From Emmeline I learned that I had been doing the fashion designers an injustice. I had always imagined that styles were the creation of Parisian dressmakers who worked with only two ends in view—novelty and discomfort. But Emmeline assured me that styles are a faithful record of the march of civilisation. When the Manchurian War was under way, everything in the shops was Russian. When Herr Strauss produced "Salome," half the world went in for the slim and viperous costume. The revolution in Persia worked a revolution in blouse decoration. Later everything was Bulgarian.
"In that case," I said, "those poor fellows at Adrianople have not died in vain. Under a rain of shot and shell I can hear the Bulgarian officers rallying their men: 'Forward, my children! The eyes of Fifth Avenue are upon you! Fix bayonets! For King, for country, and for Paquin!' The Turks, being a backward millinery nation, naturally had no chance."
"What you say is extremely amusing, of course," remarked Emmeline. "But I seem to remember an old suit of yours. It was about the time of the Boer War. The coat was cut like an hour glass and there was cotton wadding in the shoulders so that you had to enter a room sideways. The trousers were Zouave. Yes, it must have been about the time of the Boer War or the war with Spain."
"That was just when the feminist movement was beginning to shape our ideals," I retorted.
Not only do the styles symbolise the process of historic evolution—I distinctly recall toilets on Fifth Avenue which must have commemorated the Messina earthquake and the report of the New York Tenement House Commission—but styles actually follow an evolution of their own. They do not change abruptly, but melt into each other. Thus the costume which Emmeline described as Bulgarian could not have been altogether that. The coat was military enough, with its baggy shoulders and a bold backward sweep of the long skirts. But this coat was worn over a gown that was unmistakably hobble, revealing the persistence of the Salome influence. To call this outfit Bulgarian is to raise the supposition that the Bulgarians hopped to victory at Kirk-Kilisseh.
I pointed this out to Emmeline, and at the same time took occasion to protest against the extravagant lengths to which the languorous styles were being carried. It was bad enough, I said, to see elderly matrons arrayed like Oriental dancing girls. But what was worse was to see young girls, mere children, in scant and provocative attire. I thought the law might very well take up the question of a minimum dress for women under the age of eighteen.
"Of course it's disgusting," said Emmeline, "but it's their right."
"I know that youth has many rights," I said, "but I didn't know that the right to make one's self a public nuisance and offence is among them."
"What I mean," said Emmeline, "is that we have outgrown the days when young ladies fainted and wives fetched their husbands' slippers. We have broken the shackles of mid-Victorian propriety and are working out a new conception of free womanhood. Our ideas of modesty are changing. You might as well make up your mind to be shocked quite frequently before the process is completed."
"Oh, I see," said I. "Enslaved within the iron circle of the home, crushed by the tyranny of convention, of custom, of man-made laws, woman lifts up her head and declares she will be free by inserting herself into a skirt thirteen inches in diameter. Where's the sense of it?"