Victor Hugo thought that “a book might be written with regard to the influence of gold lace on the destiny of nations.” Carlyle wrote the book, extending his discussion to the influence of lace that is not golden on the destiny of society; and one may scarcely venture a few tentative words upon the subject of clothes without the feeling that he should, properly, apologize to “Sartor Resartus.” And yet, as we have many reasons for remembering, there are new clothes, and if there is no new philosophy, it is not impossible that the old philosophy may have some new bearings, and that the new conditions, as sometimes happens, modify the application of the eternal verities.
Naturally one cannot throw out even a casual suggestion in such a matter without realizing thatwe have gone very far from the primitive standpoint. When Adam told Eve that she looked lovely in green, the situation was strikingly different from any that we now can fancy, not only with regard to the lady, but with regard to the situation in general, for, as there could be no relativity in the sincerity of the compliment, there could have been no diffidence in receiving it. It is clear that either paying or receiving a compliment under such circumstances must of necessity have had an inferior excitement; yet we can have no difficulty in grasping the fact that between the primitive dress reform situation presented in the wilds of Paradise, and the highly evolved subtleties of modern dress, lie infinite ethical complexities, a pyramid of riddles, a Mammoth Cave of doubt. It having been established by centuries of habit that civilized men and women shall always wear some clothes, and most of the time a great deal of them, the question has not the simplicity which it might have had at an earlier time. Clothes principles are now as intricate as apparel itself. They are associated with ages of prejudice, libraries of history, acres of painted art, mountains of dry goods. On the other hand, certain notions now are entirely accepted, and the field for debate, after all, is much narrower than might at first appear.
It may not be amiss to remember the fact, flatly expressed by Carlyle, that “the first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration, as, indeed, we still see among the barbarous classes in civilizedcountries.” In women, dress is this “spiritual want” touched by artistic sentiment, I had almost said religion; and whatever we may say of the essential barbarism of the sentiment, it seems quite likely to prove one of those barbarisms that are fundamental and permanent. If we might remember that it is fundamental much of modern discussion would be simplified. I find Mr. Finck giving the following elements as explaining the Fashion Fetish: the vulgar display of wealth, milliners’ cunning, the tyranny of the ugly majority, cowardice and sheepishness. These are all good explanations, but the list seems sadly deficient without an allusion to this instinctive and ineradicable desire for decoration. Mr. Theodore Child seems to have in mind the instinctive and final phase of the situation when he bids us “enjoy in imagination what the meanness of the age refuses to the desire of the eyes.”
Woman herself seems to have adopted the view of Epictetus that “we ought not, even by the aspect of the body to scare away the multitude from philosophy.” Socrates meant the same thing when he said to one of his too-ragged followers, “I see thy vanity shining through the holes in thy coat.” Clothes, then, are not merely to warm or to conceal, but also to decorate. Wherein they warm or conceal, they are a science. Wherein they decorate, they are an art. The science is exact; the art is rich in variety and change, making every other art its handmaiden, every season its holiday, everysentiment its theme. It is an art redolent of the years, tingling with the daring of youth. 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.
The wide contrast, and one growing continually wider, in the characteristics of masculine and feminine dress, on those occasions when it most definitelyexpresses itself as dress, might suggest that some variation in the governing philosophy of each had taken place, perhaps at some definite time; for there was no such contrast in an earlier day. It may be that at the time—and we may set this early in the present century, easily within the period of our own national history—when man began to simplify his attire, to put aside all but the rudest decorative elements, woman definitely formulated her justifications for perpetuating the idea of clothes for clothes’ sake. We are bound to remember what she has had to live down. She has had to live down Queen Elizabeth, and all the hyperbole of Continental fashion when Continental fashion was inits most imaginative mood. Political traditions were not the only burdens of our ambitious young republic. Think of the gorgeous head-dresses, half as tall as the women who wore them, and which afforded such delight to the caricaturist! Have you ever stopped to think how few opportunities woman gives the cartoonist nowadays, how severe a strain she places upon his ingenuity? There may be an occasional note of excess. A recent foreign investigator found the clothes of our women too much so, too perfect for repose. This note of excess is the characteristic of genius. I myself have seen American women who, to a merely masculine prejudice, seem to be wearing too many rings. But we must make reasonable allowance for the natural accumulations of time. It has occurred to me that I might do as we may with a tree,—tell a woman’s age by her rings.
So that in looking about and finding the whole of human society “hooked, and buttoned up and held together by clothes,” we cannot hope in any successful way to investigate the matter, if we forget for a moment that the dress of women is to be looked at as a subjective element. Going a little way with logical analysis, and agreeing, for example, that “if the cut betoken intellect and talent, so does color betoken temper and heart,” we soon meet with a mountain height of contradictions introduced by the purely personal effect of woman herself, and we find, long before attaining any symmetry of information, that woman has invested certain materialelements of life, as she has invested so many elements of life that are not material, with the interest she herself has for us. A little lace, a ribbon she has worn in her hair, a glove, a satin slipper, a fan, a shred of trimming, have an eloquence in their revelation of her, a fragrance in their transmission of her touch, which eludes logic and confounds investigation. By a faculty and privilege of making things seem reasonable that are not at all reasonable, by a witchcraft, a sophistry of fashion, a trick of illusion, in the presence of which we forget every rule of art, every principle of proportion, every prejudice of habit, she can utterly bewilder us in a master stroke of invincible instinct. She takes, deliberately and with exquisite selective tact, certain entirely simple, inoffensive elements,—things which in themselves you must acknowledge to be harmless and almost rational; she takes these simple elements and she puts them together by a method, and in a manner, of which no man, if he lived to be one hundred and eighty-six, ever would discover the secret, and, waving her wizard wand over the entire mess, she calls it a hat!
Nothing could be more preposterous, of course. When we study the thing as an object separated from her, it might, even though we knew that she had created it, excite our derision. But when we see this masterpiece of absurdity upon her head, that which had seemed at once an offence to nature and to art, the acme of decorative nonsense, immediately becomes forgivable—immediately becomesright. It is not that we excuse it for her sake. It is not that the apposition dismays our reason. We bow to it, accept it, and end by perceiving that, whether it be taken as an old fact of nature or a new fact of genius, it is unanswerable.
No woman could be more completely, undebatably sane than the Professor. I know what I am talking about. And yet the Professor wears a hat. I had occasion, one day, when she had left it for a moment on a table, to study it analytically as a creation. It was a fearful and wonderful thing. No man ever can forget the moment when first, with mature deliberation, and in a consciousness of the vast significance of life, he takes up a woman’s hat, timorously, as if it were a ten-inch shell or Minerva’s helmet, and gazes into its fragile fastness. When I mentally grasped, as a man may in the absence of the wearer, the many and extraordinary elements of the Professor’s hat; when I sought to associate its multi-colored grotesqueness with the classic simplicity of the Professor’s profile;when I figured its heterogeneous elements as an object of decoration for the Professor’s outward and visible effect; when I fancied the Professor’s brain flashing and glowing under this riotous symbolism, I was filled with a new sense of the futility of reason, a new awe for the wonder of woman.
Dr. Holmes has spoken of the hat as “the vulnerable point of the artificial integument”; but plainly he was speaking of the masculine hat, for woman’s hat is no vulnerable point with her. It is her strong point, her point of vantage, the citadel of her sophistries. You can reason with her about other things, but you cannot reason with her about her hats; not, mind you, because she will not listen, but because she, or the hat, makes you not want to. This is not to say that it makes no difference who wears the hat. It does make a difference. Take a device like the calash, such as our great-grandmothers wore. There were faces that did not look well in it, faces which quite naturally might have made us think less well of the calash for themoment. Under certain other circumstances—that is to say, over a certain other head, its quaintness begins to have a meaning, and it seems as natural and acceptable as anything else which the right face and the right person choose to display for us. Thackeray contended that sauer-kraut tastes good in Germany, and it is notorious that the bagpipes sound quite reasonable in Scotland. In the same way, there is no form of hat yet devised by human ingenuity that will not tempt forgiveness when it is on the right woman.
And woman herself quite clearly perceives the force of association, the importance, if the significance of the hat is to be preserved and understood, of keeping it on her head. If this were not so why should we be confronted with the monumental paradox that our womankind are keeping their hats on in church and taking them off in places of amusement? At the theatre woman consents to be separated from her hat, and to have her hat separated from her. At her devotions she is not yet willing to commit this discord, and in the dim religious light it twinkles and shimmers its owner’s insistent dictum: The hat is the woman. In a thousand ways the hat declares the existence of occult meanings. A woman who would cut a man who wore a made tie, who would not buy a reproduced antique or pirated print, who knows Sèvres at a hundred yards and a real Bokhara in the dark, will cover her head with linen lilies and cotton-bloated roses. A woman who would hesitate toput a jewel in her hair, will heap upon the dyed straw of her hat festoons of glass and steel and wax, with the fretted carcass of a bird.
After all, there is no occasion to take hats seriously, unless you happen to sit behind one, which, of course, cannot always be happening. They are a wonderful study; there are so many different kinds; they have been talked about so much, and have filled so large a place in our lives, especially in public audiences. They have been discussed as widely and as fervidly as the Federal Constitution. Because of them, men have passed laws and sleepless nights. Because of them men fought duels in the last century and lawsuits in this. To make it possible to have them more refulgent and fetching, husbands and fathers have worked on Sundays and stopped smoking. Though it has been assailed with fanatical bitterness, buffeted by satire, stripped by statute, stoned by envy, disciplined by reform, the hat serenely survives, a defiant catalogue of every trait for which it ever has been either praised or condemned. From out the din of conflict and discussion it rises unscathed and unashamed the proud emblem of woman’s pictorial supremacy, which all nature has said must and shall be preserved.
And you know what she can do with a veil; she can make you forget that a veil is barbarous; she can make you forget that you shouldn’t like veils,—she can make you like her in one. She can make it increase her effect of preciousness, if that effect is inher line; or make it increase her sphinx-like effect, if that happens to be in her line. She no longer is extravagant in contriving them. Sarah’s was to cost a thousand pieces of silver. She now is content to make it a direct and specific instrument of illusion.
If the late Mr. Darwin had given serious attention to veils he would have remarked that the wearing of them has developed new expressions of countenance among women. When they wrinkle,—I mean the veils,—the wearer has a way of pursing her lips to push the silken gauze free from the end of her nose, having accomplished which, her fingers gently pull the thing into subjection from the lower hem. At certain seasons and under certain conditions the habit is strangely general, until you might think that woman, like the novelist in his last chapter, is always drawing a veil. The more expert can pull out the wrinkles by supplementing the pout of the lips with an indescribable wrinkling of the nose, and without calling assistance from the hand. I do not suppose that girls are educated to do this in any particular way, yet the uniformity of the habit is little less than astonishing.
Speaking of uniformity of habit, I have observed the same thing about her back hair. The gesture of the fingers with which a woman readjusts a hairpin, or, perhaps, simply ascertains that it is doing its duty, is wonderfully similar among all women. Yet the gesture may to a singular degree be a reflection of her personal style, and in that latitude for purely personal grace you sometimes are brought to the compensatory fact that in sitting behind the hat you also are sitting behind the hairpins.
This crowning glory of her hair! How it has fluttered in song and story! How it has shimmered here in comedy and there in tragedy! How it has dowered and decked and framed her, and puzzled us by its mysterious fickleness of color, now this shade, now that, on the same saucy, shapely head! How quaint a picture she can make for us when she masks it in powder and carries us back to the days of Copley or Watteau! How it has served to remind us, in some forbidden discoveryof the crimping pin or the curl-paper, that from the beginning woman’s pleasures and her conquests have not been unmixed with pain!
How much fashion owes to hair and hair to fashion! How inexhaustible are the harmonies of line of which it is capable! How fascinating, by association, are the combs, and patillas and wimples and ferronières which have caressed and curbed it! We no longer dye it blue as the Greeks did, though we still, as the Greeks did also, produce blondes at pleasure. Far be it from this page to express any preference as between blonde and brunette. If, as we have been told, all of the poets from Homer to Apuleius doted on blonde hair; if Aphrodite was blonde, and Milton’s Eve; if Petrarch loved his blonde Laura (with crimps) and Boccaccio delighted in tresses of gold, who shall attach any more final significance to this than to the fact that woman at his moment is whimsically dressing her hair like Botticelli’s Grace?
Reason does not meet these matters. “I am highly pleased,” wrote Addison, “with the coiffure now in fashion.” That is the ideal attitude of mind, a point of view above reproach. No man really is normal who does not think that “the coiffure now in fashion,” yes, and all else in fashion that expresses the invincible instinct of woman, is peculiarly and especially likable.
“Professor!” I cried, in a moment of fresh and profound conviction, “I am assured that it is a measure of sanity in a man that he shall like woman in whatever she wears. She can confound our most precious theories by doing as she pleases in the matter of dress, for the effect is always right because she has produced it. It all isher. You might as well find fault with the shade of crimson in the feathers on the bosom of a robin as to find fault with the color of her hat or gloves. Some combinations make us wince when we first see them, and in the weakness of that moment we even may entertain a doubt as to the safety of the proprieties; but we come to excuse the doubted effects, and end by putting them into the very grammar of color. I have detected a score of instances in which woman, or fashion speaking for her, has met and turned the judgment of art. I have a theory that certain painter prejudices have simply been demolished by the instinct of woman.”
The Professor was reading an exciting book on “The Evolution of the Vertebrata,” and I knew it, but she was quite patient, and said quietly, “Thoseare not the only prejudices that have been demolished by the instinct of woman.”
“True,” I admitted, curious, yet not disposed to challenge enumeration. “Do you know,” I went on, “that your comment brings up an interesting question as to the effect upon woman herself of a pampered instinct. Will not the reckless gratification of instinct, charming as its effects may be, tend in time to differentiate her unfavorably? Though you meet vertebrata with your reason, when you turn your instincts loose upon millinery are you not vitiating—”
“Willyou stop!” expostulated the Professor, “before both instinct and reason co-operate in boxing your ears? Prattle about a woman’s instinct is a man’s way of dodging admission of woman’s subtler sense. If I actually had the time I should like to impress upon you the fact that dress is a department of the fine arts; that it has a logic and a language, principles, rules, functions, and a future. But that is another matter. Man is hampered by absurd prejudices as to clothes, especially as to the clothes of women. Our Concord philosopher remarked that the consciousness of being well dressed imparts a peace and confidence which even religion scarcely can bestow. Beneath the fact of this dependence lie emotions and impulses to which women yield frankly, but to which men turn a hypocritical squint. The candor of woman toward her clothes instincts does her good. A free, natural love of clothes as clothes is a sign of health in a woman.”
“Professor, if I did not know how fearfully and wonderfully it was made, and how unpromising for the purpose, I should say that you were talking through your hat.”
The Professor rewarded me with her choicest twinkle. “Well,” she said, “I sha’n’t be able to laugh in my sleeve much longer; fashion is making it tighter every day!”
“Can you not see,” I went on, “that the tightness or looseness of a sleeve, for example, must have some direct effect upon the mental attitude of a woman? Are not these constant changes destructive of intellectual repose and progress? If dress is a language, how can you escape a resulting confusion in this instability?”
“My dear sir, that constant change of which you speak is not an instability, but a consistent and symmetrical ebb and flow.”
“It may be pure curiosity, Professor, but even if Rosalind did not have ‘a doublet and hose in her disposition,’ it seems to me that we well may wonder how far the current bloomer affects the mind of the current young woman. It cannot be possible that so momentous and revolutionary a condition as the bloomer shall be without effect upon the mind of woman—and not merely upon the women who wear them, but upon the whole sex. It has been said that not only the physical structure but the character of men have been modified by the fact that men persistently avoid bagging their trousers at the knees. Will not the divided skirt divide woman’s attention—”
“As for bloomers,” said the Professor, “and all related forms of dual garmentature, I am going to lecture about them before the Zenith Club, and, if you are very good, when my paper is quite completed I shall read it to you. Meanwhile, I may remark that the bloomer is not ‘current’ at all, save, perhaps, in a modified and semi-visible way in partnership with an abbreviated skirt,—but this is anticipating.”