Fashion: The Power that Influences the World. By George P. Fox. New York: The American News Company. 1872.
The author of this work seems to have been “born with a divine idea of cloth.” According to him, fashionable dress is a preservative of morals. Easy and graceful garments are incompatible with deeds of violence. No one who ever honored the author with his patronage was ever convicted of a crime. We are as morally bound to offer a pleasing exterior to our friends as a smiling face. In Carlyle’s language, “Man’s earthly interests (to say the least) are all hooked and buttoned together by clothes. Society is founded on cloth.” The pen was once considered mightier than the sword, but shears are now in the ascendency. “Dress makes the man, and want of it the fellow.” Dress is a duty we owe ourselves, and inattention to it indicates a want of respect to others. Man’s chief duty is to sacrifice to the graces. Our author is the high-priest of fashion. He makes dress almost a sacrament—as Hazlitt says, “an outward and visible sign of the inward harmony of the soul.” Non possumus does not seem to be in his code. There is no physical defect he cannot remedy. Witness the unhappy man in New York, with a long neck, low shoulders, and sallow complexion, at last able to hold up his head in society; the unfortunate British nobleman, whose attenuated and shapeless limbs are made to correspond more fully to our idea of sturdy John Bull; and President Fillmore’s life-long ambition for a pair of well-fitting pantaloons at length realized. Bow legs and knock-knees are all remedied. The old proverb of the Béarnais is verified: “Habillez un bâton, il aura l’air d’un baron.” A book that brings hope to all is a public benefaction. No Jonathan need despair of cutting a figure in the world after this, and he should not. Dress, its color, style, and fit, are all matters of momentous interest (being so interwoven with our morals), as well as manners and the carriage of the body, which are not overlooked in this volume. As to the latter, everybody knows a stoop in the shoulders sinks a man in public and private estimation.
The Saturday Review calls our author a Transcendental Tailor, a title he evidently merits. The devise he assumed when he entered the lists was Faire sans dire, which Daniel Webster did him the honor of quoting in an address before the New York Historical Society, as well as wearing his transcendent—we almost said transcendental—garments, both living and dead, for the blue coat with a velvet collar and gold-wove cloth buttons that shrouded the immortal statesman are almost a matter of history, and have been sworn to in the most solemn manner before the mayor of New York.
But to go back to our devise. The author forgot it when he began to write. He must now make it: Faire et dire. However, he handles the pen almost as skilfully as the shears, and throws quite a glamour of poetry over the most common duties of the toilet. He ought to be a capital hand at a hem-a-stitch, as Rogers said of Béranger. He gives some excellent advice about dress (gentlemen’s, of course) and etiquette, but some of the chapters seem rather foreign to the subject. We cordially recommend the book to Mr. and Mrs. Veneering as they endeavor to adjust themselves at the glass of fashion, and to whosoever is entirely wrapped up in cloth.
We have been particularly interested in the published correspondence at the end of the volume of the various dignitaries in the political and literary world who sought the efficient co-operation of our Prince of Tailors. If dress is really an “emanation” of the soul (as well as from Mr. Fox’s “emporium”), and indicative of character, it is well to know that Mr. Fillmore’s ill-fitting garments might be owing to a judgment awry; the attenuated limbs of the British minister, which nothing had been able to hide, to a paucity of understanding; and the long neck of our New York friend, which had to be muffled, to an overreaching disposition. Who can tell?
Dress is certainly of the utmost importance to those who are conscious of no other recommendation. Diderot saw no difference between a man and his dog but the dress, and it would sometimes be hard to give a person his proper grade in the animal world without reference to his material garments, for it really does not do in our social world to follow Carlyle’s advice to look fixedly on clothes till they became transparent. It would lead to a fearful revolution in society.
Still, there are some, like Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, who “go in neck and crop for fashion,” who can bear such a clairvoyant eye. Mrs. Boffin was “a Highflier for Fashion,” but we entirely overlook that low evening dress of black sable which she does credit to (“her make is such”), in consideration of her large heart, and the affectionate readiness to salute her lord to the great detriment of her great black velvet hat and plumes.
Our author is really a phœnix sprung from the ashes of Beau Brummel.
“Kind Heaven has sent us another professor,
Who follows the steps of his great predecessor.”