THE DRESS DIFFICULTY.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2551, 12 June 1882, Page 3

THE DRESS DIFFICULTY.

“Rupert,” writing to a South London paper, concludes a most interesting article thus ;

The primary use of clothing is to secure warmth. Some, I am aware, deny this, and set decency first ; but they are mistaken. Decency is a geographical virtue. Men, in the first instance, clothe themselves because their own E-kin is not robust enough to keep out the cold. Other considerations follow, and at last dress is elevated into a Erne Art. In that stage —which it should have reached among ourselves —it must be regulated by artistic considerations. Rules muc-t bo insisted on. These are few, but important. Clothing may take one of two forms : it may consist of tightly-fitting garments which are agreeable to the eye as not detracting from the natural beauty of the human figure, but, on the contrary, following its linos and proportions almost as if it were an integral portion of itself. As opposed to this is the style of clothing to which we apply the term drapery. The toga of the ancients was of this nature, and any garment which flows loosely around tbo figure and disposes itself in folds comes into this second class, and may bo credited with a beauty of its own, not easily described, but readily felt, insomuch that however coarse a piece of cloth or other material m»y be which is thrown about the shoulders and allowed to flow loosely, it will hold within it the clement of beauty. There is, indeed, a third stylo of dress, combining the two named, which has its claims, and may be achieved with effect. When to these forms we have added harmony of colour, the theory of becoming attire is complete, Nothing can bo added to it. This law should be known to everybody, hut unfortunately those who dictate “ the fashions” to society have a direct interest in ignoring it, while society itself is too ignorant to know when it is imposed on. The fashionmaker’s profit in ignoring the conditions of the beautiful lies in this—that as the demand for novelty is incessant, if he can resort to the ugly as well as to the beautiful, ho has a double source from which that demand can bo met. Graceful combinations and harmonies tii colour would soon bo exhausted, whereas if the hideous is included, the possible varieties are practically illimitable. The hideous just now is rampant. Male attire is constructed on what is known ns the drain-pipe model. The hat is one pipe ; the body of the coat one, a size larger; the coat sleeves two, a size smaller; the trousers two more ; and thus by a formal arrangement of six pipes we get clothed, neither ao aa to show the figure, as they did

during the last century, nor so as to treat it as a statue to be elegantly draped. Neither is of a combination of the two things. It is pure drain-pipory—nothing more ; and when the artist gets it into a picture, or the sculptor immortalises it in marble, he has the pleasing consciousness that his figures will in a few years be voted “ guys.” The attire of the ladies is just now equally hideous. A year or two since—for the first timo for half a century—the female dress lapsed into beauty, or as near an approach to it as milliners and dressmakers would permit. Now it has relapsed into ugliness and atrocity. The high shoulders and hour-glass waists, the ugliest form of crinoline —that of a rudder sticking out behind and wagging from siie to side—and the high, distorting heels to the shoes, to say nothing of variedly-hideous head-dress, go to make the lady of fashion simply a figure of fun. She cannot be ad mired. She can only be laughed at, and all the more so when she envelops herself in a cloak with fla ,'pors, giving her the aspect of a seal on the edge of its tank. And this is the latest outcome of our culture 1 Art, and resthetioism, and schools of design, ai d all that is talked and written about the biautiful, the elevation of the national mind, and nil the rest of it, have landed uo in an era of costume more frightful than any that has preceded it. The fact is infinitely discouraging; but what is to bo done P It seems as it we must perforce accept what we got, and simply blush at our barbarism and hold our peace.