THE GUILD OF PLAIN DRESSERS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 52, 20 January 1872, Page 8

THE GUILD OF PLAIN DRESSERS.

[Spectator.]

The Bishops suffer dreadfully from their epicene costume—wo hear a rumor we cannot confirm that one or two of them have had the sense to appear in the House of Lords without it—and the High Church clergy have been at least as much injured in popular estimation by their long soutanes as by their resolution to live or die by their right to celebrate the Communion standing North-East-and-hy-East of the altar. The periwigs are falling off the coachman, and, though beadles still look grand, we question if twenty years hence a footman in livery will be a possibility. He will want the pins thrust into his calves to be too much “ considered" in his wages. The idea, nevertheless, which penetrated the sumptuary laws, the notion that there is a standard of dress which befits each station, and which ought to be enforced somehow, if not by law then by opinion, which still retains some influence—still, for instance, inducesjournalists all over England to republish a statement that some unmarried lady unknown out of her own county is going to found a Guild to promote simplicity, modesty, and inexpensiveness of dress . . . The charge of extravagance depends too much upon circumstances, income, taste, and degrees of judgment, to be capable of proof by reference to any standard whatever capable of recognition by the world, and the attempt to enforce cheapness even by opinion would end in a large amount of oppressive interference with the right of indidual will. Society has no more right to prevent Smith giving his wife a sealskin jacket worth thirty guineas than to prevent him from giving her a portrait by Millias costing perhaps £BOO. One gift may be sillier than another, but among the clearlyestablished rights is that of being affectionately silly. It is the same with simplicity—which, to begin with, is of all the millinery virtues perhaps the most unendurablv costly. Let the Guild just consult a few Quaker friends, or ask Poole what it costs a year to produce some of his quiet, unobtrusive dandies, or cross-examine Mr Worth as to the comparative cost of the dresses of the Empire and the 11 mournful’’ dresses he is now compiling for the half-ruined Parisiennes. But then, it is said,simplicity apart from the question of cost, is so “ right,” so £t becoming,” so Christian. Is it? Why? It is very foolish to waste money wanted for higher duties on dress ; it is very wrong to dress lasciviously; and it is very inexpedient to dress in an excessively conspicuous manner; but with these three dogmas, it seems to us, the morality, social or real, of the matter ends. There is no more harm in a woman being brightly dressed than in a flower being brightly dressed ; no more wrong in an innocent woman’s study of dress effects than an orator’s study of pose, or elocution, or poetic effects. Drab is not in itself holier than scarlet one whit, aud the subdued colors are no more favorable to virtue than they are to artistic beauty. Nature hates them, and the notion that they are virtuous is an absurd effect of English bad taste. Phryne dressed in spotless white, and among the really vicious races, like the Turks of Constantinople, female dress has as little brilliancy as grace. There is absolutely no reason for simplicity except economy, and no Guild of Fashion could settle what for any particular individual was economiqal or the reverse. The only real departure from simplicity now common is the rapidity with which a really pretty dress is laid aside, and that practice does not arise from any social pressure which a Guild or Academy of Fashion could help to suppress, hut irom the spirit ot ostentation which has infected society, and which is no worse in female dress than in any other department of life. As to modesty, in spite of Club clamor on the subject, we venture to say dress has seldom been more modest. The last trace of immodesty has disappeared from men’s dress, and there never was a time when in Western Europe, except the few years of our own Puritan regime, and the fewer during which Clapham weighed on society, when women uncovered their bosoms less than they do now. The

social satirists forget the past, as they forget also to establish that there is any relation whatever between purity of life and mode of dressing—fashions the most “ immodest.” in English ideas, having existed among the purest socielies, while vice rages among the closely-veiled races of Asia. A modern grande-dame would color purple at Cornelia’s home costume, and consider that of a Sevillian street-walker the perfection of modest refinement. We are not denying for a moment that a woman may dress extravagantly, or immodestly, or in an outre style, just as a man may. We only deny that there is any arbitrary standard which can enable any guild or any society to try an individual member, and maintain that in this, as in most other departments of life, there is a moral right of free will, to choose colors, to choose materials, to choose cut, without perpetual reference to the moral sphygmograpli, or register of the moral pulse. If a woman likes pearls, and looks pretty in pearls, and can afford pearls after satisfying other and higher claims, she has a right to pearls, without any reference to any standard whatever except her own judgment, or any regard for the fact that there are people who cannot buy pearls, just as there are people who cannot buy boots. Variety in costume is a good in itself, and not an evil, and so is 'brilliancy; and the objection to low dresses has, within well understood limits, no move of real principle in it than the old Puritan’s objection to curls—an absurdity, by the way, which thirty years ago very nearly triumphed for the second time. It became for five or six years a mark of grace to plaster the hair on the temples instead of letting it fall in ringlets, and this even when the plastering consumed more time than the ringlets did. The world has always been ready to listen to such criticisms, for it has always consisted of men, and found a stimulent in semi-prurient satire, and of late years, and in England, such criticism has had. from accidental circumstances, two additional provocations. Men’s dress is not visibly costly, and need not be so in reality ; though most men spend more on their whole dress —that is, on the hosier as well as the tailor—than they think; and women, being debarred from holding property or earning it, always seem to be spending somebody else’s money. Englishmen who wonder how on the Continent and New York men endure their wives’ extravagance, forget that there the wife in nine instances out of ten contributes har fair share to the joint fund, and is only doing with regard to dress what her husband does with regard to more varied methods of expense. She is spending her own with very little judgment.