Dress as a Fine Art, with Suggestions on Children's Dress

by Mary P. Merrifield

With regard to the adaptation of the dress of children to the climate, this appears so evident that any observations upon it might be deemed almost unnecessary; yet, in practice, how little is it understood! The great object in view in regulating the warmth of the clothing, is to guard the wearer from the vicissitudes of the climate, and to equalize the circulation, which is accelerated by heat and retarded by cold. Children are habitually full of activity, which quickens the circulation and produces a determination to the skin; in other words, causes some degree of perspiration, and if this, perspiration be suddenly checked by the application of cold, illness in some shape or other is induced. In order to lessen this risk, the clothing should be light and warm; sufficiently warm to shield the child from the effects of cold, but not to elevate greatly the temperature of the body. The latter would only render the child more susceptible of cold. Children are, by some over-careful but not judicious parents, so burdened with clothes that one is surprised to find they can move under the vast encumbrance.

There is much diversity of opinion among medical men as to the propriety of wearing flannel next to the skin. The arguments appear to be in favor of the practice, provided that the thickness of the flannel be proportioned to the seasons of the year. In winter it should be thick; in summer it can scarcely be too thin. Flannel is preferable to linen or calico, because, although it may be saturated with perspiration, it never strikes cold to the skin; whereas linen, under similar circumstances, always does, and the sudden application of cold to the skin, when warmed by exercise, checks the circulation, and causes illness.

Parents are frequently guilty of much inconsistency in the clothing of their children. The child, perhaps, has delicate lungs; it must, therefore, have warm clothing; so garment after garment, made fashionably, that is to say, very full and very short, is heaped one upon the other over the chest and upper part of the body, until the poor child can scarcely move under the heavy burden with which, with mistaken kindness, it has been laden, while the lower limbs, in which the circulation is most languid, and which require to be protected as well as the chest, are frequently exposed to the air, and the foot is covered with a shoe which is too thin to keep it dry. The consequence of this arrangement is, that the child, oppressed by the weight of its clothing, becomes overheated, and being cooled too hastily, catches severe colds.

The habiliments of children cannot be too light in weight; and this is perfectly consistent with a proper degree of warmth. Those parents are greatly to blame who, influenced only by appearance, and the wish to dress their children fashionably, add to the weight of their clothing by introducing so much unnecessary fulness into the skirts.

The next point for consideration, and which is not inferior in importance to the last, is the adaptation of the dress to the movements and healthful development of the figure; and, strange to say, this point is almost entirely overlooked by those who have the management and control of children, although a few honest and sensible medical men have raised their warning voices against the system now pursued.

We hear every where of the march of intellect; we are perpetually told that the schoolmaster is abroad; lessons and masters of all kinds are endeavoring

“To teach the young idea how to shoot;”

while the little delicate frame which is to bear all this mental labor is left to the ignorance of mothers and nurses, and the tender mercies of the dressmaker, who seems to think that the human frame is as easily moulded into an imitation of those libels on humanity represented in books of fashionable costume as the materials with which she works. Would that we had powers of persuasion to convince our readers how greatly these figures, with their excessively-small waists, hands and feet, deviate from the actual proportions of well-formed women! Unfortunately, the pinched waist is too common in real life for those unacquainted with the proportions of the figure not to think it one of the essential elements of beauty. So far, however, from being a beauty, a small waist is an actual blemish. Never, until the economy of the human frame is studied by all classes, and a knowledge of the principles on which its beauties depend is disseminated among all ranks, can we hope that just ideas will be entertained on this subject.

If there is one thing in which the schoolmaster or the reformer is more wanted than in another, it is in our dress. From our birth to our death we are the slaves of fashion, of prejudice, and of circumstances. The tender, unresisting infant, the delicate girl, the mature woman, alike suffer from these evil influences; some fall victims to them, others suffer during life. Let us consider the dress of an infant. Here, however, it must be acknowledged that of late years much improvement has taken place in some respects, although much still remains to be done. Caps, with their trimming of three or four rows of lace, and large cockades which rivalled in size the dear little round face of the child, are discontinued almost entirely within doors, though the poor child is still almost overwhelmed with cap, hat, and feathers, in its daily airings, the additional weight which its poor neck has to sustain never once entering into the calculation of its mother and nurse. Fine feathers, it is said, make fine birds. This may be true with respect to the feathered creation, but it is not so with regard to children. They suffer from the misplaced finery, and from the undue heat of the head. And yet the head has, generally speaking, been better treated by us than the rest of the body. When we look back upon the history of costume, it really seems as if men—or women, shall we say?—had exercised their ingenuity in torturing the human frame, and destroying its health and vigor.

The American Indian compresses the tender skull of the infant, and binds its little body on to a flat board; the Chinese squeezes the feet of the females; the Italian peasants, following the custom of the Orientals, still roll the infant in swathing bands; the little legs of the child, that when left to its own disposal are in perpetual motion, now curled up to the body, then thrust out their extreme length, to the evident enjoyment of their owner, are extended in a straight line, laid side by side, and bandaged together, so that the infant reminds one in shape of a mummy. In this highly cultivated country we are guilty towards our infants of practices quite as senseless, as cruel, and as contrary to nature. The movements of the lower limbs, so essential to the healthy growth of the child, are limited and restrained, if not altogether prevented, by the great weight that we hang upon them. The long petticoats, in which every infant in this country has been for centuries doomed to pass many months of its existence, are as absurd as they are prejudicial to the child. The evil has of late years rather increased than diminished, for the clothes are not only made much longer, but much fuller, so that the poor victim has an additional weight to bear. Many instances can be mentioned in which the long clothes have been made a yard and a quarter long. The absurdity of this custom becomes apparent, if we only imagine a mother or nurse of short statue carrying an infant in petticoats of this length; and we believe that long clothes are always made totally irrespective of the height of mother or nurse. Imagine one or the other treading on the robe, and throwing herself and the child down! Imagine, also, the probable consequences of such an accident! And when one ventures to express doubts as to the propriety of dressing an infant in long clothes, instead of arguments in their favor, one is met by the absurd remark, “A baby looks so grand in long clothes!” We have for some years endeavored, as far as our influence extended, to put an end to this practice, and in some cases we have so far succeeded as to induce the mother to short-coat the child before it was three months old, and even previous to this period to make the under garments of a length suited to the size of the child, while the frock or robe, as it is called, retained the fashionable length. The latter, being of fine texture, did not add considerably to the weight of the clothes. Children who have the free use of their limbs not only walk earlier than others, but are stronger on their feet.