Home Fires in France

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

"All that for hats!" I cried, "and every year, twice a year!"

"Oh, this is only the smallest part of what goes into hats," the expert assured me. "What I'm buying now are only single models, you understand; the successful ones, the well-chosen ones, will be copied by the hundred dozen in the States and in Canada. That chenille toque you saw me buy the other day..."

"That little, plain, ugly scrap of a thing you paid a hundred dollars for?" I asked, giddy again with the remembered shock of that price.

"Yes. Well, probably that will be very widely copied, at first in New York and then everywhere. It's a fair guess to say, that being a model that's sure to be popular, there will be at least twenty thousand toques like it sold in different places in the States for five dollars apiece."

I was staggered. "A hundred thousand dollars spent in one season, just for one out of all the different models of women's hats!" My old superficial scorn for "the style" disappeared in an alarmed dismay at its unsuspected scope. "Why, that's terrible! It's appalling! When there isn't enough money to make the schools what they ought to be, nor to take care of the sick, nor to keep up the...."

He showed an unexpected humanity. "Yes, it is awful," he agreed gravely—"very, very awful. And still more awful is the way we live right along beside such an awful force and never have the slightest idea that it rules our lives and not what we wish or decide."

For all my consternation I found this excessive. "Oh, come, it's not so bad as that!" I cried.

"Yes, it is," he assured me with his formidable quiet certainty. "Yes, it is. It goes beyond anything we can imagine. It's the greatest force in the world, this desire, this absolute necessity to be in the style. Nothing else can stand up against it for a moment, not hunger, not fear, not love, not religion. They only exist so far as they don't get in the way of being in the style. The minute they interfere with that, over they go like a pack of cards in a tornado! What do you think a man is doing when he works all his life for his family? Is he earning their livings? Not much. He's enabling them to keep in style, and if he doesn't he is a failure. What do you really want for your children? That they may grow up to develop all the best they have in them ... yes, if that doesn't prevent their being in style."

I found all this so outrageous that I could only stare a silent protest.

"I don't mean just my small part of it, hats," he explained, "although hats are always, so to speak, the crest of the tidal wave. It's everything. Style rules everything. Of course all material things, furniture, clothes, the way houses are built and gardens laid out and parks made and pictures painted. Everybody can see with his own eyes how they are all determined by whatever the style happens to be in that century or year, and not by anything we want or need. But more than that, too. Everything goes together. We talk and eat and act according to the kind of furniture we have; for instance, when rough-hewn Morris furniture was the rage and we all had to have it or dry up and blow away with envy, don't you remember how the athletic blowsy styles in clothes and manners came in too, and it was all the thing to go to a funeral in a striped shirt and yellow shoes and the girls' shirtwaists bloused over in front as though they had forgotten to tuck them in, and how bulging pompadours straggled down in every woman's eyes?"