Chapter X

The Force Called Fashion

IF WE saw a million people, moved by some invisible power, rise from their seats and bow to the ground at the same hour each day, we should attribute this act to a religious belief.

If we saw them all suddenly change their diet from meat to fish, or from fish to vegetables, we should attribute it to some hygienic conviction, if there was no change in the available food supply. If the change in attitude, or the change in diet, was repeated indefinitely; the prostrations and genuflections varying from kneeling to jumping, from dancing to lying prone; or if we saw the dietary scheme alter from year to vear, from month to month—then we should be forced to consider that in religion and hygiene these people had no real convictions, no settled faith or established facts on which to base their conduct.

In the matter of clothing, which, as may be seen on the most casual study, is of the most vital importance to humanity, there is some mysterious and compelling power at work, which forces people by millions and millions to wear clothing which they neither like, admire, or need; in which they are not comfortable, and which they cannot afford.

So heavy is the pressure of this force that many heroic persons engaged in great work for the world's good, and quite conscious of the evils of our methods of dressing, have deliberately given up the effort to decide on their own clothing, both as too diffcult, and as so costly in the opposition and opprobrium excited by any efforts at freedom as to imperil the other work in which they were interested.

We have, half in earnest, personified this force; we speak of "Dame Fashion," of “Fashion's Mandates," or say “Fashion's Decrees" with all the solemnity of one naming his hereditary monarch or tutelary deity. Yet none of us really imagines that there is any extra-human power at work upon us in this way. We know, or may know, easily enough, that our conduct is the result of (a) heredity; (b) environment; and (c) the individual will. This last factor is open to pressure, both from within, from the knowledge, the ideas and convictions of the individual; and from without, in some form of persuasion or coercion from others.

Since human beings do not exist singly, and since artificial isolation instantly produces morbid reactions, we cannot make any study of absolutely individual choice in clothing. Further, as we have seen, clothing is essentially a social product, and must be so discussed.

Our question in regard to Fashion is not so much: “Why do you wear something so foolish, so ugly, so utterly injurious as high heels?" but “Why do we do it?"

The first answer is generally one based on economics. In our stage of sociologic discussion, with the Socialist doctrine of economic determination so widely known, it takes little thinking to discover the economic factor in almost any human performance. A little more thinking easily shows that there are others, many others, also effective.

If we go deep enough, examining this power of fashion in other instances, we shall easily find it at work in cases where it would puzzle Marx himself to show economic pressure, as for instance in the unanimous swing of young boys toward marbles in March.

Among children, or those sociological children, savages, we find this pressure well-nigh absolute. The power of custom, the demand for absolute conformity, is seen to be stronger as we go backward in social progress. The lower the stage of social development the more rare is individual freedom, the more difficult, the more dangerous—a fact clearly expressed by the formula: "Specialization is in proportion to organization." Those who prize their “individuality," and who fear that advancing Socialism will reduce or injure it, should carefully study this fact. It is only in high social relation that any full and perfect individuality is possible.

Thus we have one factor in the power of fashion explained without reference to economics; it is the tendency to conform, common to primitive humanity, and based mainly on the psychic characteristic of imitation, common to us and monkeys. Also there is the objection of the mass to the freedom of the individual. There is no question about this, even in modern and comparatively intelligent life. Let any individual deliberately choose to be “different" in no matter how small an instance, and from the intimate criticism of the family and the faithful wounds of a friend, to the general disapproval of the public, the painful consequences must be borne.

Little by little humanity has burst its chains in some lines of action, notably in the useful arts. Every step of improvement in tool, weapon or machine, involved doing something “different," and every step was met by the same objection, criticism, resistance. Nevertheless the growing-power, which is as clearly seen in the evolution of society as in that of earlier life-forms, has made us sprout and push with new inventions, and, in the more practical lines, where advantage was clear and easily proved, we have progressed.

Those who are so fond of extolling the merits of conservatism, calling it “the balance wheel," “the necessary brake," and other pleasant names, should face the bald fact that every single advantage we have over the cave man has come by doing something different, something new, and that every single advantage has invariably been opposed by the beneficent conservatives.

The predominant human traits distinguishing us from all other animals, civilized man from savage, and grown persons from children, are the Reasoning Power and the Applied Will. To be able to think, judge, decide for oneself, and to have the force of character to act on one's decision—these are the supreme human characteristics. Not love itself is able to maintain life, much less promote its growth, without these faculties of self-judgment and determined action.

In view of this it becomes highly important to find in our modern life any department wherein these higher faculties are not used; and where, on the contrary, the primitive attitude of conformity is maintained under penalty.

The economic agencies working to keep up the rapid fire change of fashion are easy to see. The largest is the pressure from the manufacturers and dealers, with all the designers, tailors and dressmakers. It is obvious that the necessary clothing of a human being would not begin to “furnish employment" to the multitudes now occupied in making and selling unnecessary, poor and ugly clothing. All this force of workers, subsidizing the press by their advertisements, continually operates to create and maintain a “forced draught" of changes in costumes, and this obvious fact, to some minds, quite accounts for the kaleidoscope. But it is not nearly enough. There is further required an explanation of two things: First, to what appetites, natural or artificial, does this effort appeal? Second, what is it which prevents the counteraction of the Judgment and the Will?

Let us suppose that a vast group of capitalists and workers found a continuous profit in making and selling colored ear-muffs, to be changed each week. How could they make us buy those ear-muffs—if we did not want them? How could they make us change the color every week—if we did not wish to?

The economic pressure actuating the producer is clear enough, but what is the pressure actuating the consumer? Admitting the “tendency to conform," the question still arises as to how we induce the "leaders of fashion" to change—in order that the others may conform as rap idly as possible?

Here we have three lines of approach: one the economic dependence of women upon men, which, as we have shown, causes her to vary in costume in order to win and hold his variable taste; another the tendency to “conspicuous expenditure," shown by Veblen, which causes both men and women to exhibit clothes, rather than wear them—the more the better; and third, a result of our artificial classification of society, in which social position is indicated by dress. with the consequence that the natural tendency to conform and to imitate is reinforced by the desire to resemble someone higher up, a species of “protective mimicry."

That the clothing of women is more open to variation than that of men, in spite of all efforts of producers to work off their wares on both sexes, is due to several causes. There is the main distinction of their lives, that men as a class make and hold their positions by what they do rather than by what they look like; the greater standardization of men's clothes, with its flat and determined symbolism in uniform; the fact that men please women not by elaborate changes of costume but by personal qualities and the whole range of gift and bribes; and, further, that the activities of men call for the exercise of individual judgment and will more than those of women.

In the matter of conformity there is little to choose. Men have swallowed their dose wholesale, they are far more alike in appearance than women, and it is even more difficult to make them show personal peculiarity in dress. Moreover the man's dress, with all its limitations, is far nearer to the needs of the real basis, the human body. He must have freedom of movement, he must have some power and skill. He could not, conceivably, be made to wear anything that crippled him in action, like the “hobbleskirt," or the stilt heel.

But the woman, unfortunately, is open to every pressure that can be brought to bear—economic, sexuo-economic, what she calls “social," and all the others, major and minor, and against these she has not yet learned to present the solid front of reason, knowledge, artistic taste, or personal judgment.

She makes no resistance at all.

A sadder, more pitiful, more contemptible spectacle it would be hard to exhibit, than these millions of full-grown human creatures hurriedly and continuously arranging and rearranging their hair, their clothes, their hats, their shoes, their very fingernails—because someone has so ordered.

There is not a murmur of resistance, not a moment of criticism.

"This is beautiful! Wear it!" says the Power, and by millions and millions they agree: “This is beautiful!"—and wear it. In a few years, a few months, they laugh at it and say: "It is not beautiful! How could we wear it!" Yet never once do they hesitate to accept the next proclamation.

One would think that in members of a freeborn race, in a free country, with all our traditional admiration of revolution, our women would cringe in shame to be so harried and driven by masters they cannot even name. One would think they would lift their heads and say, "Why must I?—I will not!" But no, they bow their heads all one way, like river grass streaming in the current, and over them, their lives long, flows this stream of clothing and decoration. They do not oppose it, being apparently will-less in the matter. So long, so complete, so unbroken has been their surrender that it does not, in all their lives, cross the minds of most women that it would be possible for them to wear what they personally preferred. They have no preference. They have not taste. They have no standards, ethic, economic, hygienic, or artistic, whereby to measure and criticize the things poured upon them. On the contrary, they have deified the power that governs them, and worship it. They call it—"Style."

There is a mystic cult in this worship. It is approached with a special air; it cannot be described in words; it is supposed to convey some indefinable merit and superiority on its exponents and devotees. Being ruthlessly analyzed by those who do not readily bow down to mysteries, it seems to consist in discerning the distinctive note in the newest fashion, and harmonizing the costume to that note. This is perhaps better than wearing a jarring hodge-podge of various “notes," or a subdued failure to catch any of them, but it confers no merit on the “note" itself. The crinoline was just as ugly, clumsy, and silly on the most buoyant balloon-lady of them all; the “Grecian bend" as insulting to all beauty; the “tied-back" of the eighties, and “hobbleskirt" of yesterday as ignominiously crippling. To successfully and harmoniously carry out a design of utter folly is no high ambition.

Yet our women, practically all of them, yearn their lives long for "style"; strive for it, study it, admire it, envy it, seek to buy it at any price. Those who attain it bask in a complacency so absolute that one rubs one's eyes to be sure that so much satisfaction is attained on so fragile and uncertain a basis. For this so-worshipped “style” is not something to be attained by the use of the intellect, by strength or skill or patience. The ability to discern in the tossing flood of ceaseless changes this mystic line of superiority, and seize upon it, requires, it would appear, a peculiar cast of mind. So vague and indefinite is this gift, that even its possession is attested only by the opinions of other persons—and they, alas, disagree. This, that, or the other woman, among the trooping, eager, subservient masses, is hailed as a high exponent of style—by some. Others deny it. None can explain or prove either affirmation or denial. When pursued to its sources in the mind we find a singular psychologic background.

Following the life of an individual, we see the girl-child first influenced by sex-distinction in dress, the things “proper to little girls" as quite distinct from things “proper to little boys." The baby has, of course, no choice in dress, though quite open to its influence. What moulds the mother's choice?

It is a long way back, counting from egg to hen, and from hen to egg, but one strong influence modifving our taste in dress is the habit of playing with dolls. The girl child is given dolls, and, partly by instinct, mainly by imitation, repeats maternal cares and labors. The child pets and punishes, feeds and dresses her dummy infant as she sees her mother do to the real one; and the mother in turn pets and punishes, feeds and dresses her real infant, as she did when a child to her doll.

Where maternal conduct is so largely a matter of "instinct” we need not be surprised to see the child's conduct so closely resemble the mother's, and the mother's resembles the child's.

The child, given a bundle of odds and ends as gay as possible, her "doll rags, proceeds to the best of her ability toadorn the body of her favorite. A childish taste is to be expected—in children; and where it never grows wiser, never is educated, never is refined by the study of beauty, nor strengthened and clarified by a knowledge of natural and aesthetic love, it remains childish through life.

The similarity in taste between children, savages, and women is sufficiently marked to be noticeable, as we have seen in the study of decoration. It should be outgrown by the use of progressive intelligence, and by education; but neither is used in the clothing of women. The child gets her start in taste as a doll-dressed baby, and develops it on her baby-dressed dolls. She then, among her young associates, comes under the influence of that strong human tendency, imitation.

Children are as helplessly and as ruthlessly imitative as savages. They long to wear what the others wear; they cruelly criticize and ridicule the hapless child who forms any exception to the rule. Boys are as subject to this force as girls, their superiority in clothing is related to their status—not their sex.

One would think that parents and teachers might combat this primitive tendency to imitate; might explain that an article of clothing was to be judged on its merits, by its intrinsic or applied beauty, its use, its power of expression. One would think that it might be shown to any intelligent child of eight years that a hundred thousand ugly hats or silly ribbons were no less ugly or silly than one or two.

No such effort is made.

Children are taught, with anguish and rebellion, to “take care of their clothes"—at least the effort is made to teach them. We seek also to make them “keep their clothes clean," a fruitless task, and injurious if accomplished. No healthy child can be a safe clothesbearer. But no one teaches the child anything whatever about the nature and purpose of clothes—what they mean to humanity, and how to appreciate them.

The boy, becoming a youth, has his period of agitated interest in cut and buttons, in hats, socks, and ties; and presently, selecting in a limited range, decides on the kind of clothes he likes and wears them thereafter. Or else, using even less intellect, accepts what is given him by the tailor, or merely imitates his companions.

As said before, the higher state of development in men's clothing is due to their advanced social condition, to their economic status, and not to any special superiority of sex. A glance at the history of costume shows that men have eagerly worn all conceivable monstrosities, even to stuffing their trunks and doublets with bran, to the shaven head and powdered horsehair wig, to the shoe so long in its pipe-extended toe that it was fastened to the knee or even to the girdle. But men, as workers, have evolved farther in costume than have women.

The girl growing into youth and womanhood, finds nothing to check the doll-and-baby influences, or the imitative instinct. She finds, however, two new forces at work upon her—the pressing necessity of using dress as an avenue of sexuo-economic advantage, and the further demand for “style" as a means of social advancement.

Observe the cumulative forces by which she is influenced: (a) the primitive decorative taste of racial and personal childhood, carried on from doll to baby, and from baby to doll; (b) the imitative habit, so natural to the human race, and to its immediate progenitors, unchecked by the conscious application of the mind; (c) the tremendous compound force of the sex-motive with economic advantage; and (d) the desire for social advancement, as attained by clothes.

It is no wonder that women, so long as they were wholly uneducated and unused to any freedom, should have abjectly surrendered to such pressure as this. It is no wonder, either, that even today so many women able to balance results should deliberately choose the easiest way and gain their ends by dressing rather than by doing.

But it is grave cause for amazement that women of real ability, of clear strong minds, of high ethical sense, should allow this subject of clothing to remain without even intelligent consideration. The peculiar slavishness of their attitude would, one would think, rouse some smoldering feeling of rebellion. From sheer love of exercise, the subject, one would think, might attract the active mind, the efficient will.

No such desire is shown, no such effort made. “Fashion's Mandate” is accepted as if a revelation from heaven or a law of nature. In a current “Woman's Magazine” we are given a solemn “page" with the ukase from Paris. This is merely a letter from a correspondent, a person hired to tell the eager readers what they must do now, quickly, to obey this whirligig monarch.

"Most of the big coutouriers (an impressive word, meaning only dressmakers) here have decided to emphasize the figure in their new creations for the Fall and Winter."

"The figure claims their attention first, and the design, once so important, comes second."

"Hips are in evidence, and the slender waist has arrived."

Paquin will favor wide skirts."

“Bernard, the leading Parisian tailor, says that straight skirts and kimono sleeves are at an end."

"Jenny will employ a profusion of narrow soutache on her lovely autumn dresses."

Well? These are statements which may be correct enough as to the intentions of Paquin, Bernard and Jenny—but what of it. What is this awed importance attached to the opinions and purposes of these tradespeople? If we see a page announcing that "Most of the big grocers have decided to emphasize cheese in their new stock"—do we therefore buy more cheese?

"Jones will favor old cheese.'

"Brown, the leading wholesaler, says that Edam cheese and Neufchatel are at an end."

"Susie will employ a profusion of Limburger in her menus."

What of it? Does a conspiracy of tradesmen to force you to change your diet make a million women run headlong to discard the food they were eating and eat a new kind?

Only in dress, and almost wholly in the dress of women, is it possible to dictate to half the adult population as if they were a lot of hypnotized dummies.

"Fix your eyes on Me!" say the Leading Coutouriers. The eyes are fixed—glued—in silent adoration.

“Think exclusively about clothes in relation to the orders I give!"

They think, exclusively.

"Now then, attention! Act promptly please! Up with the waistline!"

It goes up.

"Down with the waistline!"

It goes down.

"Away with the waistline!"

It goes away.

The devotees are breathless with the speed of the changes and with their eager concentrated attention to see that their waistlines are correctly located.

"Trail your skirts in the mud!"

They trail them.

"Shorten your skirts halfway to the knee!" They shorten them.

"Tighten your skirts into a single trouser leg!" They tighten them.

Quite apart from the beauty, the truth, the comfort, the economy, the health involved in this matter of clothing, what is the matter with our women that they do not resent this insolent dictation?

By what Right does any man or group of men—and Jennys—issue orders to American women? By what Wrong, what weak compliance, what cowardice, what blank lack of thought, what creeping paralysis of the will do we take these orders and obey them? We search eagerly for them. We send “correspondents" to Paris to get them—in advance. We out-Herod Herod in fulfilling them, going quite beyond the intention of the Commander, so that our Rulers come over here and condemn us, to our faces, for our too-absolute submission.

Moreover, so sodden through and through are most women by this weird cult of style, that, wholly unaware of their own grotesque appearance, they criticize and ridicule other costumes which may be far more essentially beautiful than theirs. They measure one another by their clothes—not by their bodies, much less minds; and the standard of measurement is not the excellence of material used, the skill of its construction, its fitness to time, place, and occupation, its abstract beauty as a garment or its concrete beauty of becoming the wearer—none of these nor all of them weigh against the one question: “Do this woman's clothes obey orders?" If they do not, she is anathema.

One might expect this of women in the harem stage of development. We might understand it among those wretched traders in sex whose clothing is their signboard. We can appreciate it among those who spend their lives in trying to get invitations from their “social superiors," a game in which clothes are as much a signboard as in the other. But that comfortable matrons, working women, even many who think and teach, should also be blighted with this disastrous weakness, showing neither knowledge of aesthetics, economics, or hygiene in dress, but only the demand for Conformity—Obedience to Orders—is not only ludicrous but pathetic, not only pathetic, but dangerous.

Remember that this conformity is not to a fixed type, but is a frantic shadow-dance after constantly changing patterns. Remember that it occupies the minds of practically all women in so far as they are able to attain to it, and requires for fulfillment not only thought but constant labor. It is not only Flora McFlimsy but the loving mother in Barrie's exquisite picture, who worked so hard to remake her children's garments after the changes she glimpsed from the window.?

Remember that a constant active submission to orders—on any line—is not only a temporary preventative of independent action, but tends to destroy the wish and the will for it.

Remember that the most important qualities of the human race are those which enable us to Think Freely and to Act Strongly on our own decisions.

Slowly and only recently we have struggled out of the age-old status of slavery, real chattel slavery. Slowly, recently, and only partially, have some nations broken loose from the Infallibility of the Church and the Divine Right of Kings. All the way through history we may see the Human Soul pushing, striving, toward freedom. Only with freedom comes progress, growth, the true unfolding of qualities and powers, the development of right relationships, which is our great Race Duty on the earth.

And here, in the very face of all our hard-won freedom, we see half the people contentedly, eagerly, delightedly, practicing this unspeakably foolish slavery to the whims and notions, and the cconomic demands, of a group of people less worthy to rule than any Church or Court of past—the daring leaders of the demi-monde, the poor puppets of a so-called “Society” whose major occupation is to exhibit clothes, and a group of greedy and presuming tradesmen and their employees.

These determine our fashions.

These give orders.

To these we, in our millions, submit.

(To be continued)