NATIONALITY IN COSTUME
When seen in perspective, the costumes of various periods, as well as
the architecture, interior decoration and furnishings of the homes of
men appear as distinct types, though to the man or woman of any
particular period the variations of the type are bewildering and
misleading. It is the same in physical types; when visiting for the
first time a foreign land one is immediately struck by a national cast
of feature, English, French, American, Russian, etc. But if we remain in
the country for any length of time, the differences between individuals
impress us and we lose track of those features and characteristics the
nation possesses in common. To-day, if asked what outline, materials and
colour schemes characterise our fashions, some would say that almost
anything in the way of line, materials and colour were worn. There is,
however, always an epoch type, and while more than ever before the law
of _appropriateness_ has dictated a certain silhouette for each
occasion,--each occupation,--when recorded in costume books of the
future we will be recognised as a distinct phase; as distinct as the
Gothic, Elizabethan, Empire or Victorian period.
PLATE XXXI
Costume of a Red Cross Nurse, worn while working in a
French war hospital, by Miss Elsie de Wolfe, of New York. An
example of woman costumed so as to be most efficient for the
work in hand.
Miss de Wolfe's name has become synonymous with interior
decoration, throughout the length and breadth of our land,
but she established a reputation as one of the best-dressed
women in America, long before she left the stage to
professionally decorate homes. She has done an immeasurable
amount toward moulding the good taste of America in several
fields. At present her energies are in part devoted to
disseminating information concerning a cure for burns, one
of the many discoveries resulting from the exigencies of the
present devastating war.
[Illustration: _Miss Elsie de Wolfe in Costume of Red Cross Nurse_]
As we have said, in studying the history of woman decorative, one
finds two widely separated aspects of the subject, which must be
considered in turn. There is the classifying of woman's apparel
which comes under the head of European dress, woman's costume affected
by cosmopolitan influences; costumes worn by that part of humanity
which is in close intercommunication and reflecting the ebb and flow of
currents--political, geographical and artistic. Then we have quite
another field for study, that of national costumes, by which we mean
costumes peculiar to some one nation and worn by its men and women
century after century.
It is interesting as well as depressing for the student of national
characteristics to see the picturesque distinguishing lines and colours
gradually disappear as railroads, steamboats and electric trolleys
penetrate remote districts. With any influx of curious strangers there
comes in time, often all too quickly, a regrettable self-consciousness,
which is followed at first by an awkward imitation of the cosmopolitan
garb.
We recall our experience in Hungary. Having been advised to visit the
peasant villages and farms lying out on the püstas (plains of southern
Hungary) if we would see the veritable national costumes, we set out
hopefully with letters of introduction from a minister of education in
Buda Pest, directed to mayors of Magyar villages. One of these planned a
visit to a local celebrity, a Magyar farmer, very old, very prosperous,
rich in herds of horses, sheep and magnificent Hungarian oxen, large,
white and with almost straight, spreading horns, like the oxen of the
ancient Greeks. There we met a man of the old school, nearly eighty, who
had never in his life slept under cover, his duty being to guard his
flocks and herds by night as well as day, though he had amassed what was
for his station in life, a great fortune. He had never been seen in
anything but the national costume, the same as worn in his part of the
world for several hundred years. And so we went to see him in his home.
We were all expectation! You can imagine our disappointment, when, upon
arrival, we found our host awaiting us, painfully attired in the
ordinary dark cloth coat and trousers of the modern farmer the world
over. He had donned the ugly things in our honour, taking an hour to
make his toilet, as we were secretly informed by one of the household.
We tell this to show how one must persevere in the pursuit of artistic
data. This was the same occasion cited in _The Art of Interior
Decoration,_ when the highly decorative peasant tableware was banished
by the women in the house, to make room, again in our honour, for plain
white ironstone china.
The feeling for line accredited to the French woman is equally the
birthright of the Magyar--woman and man. One sees it in the dash of the
court beauty who can carry off a mass of jewels, barbaric in splendour,
where the average European or American would feel a Christmas tree in
the same. And no man in Europe wears his uniform as the Hungarian
officer of hussars does; the astrachan-trimmed short coat, slung over
one shoulder, cap trimmed with fur, on the side of his head, and
skin-tight trousers inside of faultless, spurred boots reaching to the
knees. One can go so far as to say there is something decorative in the
very temperament of Hungarian women, a fiery abandon, which makes _line_
in a subtle way quite apart from the line of costume. This quality is
also possessed by the Spanish woman, and developed to a remarkable
degree in the professional Spanish dancer. The Gipsy woman has it
too,--she brought it with her from Asia, as the Magyar's forebears did.
Speaking of the Magyar, nothing so perfectly expresses the national
temperament as the czardas--that peasant dance which begins with calm,
stately repression, and ends in a mad ecstasy of expression, the rapid
crescendo, the whirl, ending when the man seizes his partner and flings
her high in the air. Watch the flash of the eyes and see that this is
genuine temperament, not acting, but something inherent in the blood.
The crude colour of the national costume and the sharp contrast in the
folk music are equally expressions of national character, the various
art expressions of which open up countless enticing vistas.
The contemplation of some of these vistas leads one to the conclusion
that woman decorative is so, either as an artist (that is, in the
mastery of the science of line and colour, more or less under the
control of passing fashion), or in the abandonment to the impulse of an
untutored, unconscious, child of nature. Both can be beautiful; the art
which is so great as to conceal conscious effort by creating the
illusion of spontaneity, and the natural unconscious grace of the human
being in youth or in the primitive state.