THE DROLLERIES OF CLOTHES
By AGNES REPPLIER
(1858-). One of the most noted American essayists. Among her books are: Essays in Miniature; Essays in Idleness; In the Dozy Hours; A Happy Half Century; Americans and Others.
Miss Agnes Repplier for many years has kept her high place as one of the most popular American essayists. She has written upon a great variety of subjects, and always with charm and substantial thought. The essay on The Drolleries of Clothes shows with how much good spirit one may write even a critical essay.
In that engaging volume, “The Vanished Pomps of Yesterday,” Lord Frederic Hamilton,[152] commenting on the beauty and grace of the Austrian women, observes thoughtfully: “In the far-off seventies ladies did not huddle themselves into a shapeless mass of abbreviated oddments of material. They dressed, and their clothes fitted them. A woman upon whom nature has bestowed a good figure was able to display her gifts to the world.”
That a woman to whom nature had been less kind was compelled to display her deficiencies is a circumstance ignored by Hamilton, who, being a man of the world and a man of fashion, regarded clothes as the insignia of caste. The costly costumes, the rich and sweeping draperies in which he delighted, were not easy of imitation. The French ladies who followed the difficult lead of the Empress Eugenia[153] supported the transparent whiteness of their billowy skirts with at least a dozen fine, sheer petticoats. Now it is obvious that no woman of the working classes (except a blanchisseuse de fin[154] who might presumably wear her customers' laundry) could afford a dozen white petticoats. But when it comes to stripping off a solitary petticoat, no one is too poor or too plain to be in the fashion. When it comes to clipping a dress at the knee, the factory girl is as fashionable as the banker's daughter, and far more at her ease. Her “abbreviated oddments” are a convenience in the limited spaces of the mill, and she is hardier to endure exposure. She thanks the kindly gods who have fitted the fashions to her following, and she takes a few more inches off her solitary garment to make sure of being in the style.
Not that women of any class regard heat or cold, comfort or discomfort, as a controlling factor in dress. In this regard they are less highly differentiated from the savage than are men, who, with advancing civilization, have modified their attire into something like conformity to climate and to season. The savage, even the savage who, like the Tierra del Fuegian,[155] lives in a cold country, considers clothes less as a covering than as an adornment. So also do women, who take a simple primitive delight in garments devoid of utilitarianism. For the past half-dozen years American women have worn furs during the sweltering heat of American summers. Perhaps by the sea, or in the mountains, a chill day may now and then warrant this costume; but on the burning city streets the fur-clad females, red and panting, have been pitiful objects to behold. They suffered, as does the Polar bear in August in the zoo; but they suffered irrationally, and because they lacked the wit to escape from self-inflicted torment.
For the past two winters women have worn fur coats or capes which swathed the upper part of their bodies in voluminous folds, and stopped short at the knee. From that point down, the thinnest of silk stockings have been all the covering permitted. The theory that, if one part of the body be protected, another part may safely and judiciously be exposed, has ever been dear to the female heart. It may be her back, her bosom, or her legs which the woman selects to exhibit. In any case she affirms that the uncovered portions of her anatomy never feel the cold. If they do, she endures the discomfort with the stoicism of the savage who keeps his ornamental scars open with irritants, and she is nerved to endurance by the same impelling motive.
This motive is not personal vanity. Vanity has had little to do with savage, barbarous, and civilized customs. The ancient Peruvians who deformed their heads, pressing them out of shape; the Chinese who deform their feet, bandaging them into balls; the Africans who deform their mouths, stretching them with wooden discs; the Borneans who deform their ears, dragging the lobes below their shoulder blades; the European and American women who deformed their bodies, tightening their stays to produce the celebrated “hour-glass” waist, have all been victims of something more powerful than vanity, the inexorable decrees of fashion.
As a matter of fact the female mind is singularly devoid of illusions. Women do not think their layers of fat or their protruding collar bones beautiful and seductive. They display them because fashion makes no allowance for personal defects, and they have not yet reached that stage of civilization which achieves artistic sensibility, which ordains and preserves the eternal law of fitness. They know, for example, that nuns, waitresses, and girls in semi-military uniforms look handsomer than they are, because of straight lines and adroit concealment; but they fail to derive from this knowledge any practical guidance.
(page 280)
“The fluctuations of fashion are alternately a grievance and a solace.”
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. In Watson'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 are democratic. 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.