If Crinoline Came Back

I HAVE a scrapbook, begun in 1881, to which a page of the current fashions has been added once a year ever since. A rummaging in the garret brought to light old numbers of the Englishwoman and Godey’s Lady’s Book, extending back to 1840; so that I have now a continuous record of the prevailing mode of dress for more than eighty years.

To turn the pages and observe the tendency of fashion toward full circle sets one thinking. The dress of to-day is remarkably like that worn in some of the earlier years of the last century. Supposing crinoline in its turn came back again — how much would come back with it? how much would have to go? Would woman, when she exchanged her scanty skirt for the inflated one of sixty years ago, with its yards and yards of material, — I heard one lady boast that hers measured seven yards around the hem, — exchange her stride for the movements of a swan? Would she lay down the tennis racket and hockey stick and take up the croquet mallet ? Picture her working in a kitchenette! If she used the street cars, the doors, at least, would have to be enlarged. She could n’t push her way through a crowd. In the sixties, on the rare occasions when women were caught in a crush, there were dire consequences, sets of crinoline being found afterward among the wreckage on the streets.

In that dress there could be no rubbing of elbows. Wherever she went, the lady of the crinoline claimed a little island of space for her own. This may account for a certain inaccessible air she had. Except in the matter of outward formalities, I doubt if she was really more difficult of approach than her granddaughters. I speak not altogether at random, for, at the time when she was occupied with her ‘beaux,’ as she called them, I was just at the right age to carry lovers’ messages. As I have so long kept silence, I hope the lady will forgive me for speaking now. But it is not a point upon which she is sensitive. One of her quarrels with modern ways is precisely that beaux have become of so little consequence. She wonders what is the matter with girls nowadays. There is Barbara—not bad-looking at all; ‘but she has n’t any beaux, and she won’t move an eyelash to get them.’ Sixty years ago, to be without admirers was looked upon, not as a misfortune, but as a fault; want of beauty was hardly considered a mitigating circumstance. This particular grandmother informs us that she was homely. She does n’t inform us as to the number of her admirers; but even if there were no other way of knowing, there is a manner that lingers to the end, and tells us what women were much sought after in their youth. It must be admitted that it is a manner with a distinction all its own.

Her flirtations were carried on circumspectly. Very sedate she was, this lady of the crinoline. Never for a moment solemn, however; she sang, ‘Ring the bell gently, there’s crape on the door.’ but she made it sound cheerful, and in the next breath she was singing, ‘I ’m Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines’ — with a demureness that went far to rob it of vulgarity. Her laught er comes back over half a century as an exceedingly pleasant sound. And she laughed a great, deal. It was fitting that ‘Happy thought!’ should be the favorite slang phrase of the day; though, as far as I can remember, she left slang to young men. Something in the lightheartedness of that generation seems missing from the world now. A grim will-to-pleasure can never fill its place.

My fashion scrapbook reminds me that she dressed in the gayest, of colors. There was so much of her dress that, at times, the effect was almost too dazzling. I remember, in particular, a group of callers who paused outside our front door to pat the little girls playing there and ask all about Little New Brother. One was in sky-blue, and it really seemed as if the sky itself had turned inside out and fallen upon our sidewalk. Draped in a festoon over her arms, like a rosy cloud against the blue, was a scarf of magenta, as it was called then, in honor of Napoleon’s victory. Call it. petunia, cerise, or what you will, a little of it goes a long way, and the other two callers were arrayed entirely in this color — dress, burnoose, and coal-scuttle bonnet. It was truly a sight to ‘bid the rash gazer wipe his eye.’

It is a pleasant time to recall — yet we would not have it back if we could. We don’t want our girls changed — much. We should like, perhaps, to have them borrow a few of the graces of that older day. We should like to see their faces by some miracle acquire the smooth impress of its unhurrying leisure, and at the same time retain the look of competent self-reliance that is the stamp of their own more crowded times.

That look of competency, of readiness for an emergency, never struck me more forcibly than at a morning concert lately, when, in response to the appeal, ‘Are there any V.A.D.’s in the audience? There is a fire and help is needed in caring for the injured,’ here and there throughout the hall a girl rose quietly and went out. These V.A.D.’s looked as unflustered as did the performers — amateurs, and mostly young girls — who played and sang without a trace of the nervousness that used to make such a concert a pain to sympathetic listeners. More than one of the older women present must have had the same thought: ‘This could n’t, have happened when I was young.'

I try the question upon a circle of intelligent friends: ‘Will crinoline ever come into fashion again?’ They all make the same answer: ‘I will not wear it if it does.’

Three young radicals got togetheronce, and debated why they wore clothes they did n’t like, just because everybody else was doing it. Who or what was the bogey called Fashion, anyway? ‘L’état, e’est moi: Fashion, that’s us,’one of them voiced the sentiments of all, in a burst of feeling that overrode that other bogey, the rules of grammar. The era of crinoline was past, but it was a time, if ever, when revolt was justifiable. The walking skirt, besides being encumbered by a train, was tied back just above the knees so tightly as to permit only a step of two or three inches at a time. At the last DrawingRoom, several débutantes, making their curtsey to vice-royalty, had found it impossible to recover an upright position, and aides had been obliged to go to their rescue. But the remembrance of this had been lost in a much more serious disaster. A crowded wharf had broken down, and many of the drownings that followed had been due, it was said, to the helplessness of the women in their ‘pull-back skirts.’

The three friends constructed three dresses that should have made walking a pleasure. Why it was a misery instead you can never understand, unless you have known for yourself the expression that tells you you arc an object of curiosity and ridicule — a freak. No train, no restricting tapes, can occasion such discomfort to the young as can that embryonic eye in the back of the head that tells when other heads arc turned at their passing. She who was loudest in her declaration of independence was first to desert the ranks and creep back to the enemy’s camp. The others soon followed, and thenceforward all three kept within moderate distance of the fashions, until old age rendered them inconspicuous in whatever they chose to wear.

For years the return of crinoline has been periodically announced as an imminent danger — a long, low, rakish craft sighted just above the horizon. Let us hope it is one of those troubles that never come. After all t he apparent circle may turn out to be a spiral. Fashion’s next round will perhaps carry her just far enough upward to escape the peril.