The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859

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_Tomes_. But how about the length, or rather the shortness, of that
skirt? It seems to me to cry _excelsior_ to the pink night-gown.

_Grey_. You are implacable as to this poor girl's petticoats. Don't you
see that her arms are bare? and yet you make no objection. Now, a woman
has legs as well as arms; and why, if it be the custom, should not one
be seen as well as the other? That girl's grandmothers, to the tenth
degree of greatness, wore skirts of just that length from their
childhood to their dying day; and why should not she? She would as soon
think of hiding her nose as her ankle; and why should she not? Besides,
as you will see, her gown is not shorter than those our grandmothers
wore, or our mothers, twenty-eight or thirty years ago; and that they
were modest, which of us will deny? And now as to the width of these
skirts. You will see that they reach only a little below the calf of
the leg, and therefore it is both impossible and undesirable that
they should fall so closely round the figure as in the case of the
fashionable gowns of 1812 that we were just examining. And besides, in
the case of our peasant-girl, we see that the lines of her gown are
determined by the outline of her figure; and we also see her feet and
the lower part of her legs. Her humanity is not extinguished, her means
of locomotion are visible;--but in looking at a lady nowadays, we see
nothing of the kind; from the waist down, she is a puzzle of silk and
conic sections, a marvellous machine that moves in a mysterious way.
See, again, how beautiful in color this peasant's costume is. The gown
of a rich red, not glaring, but yet positive and pure; the apron, blue;
she is a brunette, and so has wisely chosen to have that enviable
little shawl or kerchief, the ends of which reach but just below her
waist, of yellow; while that high head-dress, quaint and graceful, that
serves her for a bonnet, and in fact is one, is of tender green.

_Miss Larches_. She is not troubled with trimming.

_Grey_. Not troubled with it; but she has it just where it should
be,--on the bottom of her gown, which is edged with black,--in the
flowered border of her kerchief,--on the edge of her bonnet, where there
is a narrow line of yellow,--and in the lace or muslin ruffle of the
cape which falls from it If she were a queen, or the wife of a Russian
prince who owned thousands of girls like her, she might have trimming of
greater cost and beauty, but not a shred more without deterioration
of her costume, which, if she were court-lady to Eugenie and had the
court-painter to help her, could not be in better taste.

_Mrs. Grey_. But, Stanford, don't you see? (just like a man!) you are
charmed with these women, not with their dresses. These fashion-plates
of fifty years ago are designed by very different hands from those which
produce our niminy-piminy looking things,--by artists plainly; and your
peasant-girl was seized upon by some errant knight of palette and brush,
and painted for her beauty. These women are what you men call fine
creatures. Their limbs are rounded and shapely, their figures full and
lithe; they are what I've heard you say Homer calls Briseis.

_Grey_. White-armed, deep-bosomed?

_Mrs. Grey_. Yes; and their necks rise from their shoulders like ivory
towers. Any costume will look beautiful on such women. But how are poor,
puny, ill-made women to dress in such fashions? They could not wear
those dresses without exhibiting all those personal defects which our
present fashion conceals. It's all very fine for perfectly beautiful
women to have such fashions; but it's very cruel to those who are not
beautiful. Don't you remember, at Mrs. Clarkson's party, just before we
were married, you, and half a dozen other men just like you, went round
raving about Mrs. Horn, and how elegantly she was dressed? and when I
saw her, I found she had on only a plain pale-blue silk dress, that
couldn't have cost a penny more than twelve shillings a yard, and not a
thing beside. All the women were turning up their noses at her.

_Grey_. Because all the men were ready to bend down their heads to her?

_Mrs. Grey_. Yes.--No.--The upshot of it was, that the woman had the
figure and complexion of Hebe, and this dress showed it and set it off;
but the dress was nothing particular in itself.

_Grey_. That is, I suppose, it was not particularly fanciful or
costly;--no detriment to its beauty. But as to the beauty of these
costumes depending on the beauty of the women who wear them, and their
unsuitableness to the needs of women who are without beauty,--It is
undeniably true, that, to be beautiful in any costume, a woman must
be--beautiful. This may be very cruel, but there is no help for it.
Color may enhance the beauty of complexion, as in the case of Mrs.
Horn's blue dress; but as to form and material, the most elaborate, the
most costly, even the most beautiful costume ever devised, cannot make
the woman that wears it be other than she is, or seem so, except to
people who do not look at her, but at her clothes. What did all the ugly
women in 1811 and '12 do? and what have all the ugly peasant-girls in
Normandy done for hundreds of years past? Do you suppose that their
beautiful costume made them look any uglier than ugly women do now and
here? Not a whit. Ugliness may be covered, but it cannot be concealed.
And does the fashion of our day so kindly veil the personal defects in
the interest of which you plead? At parties I have thought differently,
and sorrowed for the owners of arms and busts and shoulders that
inexorable fashion condemns on such occasions to an exposure which, to
say the least, is in many cases needless. No,--by flying in the face of
fashion, a woman attracts attention to her person, which can be done
with impunity only by the beautiful; but do you not see that an ugly
woman, by conforming to fashion, obtains no advantage over other women,
ugly or beautiful, who also conform to it? and consequently, that a set
fashion for all rigidly preserves the contrasts of unequally developed
Nature? If there were no fashion to which all felt that they must
conform at peril of singularity, then, indeed, there would be some help
for the unfortunate; for each individual might adopt a costume suited to
his or her peculiarities of person. Yet, even then, there could only be
a mitigation or humoring of blemishes, not a remedy for them. There is
no way of making deformity or imperfection beautiful.

_Mrs. Grey_. But, Stanford, there are times when----

_Grey_. There are no times when woman's figure has not the charm
of womanhood, unless she attempts to improve it by some monstrous
contrivance of her own; no times when good taste and womanly tact cannot
so drape it that it will possess some attraction peculiar to her sex.
And were it not so, how irrational, how wrongful is it to extinguish, I
will not say the beauty, but, in part, the very humanity of all women,
at all times, for the sake of hiding for some women the sign of their
perfected womanhood at certain times!

_Mr. Key_. It certainly results in most astonishing surprises. In fact,
I was quite stultified the other day, when Mrs. Novamater, who only a
week before had been out yachting with me----

_Mrs. Grey_. Declined going again. That was not strange. I fear that you
did not take good care of her.

_Mr. Key_. I was not as tender of her as I might have been; but it was
her fault, or that of my ignorance,--not really mine. But, Mr. Grey, why
can't you boil all this talk down into an essay, or a paper, as you call
it, for the "Oceanic"? You promised Miss Larches something of the sort
just now. _Miss Larches_. Yes, Mr. Grey, do let us have it. We ladies
would so like to have some masculine rules to dress by!

_Tomes_. Don't confine your endeavors to one sex. Think what an
achievement it would be to teach me how to dress!

_Grey_. Unanimous, even in your irony! for I see that Mrs. Grey looks
quizzical expectation. Well, I will. In fact, I'm as well prepared as
a man whose health is drunk at a dinner given to him, and who is
unexpectedly called upon for a speech,--or as Rosina, when Figaro begs
for _un biglietio_ to Almaviva. [_Opens a drawer_.] _Eccolo qua_! Here
is something not long enough or elaborate enough to be called an essay
nowadays, though it might have borne the name in Bacon's time. I will
read it to you. I call it

THE RUDIMENTS OF DRESS.

To dress the body is to put it into a right, proper, and becoming
external condition. Comfort and decency are to be sought first in dress;
next, fitness to the person and the condition of the wearer; last,
beauty of form and color, and richness of material. But the last object
is usually made the first, and thus all are perilled and often lost; for
that which is not comfortable or decent or suitable cannot be completely
beautiful. The two chief requisites of dress are easily attained. Only a
sufficiency of suitable covering is necessary to them; and this varies
according to climate and custom. The Hottentot has them both in his
strip of cloth; the Esquimau, in his double case of skins over all
except face and fingers;--the most elegant Parisian, the most prudish
Shakeress, has no more.

The two principal objects of covering the body being so easily
attainable, the others are immediately, almost simultaneously sought;
and dress rises at the outset into one of those mixed arts which seek to
combine the useful and the beautiful, and which thus hold a middle place
between mechanic art and fine art. But of these mixed arts, dress is the
lowest and the least important: the lowest, because perfection in it is
most easily arrived at,--being within the reach of persons whose minds
are uninformed and frivolous, whose souls are sensual and grovelling,
and whose taste has little culture,--as in the case of many American,
and more French women, who have had a brief experience of metropolitan
life: the least important, because it has no intellectual or even
emotional significance, and is thus without the slightest aesthetic
purpose, having for its end (as an art) only the transient, sensuous
gratification of an individual, or, at most, of the comparatively few
persons by whom he may be seen in the course of not more than a single
day; for every renovation of the dress is, in its kind, a new work of
Art. As men emerge from the savage state and acquire mechanic skill, the
distaff, the spindle, and the loom produce the earliest fruits of their
advancement, and dress is the first decorative art in which they reach
perfection. Indeed, it may be doubted whether the most beautiful
articles of clothing, the most tasteful and comfortable costumes, have
not been produced by people who are classed as barbarous, or, at best,
as half-civilized. What fabrics surpass the shawls of India in tint or
texture? What garment is more graceful or more serviceable than the
Mexican _poncho_, or the Peruvian _rebozo_? What Frenchman is so
comfortably or so beautifully dressed as a wealthy unsophisticated
Turk? There seems to be an instinct about dress, which, joined to the
diffusion of wealth and the reduced price of all textile fabrics, has
caused it to be no longer any criterion of culture, social position,
breeding, or even taste, except as regards itself.

Dress has, however, some importance in its relations to society and to
the individual. It is always indicative of the temper of the time. This
is notably true of the wanton ease of the costume of Charles the Second,
and the meretricious artificiality of that of the middle of the last
century. And in the deliberate double-skirted costliness of the female
fashions of our own day,--fashions not intended for courts or wealthy
aristocracies, but for everybody,--contrasted as they are with the
sober-hued and unpretending habits which all men wear, and in which
little more is sought than comfort and convenience, we have an
expression of the laborious and the lavish spirit of the times,--the
right hand gathering with painful, unremitting toil, the left scattering
with splendid recklessness. Dress has an appreciable effect upon the
mental condition of individuals, whatever their gravity or intelligence.
There are few men not far advanced in years, and still fewer women, who
do not feel more confidence in themselves, perhaps more self-respect,
for the consciousness of being well-dressed, or, rather, when the
knowledge that they are well-dressed relieves them of all consciousness
upon the subject. To decide upon the costume which can secure this
serene self-satisfaction is impossible. For to excellence in dress
there are positive and relative conditions. A man cannot be positively
well-dressed, whose costume does not suit the peculiarities of
his person and position,--or relatively, whose exterior does not
sufficiently conform to the fashion of his day (unless that should be
very monstrous and ridiculous) to escape remark for eccentricity. The
question is, therefore, complicated with the consideration of individual
peculiarities and the fashion of the day, which are unknown and variable
elements. But maxims of general application can be laid down, to which
both fashions and individuals must conform at peril consequent upon
violation of the laws of reason and beauty.

The comfort and decency needful to dress--the Esquimau's double case of
skins and the Hottentot's _cumberbund_--need not be insisted on; for
maxims are not made for idiots. But dress should not only secure these
points, but seem to secure them; for, as to others than the wearer of a
dress, what difference is there between shivering and seeming to shiver,
sweltering and seeming to swelter?

Convenience, which is to be distinguished from mere bodily comfort,
is the next essential of becoming dress. A man should not go
partridge-shooting in a Spanish cloak; a woman should not enter an
omnibus, that must carry twelve inside, with her skirts so expanded by
steel ribs that the vehicle can comfortably hold but four of her,--or do
the honors of a table in hanging-sleeves that threaten destruction to
cups and saucers, and take toll of gravy from every dish that passes
them. Hoops, borrowed by bankrupt invention from a bygone age to satisfy
craving fickleness, suited the habits of their first wearers, who would
as soon have swept the streets as driven through them, packed thirteen
to the dozen, in a carriage common to every passenger who could pay six
cents; and hanging-sleeves were fit for women who, instead of serving
others, were served themselves by pages on the knee. No beauty of
form or splendor of material in costume can compensate for manifest
inconvenience to the wearer. It is partly from an intuitive recognition
of this truth, that a gown which opens before seems, and is, more
beautiful than one that opens behind. The lady's maid is invisible.

No dress is tolerable, by good taste, which does not permit, and seem to
permit, the easy performance of any movement proper to the wearer's age
and condition in life. Such a costume openly defies the first law of
the mixed arts,--fitness. Thus, the dress of children should be simple,
loose, and, whatever the condition of their parents, inexpensive. Let
them not, girls or boys, except on rare, formal occasions, be tormented
with the toilette. Give them clean skins, twice a day; and, for the
rest, clothes that will protect them from the weather as they exercise
their inalienable right to roll upon the grass and play in the dirt, and
which it will trouble no one to see torn or soiled. Do this, if you have
a prince's revenue,--unless you would be vulgar. For, although you may
be able to afford to cast jewels into the mire or break the Portland
vase for your amusement, if you do so, you are a Goth. Jewels were
not made for the mire, vases to be broken, or handsome clothes to be
soiled and torn.

Next to convenience is fitness to years and condition in life. A man can
as soon, by taking thought, add a cubit to his stature as a woman take
five years from her appearance by "dressing young." The attempt to make
age look like youth only succeeds in depriving age of its peculiar and
becoming beauty, and leaving it a bloated or a haggard sham.--Conditions
of life have no political recognition, with us, yet they none the
less exist. They are not higher and lower; they are different. The
distinction between them is none the less real, that it is not written
down, and they are not labelled. Reason and taste alike require that
this difference should have outward expression. The abandonment of
distinctive professional costume is associated with a movement of social
progress, and so cannot be arrested; but it is much to be deplored in
its effect upon the beauty, the keeping, and the harmonious contrast of
external life.

Of the absolute beauty of dress form is the most important element, as
it is of all arts which appeal to the eye. The lines of costume should,
in every part, conform to those of Nature, or be in harmony with them.
"Papa," said a little boy, who saw his father for the first time in
complete walking-costume, "what a high hat! Does your head go up to the
top of it?" The question touched the cardinal point of form in costume.
Unbroken, flowing lines are essential to the beauty of dress; and fixed
angles are monstrous, except where Nature has placed them, at the
junction of the limbs with the trunk. The general outlines of the figure
should be indicated; and no long garment which flows from the shoulders
downward is complete without a girdle.

[Footnote: _Mr. Grey_ [_in parenthesis, and by way of illustration_].
The fashion for ladies' full dress during several years, and but
recently abandoned, with its straight line cutting pitilessly across the
rounded forms of the shoulders and bust, and making women seem painfully
squeezed upward out of their gowns,--its _berthe_, concealing both the
union of the arms with the trunk and the flowing lines of that part of
the person, and adding another discordant straight line (its lower edge)
to the costume,--its long, ungirdled waist, wrought into peaks before
and behind, and its gathered swell below, is an instance in point, of
utter disregard of Nature and deliberate violation of harmony, and the
consequent attainment of discord and absurdity in every particular.
It is rivalled only by the dress-coat, which, with quite unimportant
variations, has been worn by gentlemen for fifty years. The collar of
this, when stiff and high, quite equals the _berthe_ in absurdity and
ugliness; and the useless skirt is the converse in monstrosity to the
hooped petticoat.]

As to distinctive forms of costume for the sexes, long robes, concealing
the person from the waist to considerably below the knee, are required
by the female figure, if only to veil certain inherent defects,--if
those peculiarities may be called defects, which adapt it to its proper
functions and do not diminish its sexual attractiveness. Woman's figure
having its centre of gravity low, its breadth at the hip great, and,
from the smallness of her feet, its base narrow, her natural movement in
a costume which does not conceal the action of the hip and knee-joints
is unavoidably awkward, though none the less attractive to the eye of
the other sex. [Footnote: For instance, the movements of ballet-dancers,
except the very artificial ones of the feet and hands.]

In color, the point of next importance, no fine effects of costume are
to be attained without broad masses of pure and positive tints. These,
however, may be enlivened with condimental garniture of broken and
combined colors. But dresses striped, or, yet worse, plaided or
checkered, are atrocious violations of good taste; indeed, party-colored
costumes are worthy only of the fools and harlequins to whose official
habits they were once set apart. The three primary, and the three
secondary colors, red, yellow, and blue, orange, green, and purple,
(though not in their highest intensity,) afford the best hues for
costume, and are inexhaustible in their beautiful combinations.
White and black have, in themselves, no costumal character; but they may
be effectively used in combination with other colors. The various tints
of so-called brown, that we find in Nature, may be employed with fine
effect; but other colors, curiously sought out and without distinctive
hue, have little beauty in themselves; and any richness of appearance
which they may present is almost always due to the fabric to which they
are imparted. Colors have harmonies and discords, like sounds, which
must be carefully observed in composing a costume. Perception of these
cannot be taught, more than perception of harmony in music; but, if
possessed, it may be cultivated.

Extrinsic ornament or trimming should be avoided, except to indicate
completeness, as at a hem,--or to blend forms and colors, as soft lace
at the throat or wrists. The essential beauty of costume is in its
fitness, form, and color; and the effect of this beauty may be entirely
frittered away by trimmings. These, however costly, are in themselves
mere petty accessories to dress; and the use of them, except to define
its chief terminal outlines, or soften their infringement upon the
flesh, is a confession of weakness in the main points of the costume,
and an indication of a depraved and trivial taste. When used, they
should have beauty in themselves, which is attainable only by a clearly
marked design. Thus, the exquisite delicacy of fabric in some kinds of
lace does not compensate for the blotchy confusion of the shapeless
flower-patterns worked upon it. Not that lace or any other ornamental
fabric should imitate exactly the forms of flowers or other natural
objects, but that the conventional forms should be beautiful in
themselves and clearly traced in the pattern.--Akin to trimmings are all
other appendages to dress,--jewels, or humbler articles; and as every
part of dress should have a function, and fulfil it, and seem to do so,
and should not seem to do that which it does not, these should never
be worn unless they serve a useful purpose,--as a brooch, a button,
a chain, a signet or guard ring,--or have significance,--as a
wedding-ring, an epaulet, or an order. [Footnote: Thus, it is the office
of a bonnet or a hat to protect the head and face; and so a sun-shade
carried by the wearer of a bonnet is a confession that the bonnet is
a worthless thing, worn only for show: but an umbrella is no such
confession; because it is not the office of the hat or bonnet to shelter
the whole person from sun or rain.] But the brooch and the button must
fasten, the chain suspend, the ring bear a device, or they sink into
pretentious, vulgar shams. And there must be keeping between these
articles and their offices. To use, for instance, a massive golden, or,
worse, gilded chain to support a cheap silver watch is to reverse the
order of reason and good taste.

The human head is the most beautiful object in Nature. It needs a
covering at certain times; but to decorate it is superfluous; and any
decoration, whether of flowers, or jewels, or the hair itself, that
distorts its form or is in discord with its outlines, is an abomination.

Perfumes are hardly a part of dress; yet, as an addition to it often
made, they merit censure, with slight exception, as deliberate
contrivances to attract attention to the person, by appealing to the
lowest and most sensuous of the senses. Next to no perfume at all, a
faint odor of roses, or of lavender, obtained by scattering the leaves
of those plants in clothes-presses, or of the very best Cologne-water,
is most pleasant.

In its general expression, dress should be cheerful and enlivening, but,
at least in the case of adults, not inconsistent with thoughtful
earnestness. There is a radical and absurd incongruity between the real
condition and the outward seeming of a man or woman who knows what life
is, and purposes to discharge its duties, enjoy its joys, and bear its
sorrows, and who is clad in a trivial, grotesque, or extravagant
costume.--These, then, are the elementary requisites of dress: that it
be comfortable and decent, convenient and suitable, beautiful in form
and color, simple, genuine, harmonious with Nature and itself.

* * * * *

_Mrs. Grey_. All very fine, and, doubtless, very true, as well as
sententious and profound. But hark you, Mr. Wiseman, to something not
dreamt of in your philosophy! We women dress, not to be simple, genuine,
and harmonious, or even to please you men, but to brave each other's
criticism; and so, when the time comes to get our Fall things, Laura and
I will go and ask what is the fashion, and wear what is the fashion, in
spite of you and your rudiments and elements.

_Grey_. I expected nothing else; and, indeed, I am not sure that in your
present circumstances I should desire you to do otherwise, or, at most,
to deviate more than slightly from the prevailing mode toward such
remote points as simplicity, genuineness, and harmony. But if you were
to set the fashion instead of following it, I should hope for better
things.

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