Chapter XI

Fashion and Psychology

THERE is no least detail of human life which does not bear relation to the whole. There is no act, however trivial, which may not be called “right" or “wrong"—in relation to living.

In order to judge of the rightness and wrongness we must, of course, have some clear idea about living, about the Great Game, and our personal part in it.

When an individual's place and work in life call for some special costume it is easy to see what clothes are“right" and what“wrong." If in one's business it is necessary to change clothing often, or to change with speed, there is rightness and wrongness in those processes; but when we consider ordinary women's lives, the standard is not so clear.

What we have here to study is not the ethical quality of this or that costume, or of physical dexterity in donning or doffing it; but the ethics of Fashion, the psychology of Fashion, the relation of this habit of abject submissiveness to all the rest of life.

So unaccustomed are we to thinking about our clothing, to any real reasoning process as to its nature, quality and effect, that it seems absurd to attach a high psychological importance to this general subservience to Fashion.

Let us see:

We must first establish a common ground as to the nature and purpose of human life.

Without going into first causes or ultimate results, most of us will surely agree that our business on earth is to improve, personally and socially. We should grow better ourselves, and our children should be better than we are. We should improve the condition of living; improve in health, in beauty, in intelligence—all of us. We should improve our social and political relations, tending toward that Kingdom of Heaven on earth which religion commands, which evolution promises, and which human nature desires.

Very well. Then we may go on to say: Those acts are right which tend to bring about such improvement. Those ideas and emotions are right which tend to promote such acts. Those surroundings are right which tend to develop the ideas and emotions leading to such acts.

Very well again. Now suppose we show that a given act, such as docking the tails of Horses, tends to dull that sympathy with animals which not only attends high social progress but helps promote it; or that it tends to prevent the development of a sense of real beauty and thus again limits social progress; or that, if it be done by persons otherwise showing such sympathy or such beauty sense, then it necessarily maintains a break in the brain connection, a deep-seated inconsistency, which is a dangerous flaw in mental equipment, liable to do unexpected mischief at any point.

It may seem a simple and trivial thing, this mutilating an animal to save oneself trouble, or from a false and primitive beauty sense, yet its correlations and results are both complex and important.

So are all the connections between our various acts.

If one has a strong, consistent, normal brain, it cannot bear to be foolish in one place and wise in another; it must bring its acts into harmony. If on the contrary, one's brain is cheerfully unconscious of its inconsistencies, cannot even see them, perhaps; or, seeing, makes light of them, sees no harm in them—then that brain is not strong, consistent, normal.

In the huge tangle of unnecessary foolishness which keeps the world back from its natural health and happiness, two factors stand out before all; the one, that we do not seem able to see clearlv and judge fairly as to our difficulties; the other that when we do see straight and judge truly we appear paralyzed in regard to action.

Take so simple a matter as the need of good roads in our country. This may be explained to a child of twelve, or less. A country with no roads is not civilized at all, is uninhabitable save by savages; a country with few and poor roads is thereby limited in its development. The better the roads, up to the full limit of its needs of transportation and travel, the better the country. Moreover, we do not plant a thick population and then make roads for them. No, we make roads and “develop the country"; the population comes and settles along the roads. We could promote the wealth of our country, improve its intelligence, health and happiness rapidly and steadily by a nation-wide improvement in roads. We have plenty of material for road-building. We know how. We have the requisite labor, labor demanding employment so loudly that we call it “a problem."

Well? Why do we not go to it—this problem—apply the labor to the materials and provide our country with the best roads in the world? There is no reason except, first, our inability to grasp large questions like this, however clear and simple; and second, our inability to act after we do understand.

There are thousands of such instances. And what has it to do with the dress of women?

This: Women are half the world. Because of their effect on the rest of it, as mothers and influencers of men, they are the more important half. A race of active and intelligent women, with men kept in harems, would make better progress than we see where the men keep the women in harems and try to be active and intelligent alone. Human progress in the hands of men is continually interfered with by their maleness, by the special weakness and irritability proper to their sex. They are peculiarly susceptible to drug habits, such as the common use of alcohol and nicotine; so lacking in self-control as to show a most deadly record of vice and crime with correlative diseases; and so inherently belligerent as to fill the world with fighting.

The natural qualities peculiar to women are those distinguishing motherhood; tendencies of love, of care and service, of creative industry, of all that develops the family group, and so leads on to higher forms. Even in their abnormal position of seclusion and dependence they have maintained in the home a good showing of many of the qualities we need to see in the world at large. Anything which tends to keep back our women, to prevent their physical, mental and moral growth, is a serious injury to the world.

We have previously discussed the influence of various articles of dress upon the minds and bodies of women; the present point is not the effect of any especial costume or piece of costume, but the effect of following the fashions.

Suppose that the fashions handed out to us were good ones; that the dresses and decorations were really beautiful, and in no way injurious. What we are to consider is not the effect of the fashion ordered, but the effect of obeying the orders.

Here we have our half the world, in the so-called civilized races, habitually submitting its mind to a brainless obedience.

A woman may have no knowledge of beauty, of anatomy, physiology, or hygiene; of textile art either in fabric or garment, or of decorative art in any form; and yet, if “the fashion" happens to be beautiful and suitable she is as wisely dressed as her wiser sisters. A woman may be past mistress of all that knowledge, and yet, if “the fashion" happens to be ugly and silly, she is as foolishly dressed as her foolish sisters. And both of them, in obeying orders, waive their own right of judgment, and, by disuse, lose the power.

The human brain, our transcendent racial advantage, is capable of steering and pushing us to the gates of heaven. Through its power of inhibition we are able to check primitive or disorderly impulses; through its power of volition we are able to behave better than we want to—so building the good habits of the future.

With no brains—no humanity. With little brains—little humanitv. With weak, uncertain brains—weak and uncertain humanity. As the brain develops, widening in range of vision, perceiving closer relations, pushing to farther conclusions, and applying its ever-growing powers to conduct, so develops humanity.

We may become vastly learned in one line or another without this beneficent result. It is not the storage capacity of the brain that counts, nor even its reasoning power, if unused; it is knowledge, reasoning, and the effectual dominance of these qualities which make for true human progress.

So long as we “follow fashion" in clothing, by just so much are we incapacitated from ever improving our clothing.

The habit of submission absolutely prohibits the habit of judgment, of free choice and determined action.

Minor variations of a given style are offered, that we may think we are “choosing," but we may not choose outside that style. When women's hats were as big as fruit-baskets there were no smallcrowned ones for sale—they were not made; the buyer had no choice but a choice of evils

Moreover, the psychology of fashion is such that, after being surrounded with some abnormal hideous thing like those huge hats extinguishing a woman from eyebrow to shoulder, the beholder in course of time becomes accustomed to it, and a hat of normal shape and size looks dwarfed and abnormal.

Also the tradespeople, selling their “new styles," are wholly robbed of judgment by the swirling stream. They have no standard whatever, save that of fashion, and their ignorance coupled with their scorn, piles up the difficulties of the purchaser who would really like to choose wisely.

Dressmakers, when dresses are made to fasten in the back, profess to be unable to make them to fasten in front. Able or not, they refuse.

Apropos of that particular folly, cannot even a fashionable woman see the baby-like, doll-like, slave-like helplessness of her position! She is forced, absolutely compelled, to have her dress fasten in the back. She never thought of having it done that way. It is uncomfortable when done, difficult to do, and utterly useless. There is no shadow of reason for it. It may be done to little children or to idiots to prevent their taking their clothes off, but why a grown woman should be driven to ask help for that necessary act it is indeed hard to see. Very few women have maids. Most women made use of reluctant and justifiablv scornful husbands. But what of those who had none?

I have heard a woman unblushingly state that, traveling alone, and stopping in a hotel, she sent for the bellboy to fasten her dress around her helpless form. What would women think of men who could not put on their own clothes? Fancy a man calling madly for someone to button his coat up the back for him!

Yet so blank are the minds of women of any sentiment or dignity, of independence, of anything whatever except fashionableness, in the matter of clothing, that they submitted to this ignominy for years—without protest.

Within mv memory our “freeborn female citizens"—if women are citizens—have been the butt of humorists and satirists and the scorn of cynics for these excesses: (a) hoop-skirts; (b) the “Grecian bend"—a shameful misnomer—Greek indeed!—that kangaroo position; (c) the "tied back"—picture in Punch at the time shows fashionably dressed ladies who could not get in when they reached their ball—because it was upstairs! (d) the tight sleeve-they had to put their hats on first, the dress, or rather the “basque," afterward; (e) the “muttonleg sleeve"; (f) the trailing skirt—actually on the sidewalk, and with special “dust-ruffles" made to sew underneath to keep it from wearing out too fast!

Then, for a little while, appeared the one perfect dress which we have had in perhaps a century—a “Princess dress," comfortably fitted, wide enough to walk or run in, short enough for cleanliness and health, decent and beautiful in every respect.

Was this perfect dress due to any protest or demand from its wearers?

Not in the least. They did not even know it was perfect, but wore it with the same complacency they had shown in all the others, and gave it up as meekly at the next command.

The next (g) was the “sheath skirt," in which the woman cheerfully exhibited the full outlines of her gluteal muscles, and this soon became the “hobble skirt" (h), that contemptible stigma of imbecility, in which our women manacled their legs so contentedly.

Add to these conspicuous idiocies the enormous hats before mentioned; and never did women look more foolish than when they went about peering out from under their extinguishers like a butcher's boy with his basket over his head.

But they did not know they looked foolish. They had no acquaintance whatever with the true proportions of the human body, and the crowning dignity of the human head. They first made their heads into Ashantee mops by gigantic pompadours and then concealed them in these hats with the shape

“Of an inverted wastebasket wherein The head finds lodgment most appropriate!"

What can account for this area of grovelling slavishness in minds otherwise independent? The explanation of the commanders is clear enough, but what is the explanation of the submitters?

It is this: When a given fashion is ordained, and the women look at it, they look with minds vacant of the bases of judgment and lacking the power of judgment. If you offer a musical performance to a person who has never heard any music, he has nothing to judge by but his own personal reaction. If you offer it to a person who has been obliged to hear every night of his life music of every description with no choice or study, he has only this personal reaction blurred into dullness by heterogenous experience. But if you offer that same performance to one skilled in music, either as a performer or a loving student, one who understands methods, and whose taste has been educated by hearing the best and by intelligent discussion—such a one can judge the performance more competently.

We shall never be competent to judge the merits of costume until we have full knowledge of its bases: of textile art as a great social power; of the history of dress, its evolution, its different periods, beauties, excesses, uglinesses, and gross follies. We should be grounded in the great distinctive styles of the world: the “straight cut" with what we glibly call the “kimono sleeve"; the crosswise cut, seen in the Medean robes of old, and only approximated now in the soft folds of a “circular" skirt or cloak; the “skirt" as a separate article—see Hottentots; the various leg coverings, and the adoption of trousers by men in the Occident, by women in the Orient—with reasons; and the other underlying divisions.

On historic charts a given article of clothing should be shown, expanding and contracting, developing in various lines, slowly in earlier times, faster now that the pressure of the tradesman has become more powerful. We should learn to recognize that Unknown Artist, the Composer in Cloth, that man or woman who loves to work in fabrics as sculptors love the clay, and who, if we knew enough to recognize them, would give us all manner of lovely and legitimate variations on a theme originally good.

With this we should be taught—children in schools—young folks in college—to recognize and ridicule the excesses of the past. Comparative exhibitions should be made of the wide range of “improvers" mankind has used; from the shameless “codpiece" men wore in Elizabethan days to the modest shoulder-pads of the present; the corset male and female—mostly female; the “bustles" and other kinds of stuffing with which women seek to supplement deficiencies; and, conversely, the “reducers" with which they seek to check redundancies.

Teach our children, clearly and strongly, to know foolishness in dress and to despise it.

Teach them to know the beauty and strength of the human body and to honor it.

Teach them to appreciate textile art as well as the others; to understand what is good material and to recognize it. And, with all the force of word and picture, with humor, satire, irony and scathing sarcasm, teach them to know and to despise all false and foolish dress. Against the shameless pressure of those who make money by our idealessness, we should present a solid front of clear knowledge and trained judgment.

In this training there are several distinct lines of studv, all of which need to be fully taught but all of which may be simplified so as to be easily learned. Only those who deeply loved the art and craft of cloth and costume making would study deeply, just as but few of us study music deeply, or architecture.

There is the line of physical beauty, involving health, vigor, freedom, grace, and the full and subtle range of personal expression. This last could be vividly and convincingly shown by careful use of models and made universally available by moving pictures. The lecturer on “Personal Expression in Dress" has on the platform models of distinct personal types. They are first shown all in similar dresses, and those of the simplest, most non-committal type, such, for instance, as a “union suit." While they are similarly clothed and standing in the same position, the speaker could point out the special power and dignity of bearing of A; the soft grace of B; the frail slenderness of C; the suggestion of alert activity of D; the dainty roundness of E.

The five next appear, still all alike, in a Turkish “ferigech," or a nun's costume, to show how all personal distinction may be lost, or at least blurred, by some forms of dress.

Then some well known types of costume should be used on all five, as the Japanese, the Chinese, the Greek, the Quaker. This would show how a good type of dress, though more “becoming" to some than to others, does justice to all, and allows of much personal expression.

As much of this could be shown as there was time for, and while wearing these typical costumes the models should take various positions and perform various actions, as to stand, sit, stoop, walk, run, dance, and so on, showing that a given dress is more suitable for some attitudes and actions than for others.

Then, taking one model at a time, she should appear in various dresses, chosen to obscure, exaggerate, or to properly bring out her special characteristics, closing with the whole five shown at their worst—and at their best.

This part should involve a special study of becomingness, and be carried out in detail. For instance, the five should be shown in profile, the hair smoothly drawn back and around to the side of the head away from the audience, merely to show as far as possible with the hair on just what kind of heads they had, and how they held them.

Then the same simple coiffure should be shown upon all of them. Then, treating one at a time, the hair should be arranged in various ways, with careful pointing out by the lecturer of what was done to the face and head by each arrangement. The medieval Italian idea of feminine beauty, with an extremely high forehead, should be sharply contrasted with the sensuous unintelligent effect of hair worn low to the eyebrows.

Then each coiffure should be arranged to the best personal effect. Incidentally it should be shown how a given style of hair dressing is related to a given costume, exhibiting, for instance, that lately seen blunder of hair massed on the back of the neck accompanied by a Medician collar.

Again a given model should be shown in a plain and beautiful dress, coiffure, and hat, and the principles of decoration illustrated. On her head with its smoothly coiled, richly braided or soft piled hair should be placed a variety of ornaments, first separately, and then together, showing the effect of right, wrong, and excessive ornament. A hat, perfect in outline, and quite becoming, should be made imperfect and unbecoming by ill-placed or excessive decoration, and restored to beauty by true decoration. Simple illustrations here are the “glengarry," or the Tyrolese hat, with a simple, alert little feather, and the cavalier hat, with its sweeping plume. Reverse these ornaments and observe the effect.

So with the dress. A softly gleaming silk hanging in rich folds should be murdered before the eyes of the spectators by heavy rigid bands of trimming; a neat and satisfying tailored suit made ridiculous by lace and beads; a filmy muslin weighted to extinction by spangles and fringe.

In the end each model should appear, in a perfect type of the kind of dress best suited to her own characteristics, and in itself a beautiful costume, in no way interfering with full freedom of action.

Lectures like that would be immensely instructive, and also vividly interesting. W'e need a large and growing body of information, a clear, strong presentation, given far and wide, to all our people, men and women alike—for men are very largely responsible for the folly of women's dresses, first by designing and second by admiring them.

No, Mr. Smith, this does not mean that you personally admire the dress your wife has on, but it does mean that you and your brethren admire and pay court to the “stylishly dressed” women—and your wife knows it.

Besides this trained knowledge of the physical side of dress we must establish a deep sense of its ethical values. Iere again we reach our psychology, the mental reactions both of individual costumes, and of this underlving weakness which allows us to take the costumes given us with neither choice nor protest.

The condition of the world today surely shows that there are deep wrongs in the body politic. One after another may be pointed out, all serious, all undeniable. But among them all this functional disturbance in our mental action is not only serious in itself, but works incalculable evil in its results. We do not meet the problems of life with clear, unbiased minds, free minds, strong minds, minds able to decide wisely and to act upon decision.

Dress is not the only subject of decision in life, and women are not the only people, but they are a very weighty half, and dress is to them a matter of pressing importance. If women once lifted their heads in nation-wide revolt on this one field of action; if they determined once and for all: “We will no longer be the walking mannequins for these cloth peddlers"; if they would begin and continue the exercise of their minds on this question—they would find it easier to exercise them on others. No matter how wise and strong a person may be on some lines, if they are weak and foolish on others it weakens the whole character. Conversely, no matter how weak and foolish one is, to begin to be wise and strong on any line helps in all. The brainless submissiveness of women in the matter of fashion helps to maintain the brainless submissiveness of men in the matter of their fashions, the sway of custom, of habit, the general weakness of acting without first deciding and then acting on decision.

The world is full of ancient habits, customs, methods of doing things, attitudes of mind. The whole progress of the world is in steadily outgrowing its ancient limitations. More than anything else we need the power to See; to look out over the confusion of our environment, to recognize the general direction in which we should all move, and our own part in it; and then, most important of all, we need Power To Act.

It is an interesting fact in psychology that power gained in one direction is useful in all. “He that is faithful over a few things, I will make him ruler over many."' Courage, patience, perseverance—whatever virtues we practice at home or in school or among our friends—those virtues are ours to use in important public measures. If our women freed themselves once and for all from this utterly unnecessary slavery, began to use their own judgment and their own will on their clothes, the psychic effect would be of immeasurable importance, not only to themselves, but to their sons, brothers, and husbands.

The destruction of a bloated artificial market would be a good thing economically, a very good thing; the increased health and beauty of our womankind would be another good thing; but best of all would be the lifted head, the daring eye, the clear judgment, the strong, efficient will. A race of women free and strong, healthy, active, graceful, swift; a race of women who know what they want and why, and who act firmly to get it—these will give us a race of men similarly strengthened.

(To be concluded)