Dress and Look Slender

by Jane Warren Wells

OPTICAL ILLUSIONS—SEEING IS BELIEVING

You yourself are familiar with many optical illusions, although you may never have thought of them as such. When you look down the railroad tracks the rails appear to come together in the distance. No matter how much you tell yourself that the rails do not actually come together, the fact remains that they appear to do so. If you put the end of a stick in water it appears broken, although you know that in fact it is not broken.

The eyes in a certain portrait seem to follow you, no matter where you may go in the room in which it is hung. This illusion persists, no matter how much you may tell yourself that the eyes do not actually move. When you are on a moving train it is only by the constant succession of passing trees, posts, and landscape that you realize you are going forward. When these objects are shut off from your view by a train going in the opposite direction, you seem to be going backward. Or if you look at a moving picture taken from the front of a rapidly moving train or motor launch, it is difficult not to get the impression that you are rushing forward.

All of these are optical illusions, yet we do not think of them as illusions. They represent the natural and the normal and we make allowances for them.

The laws of illusion are more easily understood, perhaps, by means of simple lines than any other way. You will grasp them quickly by studying the various figures which illustrate this chapter.

Let us take a simple example to begin with having directly to do with the use of straight lines in dress. You have probably read a thousand times and heard a hundred times more that stout people must work for straight line effects and the straight line silhouette. But it is one thing to know this fact and another actually to accomplish it in your clothes. You can’t just hang a straight line down from the shoulder like a carpenter’s plumb on a door sill. You must know just where and just how to apply the straight line. You must learn to use straight lines so that they blend in with your costume—so that they give the desired effect without calling attention to the means by which it is achieved.

These unbroken parallel vertical lines give the definite impression of height. This principle, used in the design of the dress above, lends it a pleasing slender appearance because no other lines interfere with the straight line effect.

Here, also, are two vertical parallel lines. They are straight—test them—but the other lines radiating from the center, make them appear “bowed.” In the dress above a similar design makes the wearer appear stouter and heavier than she really is.