Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/197

Rh this time, though it be better than it once was, few things designate classes and keep up distinctions of classes so much as the clothes that are worn, the badges, I had almost said, of the wearers. The costumes of the trim shopman, the slovenly mechanic, the country laborer, the flourishing squire, the tight-laced soldier, the club exquisite, the lugubrious doctor, the devil-may-care artist, and the awful ecclesiastic in his demented hat and sacred pinafore—these costumes and others betray a want of national taste and national unity which I for one, health-seeker as I would be, utterly repudiate. There can be no amalgamation of mind and heart while these distinctive outside declarations exist among us. In robes of office, during periods of office, men may well be distinctively clad. On the bench, at the bar, in the pulpit, in the professor's chair, such costumes are classically graceful and usefully distinctive, while in the workshop or other place of business a particular outer dress suited to the occupation is no doubt necessary; but for ordinary intercourse something in common in the way of dress were surely, in these advanced days, the thing to cultivate.

I pass now to the first head of my subject proper: Dress in relation to its mechanical adaptation to the body.

I. The first and most serious mechanical error committed on the body by dress is that of tightness, by which pressure is brought to bear upon some particular part. Presuming that an equable general pressure, not extreme in its character, and including the whole body, were applied for fitting purposes, that is to say, for the purpose of indicating outline, no great evil probably would follow from the application of such pressure, provided that it were so adapted as to give with the growth, to yield a certain measure of elasticity, and to permit perfect freedom of motion. A little more, perhaps, may be admitted even than this. In advanced life, when the shape of the body becomes irregular, and when the weight of those parts drags on the rest of the body, clothing specially adapted to those parts, and surrounding them with close and even pressure, gives useful and effective support, adding greatly at the same time, it may be, to the appearance of the body. These are exceptional conditions requiring exceptional management.

That kind of pressure to which objection must be most determinately taken is where the pressure is used, not for giving support to the body, nor for sustaining natural outline, but for the express purpose of producing an entirely artificial shape and outline. It is astonishing how resolutely the advanced professors of medicine, in all times in which they have written, have denounced the practice of compressing the body in the stages of its growth for the purpose of molding it into some unnatural form incident to fashion. It is equally astonishing to find how resolutely the votaries of the fashion have resisted the teachings of the learned, who may be said never to have made a single point in advance toward a practical victory. Now and then fashion