PICTURESQUENESS·
Hungarian Peasant Costume: a Transylvanian Bride
Sketched at Banffy Hunyad, Transylvania
Hungarian Peasant Farmer
Sketched at Banffy Hunyad, Transylvania
Therefore, it seems to me that, though highly valuable and educational, we must not rely entirely upon conscious cultivation and conscious effort to lift the question of dress above vulgarity and affectation.
Modern society encourages the ideal of do-nothingness, so that it becomes an object to get rid of the outward signs of your particular occupation as soon as you cease work, if you are a worker, and to look as if you never did any if you are not.
This notion, combined perhaps with the gradual degradation of all manual labour under the modern system, has combined with business habits and English love of neatness, and perhaps prosaic and Puritan plainness, to produce the conventional costume of the modern “gentleman”—really the business man or bourgeois citizen.