Letters to a daughter

by Hubert Bland

Doesn’t it make you feel a good deal ashamed of your sex and of yourself, as one of it, when you come across a woman’s page in a newspaper? Doesn’t it make you feel pretty much as you would feel if you saw someone of your own standing behaving rudely at dinner? or being impolite to a child? Don’t you ask yourself, with something as near to a swear word as you can get, “Whom on earth is all the rest of the paper for then? Are women so small, so narrow, such children, such idiots as to have no interest in politics, in art, in science, in literature; in all the extraordinary doings of human beings all over the world, such as the rest of the paper discusses and records?”

“The Women’s Corner!” Think of it, Alexa, child of my heart! The corner into which the poor stunted, shrivelled, petty-minded creature must betake herself to read about dress. Pah!

Here your feminine intuition will tell you that I am in rather a bad temper. There, there, I don’t mean to sneer at feminine intuition. Heaven knows I have both profited and suffered from it enough, and more than enough in my time, and when the sum comes to be cast up it will be found, I daresay, that I have profited as much as I have suffered.

But I am in rather a bad temper with that woman’s paper, not because it was all about dress, but because it was all wrong about dress. I don’t mean wrong in the absurd details—I know nothing of them—but wrong in the essence, wrong in the soul of it.

Here anyone but you would say “What in the world does the man mean by talking about soul in an article on dress?” You won’t say it because you know—we have agreed about it often—that an article on anything whatever that has no soul in it, is not an article at all; it is just a bladder of rattling peas.

It is not because I despise or even think lightly of dress, that I am so unwontedly annoyed with the person who wrote all this slops. On the contrary, it is because I am fulfilled with the idea of the importance of dress and of the part it plays in the amenities and pleasures of life. You have often told me after we have been out together, or people have been here, and I have been admiring this lady or that, that I did not even know what she had on. Precisely. That was because she was well-dressed. Had she been badly dressed I should have known fast enough. The woman is well-dressed of whose costume you remember only the ensemble, what we artists call the total impression—an impression of colour and contour. Or sometimes of nothing even so definite as that, of fluffiness merely.

Now the writer of all this abominable fustian knew nothing of that, that elementary philosophy of dress. He, she, it—I don’t know what the sex of the creature was—thought all of the costume and nothing of the woman. With him, her, it, the woman was a thing to be worn with a costume, not the costume a thing for a woman to wear. You do see the tremendous difference, don’t you? But, of course, you do.

Really—but there, one must be tolerant. These people are flatly ignorant, and, moreover, they are the hirelings of others whose business it is to make money out of dress. That, nowadays, at anyrate, is the meaning of fashion in the restricted sense of the word. Fashion is not a mode of being beautiful or even of changing from one variety of beauty to another, or of changing to meet changing circumstances. It is a means of putting money into the pockets of dressmakers and manufacturers. These people are getting stronger and stronger, more and more arrogant.

Take a case in point. Once upon a time, not so long ago, every woman in our class had what was called “a set” of furs. It was horribly expensive to begin with, but it was taken care of and it lasted, oh, I don’t know how long. Of course, that didn’t suit the furriers and fur sellers—the fierce competition of commerce and all the silly rest of it—and so, though the wearing of furs is still the comfortable fashion, each season sees a change in the smaller fashion of the furs, the cut of them, the kind, and so on, and the women even in our class, who don’t adopt the latest thing, feel hopelessly uncomfortable and out of it. They either go cold, or wear cat-skin or rabbit-skin faked to look like something expensive, or spend money that they haven’t got.

With that rabbit-skin and cat-skin I have struck the note of fashion as it is in the suburbs, the provinces, and everywhere else except among the rich and idle people to whom money does not matter, the people who do nothing to make money, and so have most of it to spend. The designers for the big dressmakers design something that is perhaps, though by no means certainly, beautiful enough. If perchance it be beautiful, its beauty lives in the artistry and science of its fashioning, and the material of which it is made. Now the people at the top can purchase, without feeling it, the artistry, the science, the rare and costly material. But the others, you see, can’t.