Women's fashion

“ These are hard words, Alexa, but I am cross to-day.
Fashion in its smaller sense, “the fashion” as it is forced upon women by the dressmakers and designers, as a card is forced by a sharper on a flat, is for nine people out of ten an accursed thing, a monstrous thing. It assumes that all women will look well dressed in the same way. Now, if anything is certain, it is that of any hundred women selected haphazard, not more than ten can dress in the same way and look anything but ridiculous. ”

“ It certainly cannot be pretended that these women adopted that dress from a love of novelty, or a desire to lead a new fashion, or from any other reason than a sense of its convenience, founded on experience. ”

“ It’s the very latest fashion.”
“Why is it,” asked the Philosopher, “that women are such slaves to fashion? They think clothes, they talk clothes, they read clothes, yet they have never understood clothes. The purpose of dress, after the primary object of warmth has been secured, is to adorn, to beautify the particular wearer. Yet not one woman in a thousand stops to consider what colours will go best with her complexion, what cut will best hide the defects or display the advantages of her figure. If it be the fashion, she must wear it. ”

“ Had they but realized that it was the sex whose sins of dress they passed over so lightly, with charity or indifference, that was to follow the inconsequential wake of fashion into the wildest vagaries of costume and adornment, they would have let the men have their brief day, and massed their strictures against those who were to elevate fashion to an art and make of its following a devotion. As it is, for our knowledge of the dress of the weaker sex we are dependent upon the illuminations, whose brilliant coloring and faithfulness of detail left little for the text to elucidate. ”

“ The variety of their dresses and figures, the satisfaction which they express in seeing and being seen, their anxious desire to please, which constitutes their happiness and that of our sex, the triumph which animates the countenance of those who eclipse their rivals; all this forms a diversified and amusing picture, which fixes attention, and gives birth to a thousand ideas respecting the art and coquetry of women, as well as what beauty loses or gains by adopting the ever-varying caprices of fashion. ”

“ So wrote Cowper. Are his lines less appropriate in our day?
Wherefore should there be so glaring a difference between the sexes in this matter? Why should men think of nothing beyond mere cleanliness, as regards dress, and women make it a never ending study? Men strutting along the promenade, dressed off in the height of fashion, and engrossed with the elegance of their tout ensemble, are scorned as fools and fops. But women decorated with gold lace, jewels, diamonds, magenta and solferino ribbons, may be seen floating along the pavement, the admired of all observers. ”

“ These remarks are applicable, in their fullest force, to every deviation which is sanctioned by fashion, from the strict and holy law of modesty and decorum. And of this most injurious tendency of fashion, how insidious is every encroachment, yet how certain its effect upon the female mind! It is no uncommon thing to hear women express the utmost abhorrence of the costume of some old portrait, who, in the course of a few years, perhaps months, are induced by fashion to adopt, with unblushing satisfaction, an equally, or more objectionable dress. ”

“ At this period, the ladies were given to similar extremes of dress and adornment to those which have furnished an indictment against them since fashion first held sway over the feminine mind. All classes of society were influenced by the all-important matter of style, and the women of each grade of the social scale found their chief contentment in copying the manners and dress of those above them. Earlier we found occasion to notice, in brief, the sumptuary legislation by which it was sought to limit extravagances in fashion ”

“ In some measure, but for the most part you dress as you do because society puts fashion pictures into your heads. You ladies dress as you do because these fashion plates and the women you see upon the street leave a deposit in your mind, a composite picture, and that composite picture works itself out in your own charming and becoming wardrobe. ”

“ With brain or scissors every woman is snipping and clipping and cutting over other people’s clothes to fit her figure; real clothes or clothes existent only in the fashion papers or her dressmaker’s brain, but what is the difference? Every woman wears what somebody else has worn. What woman would wear a dress she had not first seen on another woman? Old clothes, making over, copying, copying, copying,—dear me, how second-hand we women are! ”

“ Surely no mind accustomed to think broadly and view problems on all sides, and unaccustomed to revel in the sewer of sensualism would see in the attire of these estimable ladies aught but costumes at once graceful, refined, and apparently infinitely more comfortable and healthful than those represented in any of the fashion plates I have reproduced, and which millions of women of good sense have under the stress of conventionalism been compelled to wear. ”

“ They love Dress; love it inordinately; love it when they ought to love something worthier; and spend their time, and thoughts, and mind, and heart, and money on what they shall wear. The fashion-plate is their profoundest study. The science of dressing is the only one they care to know. The cut of a collar is a matter of sublime importance. How much of this foolish vanity there is in the world! How many otherwise good women does it spoil! And now the question with every young woman should be, How do I feel about [Pg 51] my dress? ”

“ To speak roughly, fashion in women's dress is subject to two great alternating influences—in the direction of elongation or of lateral extension. In the 'forties and 'fifties the tendency was steadily in the second direction and away from the slim elegance which has been the aim of the modistes of recent years. ”

“ Our magazines are radiant with fashion plates illustrating the latest styles; our newspapers abound with allusions and discussions bearing upon the subject, as though it were a matter of national concernment; and it is continually the theme of conversation and a subject either of praise or satire wherever men and women meet together. It would be fortunate, indeed, if this discussion should result in securing a reform in all those styles and modes of woman’s dress which are incompatible with good health, refined taste, simplicity, economy and beauty ”

“ Our garments, first under right natural selection developing perfect use, under right sex selection developing beauty; and further, as our human aesthetic sense progresses, showing a noble symbolism, would have been an added strength and glory, a ceaseless joy.
What is the case?
Men, under a too strictly inter-masculine environment, have evolved the mainly useful but beautiless costume common to-day; and women—?
Women wear beautiful garments when they happen to be the fashion; and ugly garments when they are the fashion, and show no signs of knowing the difference. ”

“ She can wear but one at a time, and she is expending brain-power and heart-power, and lifting the incidents of life into the sphere of its essentials. There are women who buy dresses, and make them, and hang them up in their closets, there to remain till the fashion changes, and the dress has to be re-made without having been once worn. ”

“ Fashion in women’s dress, almost every fashion, is somehow delightful, else it would never have been the fashion; but if any one will look through a collection of old fashion plates, he must own that most fashions have been ugly. ”

“ Though I knew what to expect in the costume of a woman of the upper classes, I was astonished, and should have been scandalised even had women only been present. The costume of ladies has undergone a great change in the last ninety years, and the extreme of the fashion is as lacking in delicacy as it is in comfort. ”

“ Another young woman passes. She is differently attired in trig tailored suit and smart toque. A business girl. Also perfect. And countless others, streaming endlessly along the wide avenue, men and women, defying in the expression of their own taste and individuality, the decrees of fashion; interpreting silks, cottons, fabrics and furs to harmonize with their own particular personalities, and the story of civilization is told in the clothes they wear. ”

“ The women must dress in the fashion. A very respectable draper in an agricultural district was complaining to me the other day that the poorest class of women would have everything in the fashionable style, let it change as often as it would. ”

“ We may, indeed, detect certain distinct influences in certain leading types of women’s dress, even in that comparatively narrow region left to individual choice by the dictates of fashion or the milliner, dressmaker, and draper, and comparatively few feel themselves at liberty to move much beyond this. ”

“ The white-coated, white-trousered, white-socked, slowly striding population is irresistibly fascinating to the eye. The women are no less interesting than the men. The unique fashion of [44] their dress, and its general dissimilarity to any other form of feminine garb the world has ever known, renders it sufficiently characteristic of the vagaries of the feminine mind to be attractive. ”

“ If professors would stop and consider the character of women who invent popular fashions of the age they might well blush with shame at their eager attempts to follow the modern styles of dress invented by the wicked leaders of fashion in London and Paris, whence the latest styles of this country generally emanate. ”

“ But big hats, big sleeves, very stand-out skirts and a general fashion-plate air do not do for every woman, and she who has her gown made on the simplest possible lines will create more sensation in a roomful of very much gotten-up women than if she attempted to vie with them. ”

“ The reason for this is that so many women, and men too, accept the dictates of Fashion without stopping to determine whether or not these new creations are suitable to their own particular type. They do not realize that to be fashionable does not mean to follow conscientiously every new fad, but to adjust the prevailing style to conform with the lines of their individual faces and forms. ”

“ If one of these prohibitions be binding upon nations of the present age, the others are not less so. To the second objection, it may be said that beauty and grace in matters of dress are determined by no rules, and if the fashion of men's clothes be awkward it can easily be improved.
Women who prefer the gown should, of course, consult their own pleasure by continuing to wear it; while those whose preference is a male dress, ought not to be blamed for adopting it. ”

“ we are persons of quality, I assure you, and women of fashion, and come to see and to be seen.’ Silent Woman, Wks. ”

“ If girls would rise above this, and desire [Pg 585] 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. ”

“ It is, however, too important an element in the ensemble of life to be ignored or undervalued in any way, as women's dress affords one of the few opportunities of indulging in the joy of colour that is left to civilization. ”

“ Now, woman alone rules the roost of fashion, man is "no longer dressed but clothed," and under feminine autocracy, dress, whose interests are widely and publicly recognised, has reached a position of primary importance. ”

“ Truth to tell, a woman's natural chic, her taste in dress and her style of coiffure, are by far the most important factors towards her well-being. The day of the healthful, buxom, pink-and-white beauty is long past. The woman rendered artistic by soft chiffons, dainty blouses, and graceful tea-gowns reigns in her stead. Women nowadays are becoming very Continental. ”

“ Dear Sir,—The questions you send me regarding my opinion of the present style of ladies' dress cover too large and varied a field to be disposed of in a moment—that is, if one could dispose of them even after many and many a month, let alone moments. The one virtue of the women's dress of to-day is its variety and individuality. Those who are really dressed and not merely clothed, have their dresses "created" for them, and they belong to each other. ”

“ Above all, it is an art in which woman chooses to express herself in a language free from the inhibitions placed upon other arts, in which, ignoring when she chooses, the primary excuses and incentives, she takes an art-for-art’s-sake justification for showing us the separate and independent fascination, in themselves, of sublimated clothes. No one who cannot perceive the inherent interest, if not the inherent justification, of clothes as clothes, ever can see deeply into the philosophy of dress, or ever can see deeply into the philosophy of women. ”

“ Oh for the ease and freedom, physical, mental, and moral, of a fixed standard of feminine dress which neither deforms, exaggerates, indelicately displays, nor ridiculously cumbers the female form —a dress suitable for all women upon every occasion, and requiring small outlay of time or money or thought! What we all really admire is the healthy, beautiful woman —not the elaborate toilet —and a bit of artistic coloring or graceful lines of drapery are as attainable in a five-cent calico as in a five-dollar brocade. ”