This motive is not personal vanity. Vanity has had little to do with savage, barbarous, and civilized customs. The ancient Peruvians who deformed their heads, pressing them out of shape; the Chinese who deform their feet, bandaging them into balls; the Africans who deform their mouths, stretching them with wooden discs; the Borneans who deform their ears, dragging the lobes below their shoulder blades; the European and American women who deformed their bodies, tightening their stays to produce the celebrated “hour-glass” waist, have all been victims of something more powerful than vanity, the inexorable decrees of fashion.
As a matter of fact the female mind is singularly devoid of illusions. Women do not think their layers of fat or their protruding collar bones beautiful and seductive. They display them because fashion makes no allowance for personal defects, and they have not yet reached that stage of civilization which achieves artistic sensibility, which ordains and preserves the eternal law of fitness. They know, for example, that nuns, waitresses, and girls in semi-military uniforms look handsomer than they are, because of straight lines and adroit concealment; but they fail to derive from this knowledge any practical guidance.
(page 280)
“The fluctuations of fashion are alternately a grievance and a solace.”
I can remember when “pull-back” skirts and bustles were in style. They were uncomfortable, unsanitary, and unsightly. Their wearers looked grotesquely deformed, and knew it. They submitted to fate, and prayed for a speedy deliverance. The fluctuations of fashion are alternately a grievance and a solace. John Evelyn,[156] commenting on the dress worn by Englishmen in the time of Charles the First,[157] says that it was “a comely and manly habit, too good to hold.” It did not hold because the Puritans, who saw no reason why manliness should be comely, swept it aside. The bustle was much too bad to hold. It grew beautifully less every year, and then suddenly disappeared. Many dry eyes witnessed its departure.
If abhorrence of a fashion cannot keep women from slavishly following it, they naturally remain unmoved by outside counsel and criticism. For years the doctors exhausted themselves proclaiming the disastrous consequences of tight-lacing, which must certainly be held responsible for the obsolete custom of fainting. For years satirists and moralists united in attacking the crinoline. In Watson's Annals, 1856, a virtuous Philadelphian published a solemn protest against Christian ladies wearing enormous hoops to church, thereby scandalizing and, what was worse, inconveniencing the male congregation. When the Great War started a wave of fatuous extravagance, it was solemnly reported that Mrs. Lloyd George was endeavoring to dissuade the wives of workingmen from buying silk stockings and fur coats. When the Great Peace let loose upon us the most fantastic absurdities known for half a century, the papers bristled with such hopeful headlines as these: “Club Women Approve Sensible Styles of Dress,” “Social Leaders Condemn Indecorous Fashions,” “Crusade in Churches Against Prevailing Scantiness of Attire,” and so on, and so on indefinitely.
And to what purpose? The unrest of a rapidly changing world broke down the old supremacies, smashed all appreciable standards, and left us only a vague clutter of impressions. When a woman's dress no longer indicates her fortune, station, age, or honesty, we have reached the twilight of taste; but such dim, confused periods are recurrent in the history of sociology. The girl who works hard and decently for daily bread, but who walks the streets with her little nose whitened like concrete, and her little cheeks reddened like brick-dust, and her little under-nourished body painfully evidenced to the crowd, is tremulously imitating the woman of the town; but the most inexperienced eye catalogues her at a glance. Let us be grateful for her sake if she bobs her hair, for that is a cleanly custom, whereas the great knobs which she formerly wore over her ears harbored nests of vermin. It is one of the comedies of fashion that short hair, which half a century ago indicated strongmindedness, now represents the utmost levity; just as the bloomers of 1852 stood for stern reform, and the attempted trousers of 1918 stood for lawlessness. Both were rejected by women who have never been unaware that the skirt carries with it an infinite variety of possibilities.
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat,
wrote Evelyn's contemporary, Herrick,[158] who was more concerned with the comeliness of Julia's clothes than with his own.