1902.
THE TYRANNY OF FASHION
I
THE mindless male of our species is commonly engaged in committing an indelicate assault upon woman’s taste in dress. He is graciously pleased to dislike the bright colors that she wears. Her dazzling headgear, her blinding parasol, her gorgeous frock with its burning bows and sunset streamers, the iridescence of her neckwear, the radiant glories of her scarves and the flaming splendor of her hose—these various and varied brilliances pain the eyes of this weakling, making him sad. He seems so miserable that it is charity to wish that he had died when he was little—when he was himself in hue (and cry) a blazing scarlet.
Every man to his taste; doubtless mine is barbaric. Anyhow, I like the rich, bright bravery that the ladies wear. It is not a healthy eye that is offended by intensity of color. It is not an honest taste that admires it in a butterfly, a humming bird or a sunset, and derides it in a woman. Nature is opulent of color; one has to look more than twice to see what a wealth of brilliant hues are about him, so used to them have our eyes become. They are everywhere—on the hills, in the air, the water, the cloud. They float like banners in the sunlight and lurk in shadows. No artist can paint them; none dares to if he could. The critics would say he had gone mad and the public would believe them. And it is wicked to believe a critic.
Nature has no taste; she makes odious and hideous combinations of tints that swear at one another like quarreling cats—hues that mutually rend and slay. She has the unparalleled stupidity to spread a blue sky above a green plain and draw it down to the horizon, where the two colors exhaust themselves in debating their differences. To be quite plain about it, Nature is a dowdy old vulgarian. She has no more taste than Shakspeare.
Just as Shakspeare poured out the unassorted jewels of his inexhaustible understanding—cut, uncut, precious, bogus, crude, contemptible and superb, all together, so Nature prodigally lavishes her largess of color. I am not sure that Shakspeare did not teach her the trick. Let the ladies, profiting by her bounty, emulate her virtues and avoid her vice, each having due regard to her own kind of beauty, and taking thought for its fitting embellishment and display. Let them not permit the neutral-tinted minds of the “subdued-color” fiends to fray them with utterance of feeble platitude.
An intolerable deal of nonsense has been uttered, too, about the heartlessness of fashionable women in wearing the plumage of song-birds—and all women are fashionable, and therefore “heartless,” whom fortune has favored with means to that end. It is conceded by those who utter the nonsense that it does no good; and that fact alone would make it nonsense if the lack of wisdom did not inhere in its every proposition. No doubt the offending female is herself somewhat punctured in the conscience of her as she goes beautifuling herself with the “starry plumes” which “expanded shine with azure, green and gold,” and remembers the unchristian censure entailed by her passion for this manner of headgear. If so, let her take comfort in this present assurance that she is only obeying an imperious mandate of her nature, which is also a universal law. To be comely in the eyes of the male—that is the end and justification of her being, and she knows it. Moreover, to the task of its accomplishment she brings an intelligence distinctly superior to that with which we judge the result. We may say that we don’t like her to have a fledged head; and that may be true enough: our error consists in thinking that this is the same proposition as that we don’t like her with her head fledged. Clearly, we do: we like her better with her feathers than without, and shall continue to prefer her that way as long as she is likely to hold the feathers in service; then we shall again like her better without them, even as we liked her better with them. The lesson whereof is that what are called the “caprices” of fashion have an underlying law as constant as that of gravitation.
In this one thing the woman is wise in her day and generation. She may be unable to formulate her wisdom; it must, indeed be confessed that she commonly makes a pretty bad attempt at explanation of anything; but she knows a deal more than she knows that she knows. One of the things that she perfectly apprehends is the evanescence of æsthetic gratification, entailing the necessity of infinite variety in the method of its production; and the knowledge of this is power. In countries where the women of one generation adorn themselves as the women of another did, they are slaves, and their bondage, I am constrained to say, is just. Efface the caprices of fashion—let our women look always the same, even their loveliest, and in a few years we should be driving them in harness. If the fowls of the air can serve her in averting the catastrophe, woman is right in employing their artful aid. Moreover—a point hitherto overlooked—it is mostly men who kill the fowls.