Dress and the Woman

KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD

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,

materials are adulterated, or sewing-women are starved, or shop-girls seek the primrose path, or husbands die of the strain in the 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 ‘Nearsilk,’ 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 æsthetic 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’s 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 somethingand-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 sorryand 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,

‘Warte, 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 wellbred 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 showwindow 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 dressrehearsal 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-yearold 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 outshining 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 that 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 gav,’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 nor 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, marvelously 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!