenus; and the palaces, the toilets, the equipage,
the entertainments, of the mistresses outshine those of the lawful
wives. Hence comes a style of dress which is in itself vulgar,
ostentatious, pretentious, without simplicity, without unity, seeking
to dazzle by strange combinations and daring contrasts.
"Now, when the fashions emanating from such a state of society come to
our country, where it has been too much the habit to put on and wear,
without dispute and without inquiry, any or every thing that France
sends, the results produced are often things to make one wonder. A
respectable man, sitting quietly in church or other public assembly,
may be pardoned sometimes for indulging a silent sense of the
ridiculous in the contemplation of the forest of bonnets which
surround him, as he humbly asks himself the question, Were these meant
to cover the head, to defend it, or to ornament it? and, if they are
intended for any of these purposes, how?
"I confess, to me nothing is so surprising as the sort of things which
well-bred women serenely wear on their heads with the idea that they
are ornaments. On my right hand sits a good-looking girl with a thing
on her head which seems to consist mostly of bunches of grass, straws,
with a confusion of lace, in which sits a draggled bird, looking as if
the cat had had him before the lady. In front of her sits another, who
has a glittering confusion of beads swinging hither and thither from a
jaunty little structure of black and red velvet. An anxious-looking
matron appears under the high eaves of a bonnet with a gigantic
crimson rose crushed down into a mass of tangled hair. She is
_ornamented_! she has no doubt about it.
"The fact is, that a style of dress which allows the use of
everything in heaven above or earth beneath requires more taste and
skill in disposition than falls to the lot of most of the female sex
to make it even tolerable. In consequence, the flowers, fruits, grass,
hay, straw, oats, butterflies, beads, birds, tinsel, streamers,
jinglers, lace, bugles, crape, which seem to be appointed to form a
covering for the female head, very often appear in combinations so
singular, and the results, taken in connection with all the rest of
the costume, are such, that we really think the people who usually
assemble in a Quaker meeting-house are, with their entire absence of
ornament, more becomingly attired than the majority of our public
audiences. For if one considers his own impression after having seen
an assemblage of women dressed in Quaker costume, he will find it to
be, not of a confusion of twinkling finery, but of many fair, sweet
faces, of charming, nice-looking women, and not of articles of dress.
Now this shows that the severe dress, after all, has better answered
the true purpose of dress, in setting forth the _woman_, than our
modern costume, where the woman is but one item in a flying mass of
colors and forms, all of which distract attention from the faces they
are supposed to adorn. The dress of the Philadelphian ladies has
always been celebrated for its elegance of effect, from the fact,
probably, that the early Quaker parentage of the city formed the eye
and the taste of its women for uniform and simple styles of color, and
for purity and chastity of lines. The most perfect toilets that have
ever been achieved in America have probably been those of the class
familiarly called the gay Quakers,--children of Quaker families, who,
while abandoning the strict rules of the sect, yet retain their modest
and severe reticence, relying on richness of material, and soft,
harmonious coloring, rather than striking and dazzling ornament.
"The next source of beauty in dress is the impression of truthfulness
and reality. It is a well-known principle of the fine arts, in all
their branches, that all shams and mere pretenses are to be
rejected,--a truth which Ruskin has shown with the full lustre of his
many-colored prose-poetry. As stucco pretending to be marble, and
graining pretending to be wood, are in false taste in building, so
false jewelry and cheap fineries of every kind are in bad taste; so
also is powder instead of natural complexion, false hair instead of
real, and flesh-painting of every description. I have even the
hardihood to think and assert, in the presence of a generation whereof
not one woman in twenty wears her own hair, that the simple,
short-cropped locks of Rosa Bonheur are in a more beautiful style of
hair-dressing than the most elaborate edifice of curls, rats, and
waterfalls that is erected on any fair head nowadays."
"Oh, Mr. Crowfield! you hit us all now," cried several voices.
"I know it, girls,--I know it. I admit that you are all looking very
pretty; but I do maintain that you are none of you doing yourselves
justice, and that Nature, if you would only follow her, would do
better for you than all these elaborations. A short crop of your own
hair, that you could brush out in ten minutes every morning, would
have a more real, healthy beauty than the elaborate structures which
cost you hours of time, and give you the headache besides. I speak of
the short crop,--to put the case at the very lowest figure,--for many
of you have lovely hair of different lengths, and susceptible of a
variety of arrangements, if you did not suppose yourself obliged to
build after a foreign pattern, instead of following out the intentions
of the great Artist who made you.
"Is it necessary absolutely that every woman and girl should look
exactly like every other one? There are women whom Nature makes with
wavy or curly hair: let them follow her. There are those whom she
makes with soft and smooth locks, and with whom crinkling and creping
is only a sham. They look very pretty with it, to be sure; but, after
all, is there but one style of beauty? and might they not look
prettier in cultivating the style which Nature seemed to have intended
for them?
"As to the floods of false jewelry, glass beads, and tinsel finery
which seem to be sweeping over the toilet of our women, I must protest
that they are vulgarizing the taste, and having a seriously bad effect
on the delicacy of artistic perception. It is almost impossible to
manage such material and give any kind of idea of neatness or purity;
for the least wear takes away their newness. And, of all disreputable
things, tumbled, rumpled, and tousled finery is the most disreputable.
A simple white muslin, that can come fresh from the laundry every
week, is, in point of real taste, worth any amount of spangled
tissues. A plain straw bonnet, with only a ribbon across it, is in
reality in better taste than rubbishy birds or butterflies, or tinsel
ornaments.
"Finally, girls, don't dress at haphazard; for dress, so far from
being a matter of small consequence, is in reality one of the fine
arts,--so far from trivial, that each country ought to have a style of
its own, and each individual such a liberty of modification of the
general fashion as suits and befits her person, her age, her position
in life, and the kind of character she wishes to maintain.
"The only motive in toilet which seems to have obtained much as yet
among young girls is the very vague impulse to look 'stylish,'--a
desire which must answer for more vulgar dressing than one would wish
to see. If girls would rise above this, and desire to express by their
dress the attributes of true ladyhood, nicety of eye, fastidious
neatness, purity of taste, truthfulness, and sincerity of nature, they
might form, each one for herself, a style having its own individual
beauty, incapable of ever becoming common and vulgar.
"A truly trained taste and eye would enable a lady to select from the
permitted forms of fashion such as might be modified to her purposes,
always remembering that simplicity is safe, that to attempt little and
succeed is better than to attempt a great deal and fail.
"And now, girls, I will finish by reciting to you the lines old Ben
Jonson addressed to the pretty girls of his time, which form an
appropriate ending to my remarks:--
"'Still to be dressed
As you were going to a feast;
Still to be powdered, still perfumed;
Lady, it is to be presumed,
Though art's hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.
"'Give me a look, give me a face,
That makes simplicity a grace,--
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all the adulteries of art,
That strike my eyes, but not my heart.'"