As showing how invariably and consistently Fashion is the handmaid of ugliness, it is curious to note that the several styles of dress worn by men are fashionable in proportion to their ugliness. For the greatest occasions the swallow-tail or evening-dress is prescribed. Next in rank is the ugly frock-coat, for morning calls. Of late, it is true, the more becoming “cut-away” has been tolerated in place of the frock-coat; but the sack-coat, which alone follows the natural outlines of the body, and neither has a caudal appendage, like the evening-dress, nor, like the frock-coat, gives the impression that a man’s waist extends down to his knees, is altogether tabooed at social gatherings, except those of the most informal kind.
Man’s evening-dress is so uniquely unæsthetic and ugly that fashionable women have of course long been eyeing it with envy and have gradually adopted some of its features. One of these is the chimney-pot hat, the cause of so much premature baldness and discomfort. But women are not quite so foolish as men in this matter; for they do not wear tall hats at evening-parties and the opera, but only when out riding, where the necessity of dodging about to keep them on against the force of the wind and the blows of overhanging boughs, compels them to go through all sorts of grotesque gymnastics with neck and head. If they wore a more rational and becoming head-dress on horseback they might easily look pretty and graceful, which would be fatal to their chances of being considered fashionable.[fashionable.]
In comparing masculine and feminine fashions, we must note that trousers and swallow-tailed coats, though ugly, are harmless; while high-heeled shoes, corsets, chignons, etc., are as fatal to health as to Personal Beauty.
It is sometimes claimed in behalf of Fashion that, though it often favours ugliness, it establishes a rule and model for all; whereas, if everything were left to individual taste, the result might be still more disastrous. Nonsense. Rare as good taste is among women, a modicum is commonly present; and there are extremely few who, if not overawed by the Fashion Fetish, would ever invent or adopt such hideous irrepressible monstrosities as bustles, crinolines, chignons, trailing dresses, Chinese boots, bird-corpse hats, etc.
A protest must, finally, be made against the horrible figures which in our fashion papers are constantly offered as models of style and appearance. Even in the best of them, such as Harper’s Bazar, which frequently points out the injuriousness of tight lacing, female figures are printed every week with hideously narrow waists, such as no woman could possibly possess unless she were in the last stages of consumption, or some other wasting disease.
CHEST AND BOSOM
FEMININE BEAUTY
Burke, in his chapter on “Gradual Variation” as a characteristic of Beauty, begs us to “observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness, the softness, the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of surface, continual, and yet hardly perceptible at any point, which forms one of the greatest constituents of beauty?”
There is reason to believe that the beautifully-rounded form of the female bosom is a result of æsthetico-sexual selection; for primitive human tribes resemble in this respect the lower animals. Says the famous anatomist Hyrtl: “It is only among the white and yellow races that the breasts, in their compact virginal condition, have a hemispheric form, while those of negresses of a corresponding age and physique are more elongated, pointed, turned outwards and downwards; in a word, more like the teats of animals.” Even the Arabian poets sing of the charms of a goatlike breast. In the Soudan older women, when at work, sometimes throw their breasts over the shoulder to prevent them from being in the way; and “the women of the Basutos, a Kaffir tribe, carry their children on the back, and pass the breast to them under the arm.”[arm.”]
It is a very interesting and important fact that not only do we find more beauty among the higher than among the lower races of mankind, but the superior beauty of civilised races is also of a more permanent kind. This truth is admirably illustrated in the following remarks by Dr. Peschuel Lœschke: The breasts of the Loango negress, he says, “approach the conic rather than the hemispheric form; they often have a too small and insufficiently gradated basis, and in rare extreme cases have almost the appearance of teats, besides being unequally developed. Breasts of such a shape are naturally much more easily affected by the law of gravitation, and soon become changed into the pendent bags which we find so ugly, especially among Africans, although they also occur among other tribes, and are not unknown among civilised peoples. The superior form, with a broad basis, is naturally the more enduring, and remains in many cases an ornament of women of a more advanced age.”