THE ORIGIN OF FASHIONS.
THERE is great need at the present moment of some patient and industrious philosopher who will make it his business to trace to their source the varying fashions of female dress, and so inform a long-suffering race of the secret origin of a despotism whose oppressive mandates they seem quite unable to withstand. No man, who happily wears the 'same kind of clothes today that he did some thirty years ago, can have the least conception of the weary tyranny exercised over the other sex by Fashion. Year after year he goes to his tailor, and orders suits of clothes " to be made as usual," with a cheerful disregard of the almost imperceptible changes which may have taken place in the dress of his more fashionable contemporaries. Ent with a woman the ease is far different; she must conform to the law of change, and the changes in her dress are as strongly marked as they are frequent. During the last two or three weeks we have been treated to a striking illustration of the utter helplessness of womankind in the matter of fashion. A rumour was recently started to the effect that an attempt would shortly be made to re.intro. duce the crinoline. It would appear, from the letters that appeared in all the newspapers, that the wearers of petti- coats were unanimous in their condemnation of the hateful contrivance, and one might reasonably have expected that they would have been contented with that expression of their feelings and have assured themselves that their milliners and dressmakers would speedily renounce an idea which was so evidently distasteful to their customers. That comfortable assurance, however, was very far from their thoughts. They have not the slightest confidence in the weight of their wishes, and firmly believe that, whether they desire it or not, they will have to wear a crinoline,—if only Fashion bids them. Who is Fashion ? What is she that all women should obey her P They frankly confess that they do not know. When one con- siders how blindly and implicitly they have obeyed her every whim for years—nay, for centuries—surely the confession should be a mortifying one. All they can say is, that they have nothing to do with Fashion themselves and have no part or share in the making of her laws ; and now that they are con- fronted with a law that threatens their comfort too much, all they can do is to band themselves together in a " No-Crinoline League," as if they were so many revolutionists conspiring in a desperate cause. We cannot seriously suppose that the
" No-Crinoline League " will be looked upon by the majority of womankind otherwise than as a kind of joke ; but, for all that, the panic that was occasioned by:this threatened revival of an exploded fashion seems to have been very real, and the apparent helplessness of women in a matter which entirely concerns themselves is certainly curious. The League—which, we are told, numbered, withi i a few days of its foundation, several thousand members—pledges itself not to wear or to encourage the wearing of crinolines, and, by way of taking more active steps still towards stopping the invasion of its foe, has addressed an appeal to her Majesty and to the Princess of Wales, begging that the great weight of their influence should be exerted in its behalf. The cause is an excellent one, no doubt, but the manner of the crusade is somewhat be- wildering to the male mind.
We have always heard a great deal about the leaders of fashion ; now we learn that those powerful personages are more or less mythical. Through the mouth of Sir Henry Ponsonby we hear that her Gracious Majesty does not consider that fashion is a subject upon which she can give an opinion, and a like answer has been received from the Princess of Wales. Evidently, therefore, the leaders of fashion are not to be found in the precincts of the Court, or, we may also suppose, among the great ladies of society. Common report assigns some of the most startling changes in woman's attire to Paris. In. the days of the Second Empire there was, without doubt, a good deal of reason for imagining that our fashions came from our neighbours across the Channel, and that the French stage, controlled to a certain extent by the Court of the Tuilleries, was responsible for each fresh innovation. To• day we do not fancy that our French neighbours are more disposed to lead us than to follow us ; at any rate they themselves no longer possess a supreme arbiter of fashion, and, as far as one can judge, are every whit as much at the mercy of some unknown inventor as we are our. selves. Who is it, then, who is responsible for the con- stantly varying modes of women's frocks P Some one must invent them ; and it must also be some one who has power to enforce the adoption of his invention, for, whether it be ugly or not, the world of womankind meekly submits to his dicta. tion. One is almost disposed to believe in the fanciful theory put forward by the lady who has been most eloquent on the side of the " No-Crinoline League." Woman's fashions, she says, are not due to the invention of woman ; they emanate from " a small clique of men ; " an unscrupulous council composed partly of manufacturers and partly of dress- makers, who play into each other's hands, in which case, of course, the introduction of the crinoline is easily explained. Supposing that a lady's skirt contains so many yards, the use of a crinoline would swell it to three times its size. The manufacturers would sell three times the amount of material, and the dressmakers would, of course, profit equally with the manufacturers. Such a theory would account for the innumerable frills of '75, for the preposterous " bustles " of '85, and for the sweeping trains of '90 ; but it certainly would not account for the tight-drawn, skimpy skirts of '80. One has only to consult fashion-books of the last quarter of a century—the back numbers of Punch will serve for the pur- pose—to see that some of the most striking vagaries of fashion are characterised by a decided saving of material. No manu- facturer who was anxious to increase the sale of his silks and satins would lend his countenance to a fashion which prescribed a clocollete bodice and a clinging skirt. Moreover, a council acting for the allied interest of manufacturers and milliners, would be quite incapable of keeping their personality and their deliberations secret. Our own explanation of the mystery is a more simple, though, we must confess, a less satisfactory one. In the first place, we believe there is no ruling mind, no system of deliberate invention or choice at all. The leading dress- makers of London and Paris find their advantage in varying their designs as frequently as possible ; and wherever a novelty achieves any success, whether it be in London or in Paris, it is immediately copied by other dressmakers, and its general adoption is as rapid as that of a slang word. Equally rapid is its course towards exaggeration ; its salient features are further and further enlarged until the exaggeration becomes grotesque, the reaction sets in, and fashion swings back to the other extreme. Take, for example, those peculiar sleeves which are now worn. They began quite modestly in the shape of a little puff] upon the shoulder : these excrescences grew and grew until they developed into the enormous andllunsightly humps which almost eclipse the wearer's head when viewed from one side. The next stage will be:the-gradual retreat back from this monstrosity to the perfectly plain sleeve. The plain sleeve will begin to pall again; some one will invent a swelling at the elbow, and a swollen elbow will become fashionable, until exaggeration has caused it to swell beyond all bounds, and then back it will go to its primitive simplicity, until the whole operation begins again da capo. The whole working of fashion may be divided into three separate processes,—genuine improvements with an idea either to beauty or comfort, which happen to hit the popular taste; exaggeration of these improvements ; reaction from the exaggeration. That, at least, is how it appears to us. As to the originators of the improvements, we believe they may be counted by hundreds.
Lrt no man quarrel with womankind because they tamely submit' to an improvement of dress which they do not like, and even consent to wear it in its exaggerated stage. It is very easy to say that nothing obliges a woman to wear. a crinoline if she dislikes it. She must conform, to a certain extent, to the dress of the majority, unless she wishes to make herself uncomfortably:conspicuous, and attract a disagreeable share ;of the public attention. In a world of balloon-like women, wearing crinolines, she could no more go about with clinging skirts than:she could with her hair down her back. For which reason, should the tide of fashion set towards that hooped abomination, we should very much doubt the mainte- nance for any length of time:of a "No-Crinoline League." If only it were possible, either through the agency of ladies' news- papers or through the dressmakers themselves—by boycotting, let us say, fashion-plates that were hideous or uncomfortable— to influence the original designers of novelties, we believe that women could defend themselves against some of the worst of the innovations which they are invited to adopt. As long, however, as the'origin of fashion remains a. mystery to them, and they talk wildly of being tyrannised over by a " small clique of men," they are hardly likely to find a voice in the designing of their own dress.
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