I can remember when “pull-back” skirts and bustles were in style. They were uncomfortable, unsanitary, and unsightly. Their wearers looked grotesquely deformed, and knew it. They submitted to fate, and prayed for a speedy deliverance. The fluctuations of fashion are alternately a grievance and a solace. John Evelyn,[156]commenting on the dress worn by Englishmen in the time of Charles the First,[157]says that it was “a comely and manly habit, too good to hold.” It did not hold because the Puritans, who saw no reason why manliness should be comely, swept it aside. The bustle was much too bad to hold. It grew beautifully less every year, and then suddenly disappeared. Many dry eyes witnessed its departure.
If abhorrence of a fashion cannot keep women from slavishly following it, they naturally remain unmoved by outside counsel and criticism. For years the doctors exhausted themselves proclaiming the disastrous consequences of tight-lacing, which must certainly be held responsible for the obsolete custom of fainting. For years satirists and moralists united in attacking the crinoline. InWatson's Annals, 1856, a virtuous Philadelphian published a solemn protest against Christian ladies wearing enormous hoops to church, thereby scandalizing and, what was worse, inconveniencing the male congregation. When the Great War started a wave of fatuous extravagance, it was solemnly reported that Mrs. Lloyd George was endeavoring to dissuade the wives of workingmen from buying silk stockings and fur coats. When the Great Peace let loose upon us the most fantastic absurdities known for half a century, the papers bristled with such hopeful headlines as these: “Club Women Approve Sensible Styles of Dress,” “Social Leaders Condemn Indecorous Fashions,” “Crusade in Churches Against Prevailing Scantiness of Attire,” and so on, and so on indefinitely.
And to what purpose? The unrest of a rapidly changing world broke down the old supremacies, smashed all appreciable standards, and left us only a vague clutter of impressions. When a woman's dress no longer indicates her fortune,station, age, or honesty, we have reached the twilight of taste; but such dim, confused periods are recurrent in the history of sociology. The girl who works hard and decently for daily bread, but who walks the streets with her little nose whitened like concrete, and her little cheeks reddened like brick-dust, and her little under-nourished body painfully evidenced to the crowd, is tremulously imitating the woman of the town; but the most inexperienced eye catalogues her at a glance. Let us be grateful for her sake if she bobs her hair, for that is a cleanly custom, whereas the great knobs which she formerly wore over her ears harbored nests of vermin. It is one of the comedies of fashion that short hair, which half a century ago indicated strongmindedness, now represents the utmost levity; just as the bloomers of 1852 stood for stern reform, and the attempted trousers of 1918 stood for lawlessness. Both were rejected by women who have never been unaware that the skirt carries with it an infinite variety of possibilities.
A winning wave, deserving note,In the tempestuous petticoat,
wrote Evelyn's contemporary, Herrick,[158]who was more concerned with the comeliness of Julia's clothes than with his own.
There is still self-revelation in dress, but not personal self-revelation. We may still apply the test of costume to people and to periods, but not safely to individuals, who suffer from coercion. Women's ready-made clothes are becoming more and more like liveries. A dozen shop windows, a dozen establishments, display the same model over and over again, the materials and prices varying, the gown always the same. The lines may lack distinction, and the colors may lack serenity; but then distinction and serenity are not the great underlying qualities of our fretted age. The “abbreviated oddments,” with their strange admixture of the bizarre and the commonplace, strike a purely modern note. They aredemocratic. They are as appropriate, or, I might say, as inappropriate, to one class of women as to another. They are helping, more than we can know, to level the barriers of caste.