EDITOR’S OUTLOOK.
DRESS AND INCOME
Dress is fast becoming a science. Particularly is this true of the dress of women. The modern fashion magazine with its suggestions and plans, shows how nearly dress is a formulated science. All this is right and necessary. When used rightly there is no weapon in a woman’s hands more powerful than effective dressing. It makes even a plain woman attractive, and a fair one doubly so. It gives her a peculiar influence which every earnest, true-hearted woman should seek rather than avoid. To be effective, dress must be studied. But the thought which women give to dress leads them often to give it undue importance, to make it a paramount object rather than a means to influence. Most especially is this true among a large class of self-supporting women and wives of salaried men. The old charge of Polonius:
“Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy”
is often literally carried out by them, and in many cases this class dresses in a more costly style and with more taste than any other in the community. Nor is it mere outside show. They do not wear silk dresses and coarse boots, nor velvet mantles and no gloves. Their wardrobe is almost invariably complete and in taste. They are sensibly, neatly and richly dressed women. They have studied and mastered the science of dressing well. They live within their incomes, too; but in almost every case their salaries give them nothing but food and raiment. At the end of a year, beyond their wardrobes and the amount of rather questionable prestige which their good clothes have given them in a certain circle—rarely a circle which is superior to their own—they have nothing, and here lies the wrong. No matter how small an income may be it ought to be so used that it will do more. If for a year’s work we have simply the necessaries of life, we have achieved small success. But few people put their money where it yields substantial return; few devote a fair portion of their earnings to increase the value of their work or to multiply implements of work. We rarely find persons who devote a fair amount of their salaries to charities, but we do often find salaries of from six hundred to one thousand dollars yielding seal-skin sacks and velvet gowns. Are such garments consistent with the steady course of self-culture which every person should pursue, or with the tithe which every moralist, not to say Christian, should devote to the world of woe about us? Common sense tells us that we can not live like the wealthy unless we are wealthy.
It is among the salaried class particularly that this evil exists. Perhaps the cause springs from the way in which they earn their livelihood. Money comes to them regularly and surely; they see no reason why it should cease, and so give less attention to strict economy than the man whose success depends upon the care and thrift with which he lives. Their future promotion depends upon their faithfulness, not upon their economy, so that often a man of moderate salary keeps a more expensive establishment than a man of moderate wealth. In the latter case future business advancement depends upon the amount he can save to invest, in the former simply upon his sticking to his work. Salaried people too often live like school boys upon their annual allowance. Whatever the cause, there is a large class of people among us much inferior to what they might be, both in usefulness and ability, simply from the wholly selfish expenditures of their incomes.