THE FASHION IS ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL.

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2337, 19 December 1914, Page 11

THE FASHION IS ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL.

, The other day I heard a group of women at luncheon discussing, with the charming gravity whioh they always bring to bear on matters. of. personal adornmont, the fashions of the immediate future. One of them had just returned from a shopping expedition to Paris, and the others listened to her reports much as the headquarters staff in a great campaign might listen to news brought in hy scouts and riatrols, on whose depositions their information must be- based. This lady electrified the others by assuring them that they would all be wearing flounces next year. Everything, she 6aid, was going in the direction of flounces; whereupon two of her audience expressed disappointment and protest, but the third and prettiest said, "But the fashion is always beautiful." For some reason this not very striking expression remained in my memory and haunted me as I went about my affairs; and as the only way to get rid of such an idea is to think it out, I set myself, when I got home, -to-consider what amount of truth might lie in it.

If you pass in review through your mind all.the .fashions in dress which you have known in your own time you will I think, find none that seems so beautiful as that of the present moment. By dress I mean, of course, women's dress and adornment generally because that is the highest and most artistic form which dress takes with us. ; I do lot mean the extreme of the fashion, or that exaggerated 6tyle which likes to overstep the mode a little in every direction; but rather the style of dress worn by pretty women whose clothes are perhaps their chief preoccupation, and who have ample means to cultivate and give expression to their own individual taste as applied to the mode of the moment. It is always, then, the latest fashion which has seemed ■■ to us most beautiful. If one leaves out the fashions of the last year or two and reviews those that succeeded them may, it is true, make critical discrimination among them. Thus the early Victorian fashions were obviously much prettier than the late Victorian, which were,-indeed, probably the ugliest that human beings have ever devised. Yet at the time cne thought them beautiful —at any rate I know that I did; although now when' 1 turn over those old volumes of "Punch" which were my chief 6auce of information upon social matters I wonder how we could have borne to see our friends 'so disguised and bedecked.

My earliest studies in clothes and the fashion were made', in Church—that being the place where I had most material before _mo to consider and most time in which to oonsider it. It was tho era of'bustles, and one watched the people coming down the aslo of the church, each woman carrying on her back a draped protuberance, by the extent, adornment, or "set" of which, among other things,, the extent of her adherence to the'fashion might, be judged. One by one the bustles came in,' glided down the asle, and disappeared into pews. Whether they were sat upon or merely leaned against I had hot then, and have not to this day, ascertained; but. I have seen them put on,_ and, in that carefull intimacy with which a very small child is made free of the most sacred scenes of feminine toilet, observed a beautiful woman, half clothed, tying by means of a tape a kind of pack or hemp stuffed with horsehair upon her back. I remember even at the timo thinking it a singularly brutal and.rndigniiied -scene,'like the harnessing.ff a carthorse; and the' memory and impression remained with me, and often, when almost intoxicated by; the dignity withV.which:some 'bustle : or other went rocking' down the aisle, I have remembored and visualised the sordid foundation on which it rested, and my joy in it has departed, liko the joy of one who sees through to the mean motives that lie behind magnifi-cent-notions. ' . • ...

■ Sometimes, if I remember right, there was. substituted for the bustle a kind of cage made <:f metal girders covered with' cloth, although whether this belonged to the bustle era or was some relic of the fashion which had precoded it I dp not know. But'l remember the' mode called iho "waterfall," which seemed to niq at the ..time one of the most ravishing 'things conceivable for the adornment of feminine beauty. The "waterfall"' was a group of closely parallel vertical pleats (if ; that be tho proper word), which began somewhere in the small of the back, curved magnificently o'ver the' bustle, and descended to the ground. . -The idea was' apparently, of. a stream of water which, rising somewhere between the shoulderblades, broke as it were upon the bustle, and poured in a Niagara of pleats to the hem of the garment—comparable, had it only been employed in front instead of the back of the dress, to that river of precious ointment that ran down Aaron's beard to the skirts of his garments.' ' But whatever its origin may have been, there was a day when this device was the very latest fashion; and on that day I for one thought it- extremely beautiful. To take another extreme case of the same kind, I remember a device by which the 6leeves, where they. joined the shoulders of the dress, sprouted or were continued upwards, giving.the impression of either a morbid growth or of shoulders hideously, shrugged. These were called "ears"; at first they were flat, liko a bat's or mouse's; but, gradually becoming fuller, and the fulness extending further and further down the sleeves, they developed at last into v the puffed- and swollen sleeves which were the' joy of a later day. But. there was a day when nobody without ears to ' their sleeves could be regarded as being properly dressed at all'; the absence of them gave a wretchedly poor and mean appearance to the whole person, while the set of" a pair of smart ears would of itself be enough to give distinction and chic to their wearer. .-

It was thus with hair-dressing, witli jewellery, and with every kind of garment. • You, good reader, may have had all the beauty and romance of your life associated wrlh a being upon whose forehead was reared an edilice of tightly and artificially curled hair; from whose' ears depended lumps of gold shaped like a coil of rope, round whose neclr hung a locket or kind of safe deposit structure of the same precious metal,- and on whose gentle breast there rose and fell a large brooch consisting of a large oval pane of glass behind which, a grizzly relic, was stored a ma6s of human' hair; who daily tied upon herself with tapes the stuffy burden of a bustle; whose sleeves sprouted into a 1 pair of ears, and who wore a bonnet and a dolman upon which yards of jet beads and bugles were strung. I remember distinctly—and this has a particularly interesting bearing on my subject—that in my earliest childhood the picture called into my mind by the word "pretty"' (and all words are associated in our minds with some picture) was that of a tightly curled fringe. For a long time I thought that to be .pretty was to have a fringe; that those who had it could properly be called pretty' and those who lacked it could not. Today we consider all these things ugly and disfiguring, and we are right: but in their own day wo thought tbotn beautiful—they symbolised beauty for us. And although on my own mind I feel convinced that the fashions 'of. to-day are more beautiful than anything in the last two hundred years, at any rate, it it probable that they, too, with all t«eir simplicity and 'fidelity to the beauties of the. body's own form will bo regarded by some future generation as —not ugly, perhaps, but at any rate absurd, the real reason, I think, why tho fashion is always beautiful at any rate while it lasts, is that.it is associated with some of the most boautiful things and tho most beautiful people A that we kuqwj that it Wfilirinoa some*.

thing more than can appeal merely to the eye—something that springs from the heart, belongs to ouv grief and our joys, and is a part of our living and breathing existence. Tho fashion is a symbol of the contemporary, of the present hour, of life itsslf; and as life is always beautiful, it is perhaps for that reason that we are right in finding tho fashion beautiful also.