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, every sentiment 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 definitely expresses 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 in its 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 material elements 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 becomes right. 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 the moment. 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.