Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/195

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These are all very serious subjects in respect to dress. If it were on the fashion of dress I had to treat, if I might have permission to lead you, as at a fancy-dress ball, through the historical domain of costume, then I might try to fascinate the most fastidious, and to make the time pass like a dream, in a promenade. Confined to health and dress, I can commit no ecstasy. I must be allowed to criticise, if not to scold, and rarely indeed to find one passing word that stands for commendation.

Let me, nevertheless, at once state that I have not a syllable of expression to bring forward against good fashion, and good changing fashion in dress. There is nothing whatever incompatible between good fashion and good health; they may always go well together, and they ought to go together. Naturally, I believe, they would always go together, because they are both good, and two goods can never make a bad. In like manner, bad fashion in dress and bad health go together very often, because two bads can not make a good. For my part, I have never seen a good fashion of dress that was not a healthy fashion, and the world has only been led astray on this matter by the unfortunate circumstance that it has allowed its taste to be directed by the childishness of ignorance. In early times costume, naturally enough, sprang out of innocence. Scientific rules were unknown, and, if we may take the history of primitive nations as true, artistic rules were not supremely developed or carried out. Through long ages fashions varied, mainly on the artistic side, approaching only toward scientific necessity in cases where arctic cold or tropical heat enforced some kind of consideration for the person who had to be clothed. Later in more modern and scientific times, fashion has been governed by the most superficial, vain, and imprudent of so-called artistes and fashion-leaders, who have invented modes out of their own little heads, and have set Nature at defiance, as if they were Nature, and she were an idiot—thereby changing places with her in the most complacent manner.

Let me say further even than this: I commend good fashion and fine, nay exquisite, taste in dress as a good thing of itself, independently of health. I agree entirely with Mrs. Haweis that it is the bounden duty of every woman to make herself look as handsome as ever she can. If she have natural beauty, she ought to study how to maintain it in and through every period of her life—yes—to the last;