On Fashions

THE fashion of a thing is the form thereof. “Thou hast fashioned me,” thou hast made me: we pay a silversmith five shillings an ounce for the silver of our tea-spoons or our epergne, and five or fifty more for the fashion, for the making. Fashion is derived from facio to make: the etymology is abstruse.

Hence it is that a man is fashioned by his tailor, or a lady by her mantua-maker and milliner. It is the tailor who fashions the man: he makes him a man: him, who before that, without the tailor’s aid, would have been a thing. The man-midwife produced the substratum into the world — a thing of nought, a rasa tabula, a simple ens, an ens nonentical, unformed, unlicked, endowed with susceptibilities, with susceptibility of clothing, and aspect, and form, and character; and the tailor forms him, licks him, makes him, fashions him, endows him with a shape and a character, and he becomes fashioned; and if the tailor be Stultz, he becomes a man of fashion — a fashionable man.

Nature made animals — she is a vile step-mother — and the tailor makes man. Thus the mantua-maker, and the milliner, and the shoemaker make woman ; woman — heaven’s best gift to man, Christian man, below — her best gift to man, Mahometan man, above. What would woman be without those aids? a nothing; a variable, inapprehensible, inexplicable, unintelligible, bundle of caprices — not even a thing, as the Romans considered her— not even a moveable, though moveable enough; but a metaphysical ens, a wind influenced by every wind that blows. But she is solidified by muslin, and silk, and crape, and gauze; and she becomes a tangible substance — a woman of fashion, provided that she is fashioned by Madame Hippolyte or Madame Triaud.

What, indeed, is human nature but a bundle of clothes. What are all the distinctions of society but distinct suits of clothing. And properly, therefore, is man the produce of a tailor. It is he that is the real creator of man; and such is the importance of his office, that it requires nine tailors to make a man. Much injured race — that is the true solution of this proverb. The tailor taketh satin, and he cutteth it, he carveth ermine, and slasheth velvet — he maketh a suit of clothes and he clappeth a crown on its top, and he falleth down and worshipeth, and he crieth, Aha ! it is a king. Again, he taketh scarlet, and gold, and fur; and he tacketh them together with needles and with thread, and he putteth a sword into its sleeve, and he presenteth it with custard, and he crieth — I have made a Lord Mayor.

What would the pomp, pride, circumstance of glorious war, nay, the very army itself be, but for the tailor. It is not the man, but his coat, that fights; the courage lies in the uniform; it is the courage of the 42d suits of clothes; and hence also the burning valour of the 10th dragoons, the valour of its sabretashes and gilded boots, as all the energy of a lancer is embodied in his trencher cap; just as the learning of the Almas, the triangles of Cambridge and the Greek of Oxford, are the produce of a square bit of board and a silk tassel. Hence it is, that all great conquerors, such as Frederic William and his majesty, (God bless him and the Duke of York,) are also the great clothiers, the great tailors, the fabricators of collars, and facings, and courage, and victory. What is a battalion? see it at a review: it is a long line of coats and pantaloons, red above and white below. What makes the unfledged, unformed, nothingless youth, an ensign, a cornet, a soldier, a hero? — It is the red coat. What makes all the young ladies “fall in love” with him? — It is the red coat. The silk and the muslin fall in love with the scarlet and the lace; they elope together to Gretna Green: the rest is nothing. Strip the army, and what is an army? — Nothing. It is the tailor who makes armies and conquers victory.

Thus also do twenty-four wigs sit on a bench covered with red cloth to prove Paddy a Pagan. A man cannot even be hanged without the order of a square cap; and such also is the difference between prunella and silk, that it costs a man twice as much to be plundered of his property by the latter as by the former. And thus the gown of prunella envies the gown of silk, and frets itself, and goes into opposition, because the produce of a sheep is not that of a silk-worm.

The very law acknowledges that the suit of clothes is the man itself, and that the rest is notliing: a post, a horse, to hang them on. We may steal the child as we please; but woe be to him that steals the suit of clothes. Doctors may resurrect the body, cut it into pieces, and cram it into bottles; but the doctor who resurrects the clothes, goes to Botany Bay. In short, from the coal-heaver to the chancellor, from Drury to Almack’s, human nature is a Monmouth-street, a collection of suits — black, white, and grey — silk, gauze, and frivolity — leather and prunella, goats hair and gold lace.

Thus is fashion all, and all in all. And, according to the fashion of the clothes, are the fashion of the man and the fashion of the woman. Hence is its sway predominant, as it ought to be. Being all, it ought to be every thing. To be in the fashion is to exist, it is existence itself: to be out of it, is non-existence; it is oblivion, death, and the grave. It is beauty, morality, every thing — not dress alone; its sway is unbounded, its powers unlimited, its sanctions unquestionable, and its decrees, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, irreversible.

For, if the coat makes the man, and fashion makes the coat, then does fashion make the man. And thus the man who is fashioned, is fashioned in every thing; not only in his coat, but in his carriage, his horses, his wife, his house, his conduct, his principles, his politics, his literature. All is fashion, and fashion is all, in every thing.

There is a metaphysical concatenation which links the whole together. Or, as the full-fashioned man must be perfect, whatever he chooses, follows, drinks, performs, thinks, rides, votes, or bets, must be equally fashioned and fashionable. It is the model and the pattern to follow by him who would also be fashionable. It is his opinion, conduct; morality; his dictate of conscience, his moral law.

Thus have we traced man, society, every thing, to the tailor and the mantua-maker; and to them also we trace beauty, grace, taste. And hence have moral writers justly laid down that great principle, that there can be no standard of taste. Now, indeed, should there be a standard of taste, an unerring principle of grace, an undeviating line of beauty, as poor Hogarth imagined, unless Mr. Stultz and Madame Triaud were as eternal as the wandering Jew, unless all the essence of all the tailors and mantua-makers, and milliners, and hat-makers, and boot-makers, and shoe-makers, and coach-makers, and upholsterers that ever will exist, were concentrated in one man or woman of each species, and that species invariable, unchangeable, immovable to all winds of doctrine.

The thing cannot be. And, therefore, there is no standard of taste; and beauty is a creation varying with every new patent, every new crotchet; a thing to be made, and unmade, and remade, as Stultz shall succeed to Stultz, or Brummel to Brummel, as Tailor shall yield to Vandervelde, and Vandervelde to Schaller, or as Hertford or Conyngham shall reign Venus ascendant in the first, second, or third, or in all the houses of Mars.

Thus it is that we endeavour in vain to fix this fleeting spirit, this “essential form of grace,” which is unessential, changing with every wind that blows. And thus it is that we admire and adore the fair, that lovely part of creation, fashion’s favourite child, whether rustling in silk, angled with satin, or flowing in muslin like white-robed innocence. Whether mounted on heels of wood, peaked like a lance, squared to the obtuseness of Paris, or rounded to an ellipse, the foot of beauty is always beauty: it carries its arrows to the heart, whether of morocco or kid, or prunella, or satin, lilac, scarlet, white, blue, green, or black, sandalled or Wellingtoned, Brunswicked, or Yorked.

Thus too, whether gipsey prevails, or Oldenburgh, coal-scuttle, or Quaker; whether she fan the idle air with topgallantsails of Leghorn, or wave in plumed or hearsed, chivalry, or undertakery, she cannot err; fashion is beauty, and beauty is fashion. Waists contract and expand, anon she is a wasp, and anon a barrel; now she diminishes the equatorial diameter, and now she enlarges it; zones ascend and descend from the seat of honour to the seat of the heart; the seat of honour itself undergoes a sudden, development, and again it vanishes; cushions are transferred from region to region, from the Hottentot region to the head; the bosom now “hides, oh! hides those hills of snow,” that the spectator may riot in scapular charms and spinal vales; and, again tuckers descend till descent becomes once more precarious, while the balance of compensation restores to concealment that of which the repose should never have been disturbed. Yet, like the moon through all her changing phases, she is always beauty, for she is always fashion.

Is it possible to be serious on all this folly? We ought, at least, to attempt it. Whatever moralists, metaphysicians, and artists may dispute about taste or beauty, it is certain that, if we take extremes at least, there is a wrong and a right, something that pleases and something that displeases, independently of all custom and all fashions. It is scarcely possible that the opposed extremes of form shall be beautiful, and that the same shall be true of all the intermediate stages; it is still less possible that the form which is beautiful in 1824 shall be hideous in 1825; or that the beauty of dress, of shape, substance, colour, disposition, which delights us in April shall be that which makes us faint with horror in June.

Yet so it is with all those who are guided by fashion — by that magical term, the sound of which conveys, in itself, beauty, grace, taste, every thing. And as it is chiefly the lovely sex which is under this influence, to them must we direct our remonstrances. It is a lovely sex; and yet, with all its charms, it owes more to dress than it is always willing to admit. The experiment is easily tried. Take the whole bright parterre at Almack’s, every lily and rosebud that blooms in that garden of sweets, and dress it up in coats and pantaloons and cropped heads. It would prove a kind of Westminster school, where the lover would be at a loss to know the object of his adoration; and we suspect that beauty would soon discover the debts which it owes to gauze, and feathers, and silk, and to all and every thing which segregates it from the pantalooned and shock-headed part of creation.

And, by the way, this is an experiment by which the fair might learn to profit, would they but perpend it. Woman gains nothing by being reduced to the nudity of man; and the nearer she approximates to him, the greater hazard she runs of forfeiting those charms which she will find to be rather more adventitious than she sometimes thinks. She loses something by every inch that she approaches him in her aspect and adornments, in the one as in the other. It is her interest to remain as far separated as possible, to surround herself with every prestige that can make her a distinct sex, whether to that she add the ornaments over which she has the command, or not. The petticoat is the essence of woman; it is woman; and woe to her who, in more senses than one, would “wear the breeches.” We know not how to approach a delicate female in woollen, the very idea of the touch of wool is unfeminine — masculine. Even the riding-habit is scarcely justified by its apparent necessity (for it is not necessary); and when combined with a beaver hat and Hessian boots, we would as lieve think of making love to an officer of dragoons. We doubt the whole invention, riding and all; and let the equitant race be assured that they lose much more than they gain by this “vaulting ambition.”

There is not an atom of the male attire in which the charming sex does not suffer, in male estimation; and if dress is to be the labour and object of their lives, if it is the primum natus and the ultimum moriens, the end and purpose of their lives here below, that end is to charm man, to gain his approbation, and excite his love. The sex is too apt to dress to itself, and to forget him to whom alone it ought to dress; and let it be assured that man is the true judge and critic, that critic which it ought to study and please. It suffers by every male assumption, by even that of the masculine shoe; a national distinction exciting the scorn and reprobation of Paris, better skilled in the charms and chaussure of a female foot, and better knowing that

From the hoop’s enchanting round,
Her very shoe has power to wound.

It has wounded, from King Solomon to Cinderella’s monarch, from Holofernes to the wife of Bath; but what other wound than a good kick is likely to be inflicted by a great hulking, double-soled, English machine, well blacked by Warren, Hunt, Day, and Martin.

The object of dress should be to add to nature’s charms: that seems tolerably obvious, and it is not denied. It is, to add to them, for the purpose of pleasing and captivating the other sex; that, we have demonstrated. Man may not judge of the value of laces or the price of trimmings; but he does judge of their power, and by their powers they ought to be judged. Woman dresses, nevertheless, that she may show to fellow woman, the superiority of Mechlin to Buckingham; that she may measure the length of her bill or the profundity of her purse with those of her rivals. Man knows nothing of these rival superiorities — till he pays the bills at least. The young aspirant to a settlement, whose whole fortune perhaps consists of half a dozen chemises, “Love’s very last shifts,” and a pianoforte, receives a present of five hundred pounds from some foolish old uncle to buy frying-pans. The Greek betrothed, at least, who had nothing else, brought a frying-pan to her husband’s arms. But the five hundred pounds are spent on a trousseau, that they may be displayed at the milliner’s for a week, and be canvassed by all the female envious, and the country cousins, and the customers. The very mantua-maker and milliner are puzzled how to carve up so much money into shreds and tatters; and the husband receives a bundle of rags with an expectant wife, sending the former to Monmouth-street, and perhaps wishing the latter there too. The five hundred pounds would have stocked his cellar with wines, or bought his darling a carriage. He would have said if he had dared, “So come in your coatie sweet Tibby Dunbar.”

But this is the fashion also. The darling sex measures all beauty by fashion, but it has forgotten to ask what is the fashion, and who makes the fashion. If they made it themselves, it might be something. To be sure, if each fair made her own fashion, there would be no such thing, and the square and the round, the slim and the squat, the septuagenarian and “sweet seventeen,” “crabbed age and youth,” would not all be thrust into the same sacques, and shoes, and slips, and caps, and bonnets. Hence they must elect a dictator, we suppose; and the dictator is the milliner, the mantua-maker. A whole nation, bright with youth, and radiant with beauty, bent on conquest and death, submits to the government and legislation of a hairdresser’s wife living in the Rue Vivienne, in a foreign country, or to Mrs. Bell, at home, whose monthly displays of taste and grace become the unalterable laws of beauty, not to be altered, till the next month.

The human form is certainly nothing, as we began by proving; and, therefore, as all nothings are equal to nothing, and to themselves, it is indifferent that old, fat, lumbering, frowsy, nothings, and youthful, blooming, slender, delicious ones, should be equalised in their adonisations. But there are or may be varieties in suits of clothes; and as variety is itself a charm, it might add to our amusement if all these nothings were converted into many somethings instead of into one. And certainly were we to choose the dictator, it should not be the mantua- maker and the milliner, any more than we would allow the Quarterly Review to dictate to us what we were to read.

Seriously, will ladies never reflect that all ages, all forms, all rank, all beauty, are not the same, and that it is at least part of the essence of dress that it should be appropriate? The same fashion cannot suit all And will they never reflect who it is that sets this fashion, which they all pursue as if their salvation depended on it. Some dropsical or bandylegged old dame finds it convenient to conceal her ancles, and immediately it becomes a matter of grace and beauty to hide, even the point of the foot, and petticoats trail to sweep the streets. When grey hairs wished to conceal themselves, a whole nation of sun-bright and auburn and jetty ringlets, ringlets where each hair was a chain to draw all hearts, chose to fill their heads with grease and flour; and high heels, pads, cushions heie, there, behind, before, hoops, trains, tuckers, all have been, in rotation, adopted by those who had an interest in producing one deformity to conceal another; while, more successful than the fox in the fable, they have spread the epidemy through the sex, causing whole generations immediately to cut off their tails also. Or the mantua-maker finds it convenient to sell off her old rags, her cuttings and cabbage, at high prices, and immediately the whole sex is seen fluttering in trimmings and deformity, a “thing of shreds and patches.”

It is a gullible sex, that is certain. And yet it is provoking that all this should be considered beauty, and beauty, too, when it is so often deformity. If there is such a thing as a handsome scapula, it would at least be prudent to inquire, at the looking-glass, whether all the cervical region, in all, is fair, lest the snow should be less pure than snow ought to be. She who conceals a graceful ancle and a slender foot, to display a bony clavicle, or a pair of hatchet-formed omoplates, is not so wise as the nation of foxes.

It is an ungallant conclusion, but, we fear, a true one, that the principles of taste are not diffused among the lovely sex, or not known to them. We have no objection to variations, since variation is novelty and a charm; but we shall never learn to approve of variation from beauty to deformity. If they have no taste, why will they not put themselves under the guidance of art, of the art of painting, not mantua-making? Sir Thomas Lawrence is the dictator to be chosen, not Madame Triaud. Accident, or taste, sometimes, and chiefly originating in France, that region of taste in petty luxury, has often conferred on the fair all the beauty which dress can give. We have lived to see them elegant, graceful, and attractive in their adornments, so that painters have transmitted them to posterity with the assurance of commanding admiration for ever. There are principles of beauty and grace, whatever the sex or the milliners may think; but they do not know them; and thus, not content with having once discovered the right, they proceed to wrong, quitting beauty to follow deformity.

And it is the want of taste, rather than a corrupted one, which makes the latest fashion always appear the most beautiful. Where there are principles of taste, no fashion can ever make that beautiful which wars against them: it will be hideous in spite of its prevalence, though it may cease, from habit, to appear so hideous. The haystack head, the pinched and armoured waist, hoops, and powder, and high-heeled shoes, have appeared beautiful in their days, but never to those who had studied the principles of beauty or of art. If, in their days of luxury and corruption, the Roman ladies rendered their head-dresses absurd by wanton variety, those of the Greeks and their dresses, generally, have descended to us models of right, to which posterity has continued to award admiration. There is much also to admire and to follow, even in the more complicated inventions of British history, and there is no want of choice throughout the Continent, of present, as well as of past Europe.

We do not say that the female dress needs be confined to a Greek stole, or to any other given form, since variations and variety are necessary. But there are forms from which the sex can depart, without quitting them, through a range as wide as the most wanton caprices can requite. And amid the endless varieties of colour, substance, ornament, there is the power of producing and reproducing change without end, and yet without surrendering grace and beauty, and what is not less momentous, the appropriate.

If the sex knew its own interests, it would choose other leaders of fashions than those who have an interest different from theirs. And if it would agree to exterminate the very term fashion, to seek no longer to rank itself under an imaginary leader, to trust to itself, and to study for itself, it would not be long in discovering that it had, not only enhanced its charms, but saved its finances. But to give the necessary taste, it must cultivate that quality. It must inquire into what is graceful and fit, into the principles of beauty, and the laws of taste. Instead of “taking lessons,” from Mr. Burgess, or spending seven years in making a pair of card racks, it must learn, in reality, what it pretends to do — to draw. From the philosophy and the art of colouring, it will be taught to distribute its colours; and, from the study of the antique and of the human form, as from the study of pictures in general, it will discover where the lines of grace and beauty lie, how they may be created, or improved, or injured. It will not then destroy the beauty of its shining ringlets to frizzle them into dirty sausages, or bare the most ill-formed parts of its body to conceal the more graceful and captivating. It will discharge its whole regiments of pads, and cushions, and flounces, and Gigot sleeves, and all the other trumpery by which it contrives to mar the most beautiful work of nature’s hand. We shall then see woman — dear woman! what she ought to be; the grace alike of nature and of art.

One word yet on the hair, before we part; that jewel in woman, of which she seems so little to know the value, if we may judge by the pains which she takes to mar it. It is chiefly by its contrast of colour that it is the ornament of the face, but partly also by that contrast which its roughness offers to the polished smoothness of the brow and the cheek. To maintain these leading principles is essential. But there is more in the disposition than either women or their advisers are aware of; and its principles lie somewhat deeper than they imagine.

By a singularity proving the great attention of ancient Greece to the human form, its artists adopted those outlines for the head, the principles of which, modern phrenology, much as it has been ridiculed, has explained and justified. But it has not been noticed that the same principles were applied to the arrangement of the hair; and yet, if this be studied in Greek art, it will be seen that every outline produced by that arrangement has a reference to the essential form of the head; of the scull itself. And the most simple experiments in drawing will prove that whenever the hair is so arranged that its outline, or protuberance, coincides with that outline which would be estimable in the unadorned head, the effect is beautiful; and that when the reverse takes place, the result is deformity. To apply phrenology to hair-dressing, may appear fantastical and ludicrous; and yet we will trust our demonstration to the trials of any one who chooses to make them. There is nothing so easy as to make the experiments; but as we have not here the means of illustrating our theory by such drawings, we must leave them to the taste and knowledge of those who have the command of their pencils and an acquaintance with the human form.

Quoted from: The London Magazine and Review. August 1, 1825. Vol. II.

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