Fashion

Why is it that the introduction of a truely refined fashion is mostly met with ridicule and resistance, while atrocious styles are
adopted with grave acquiescence and reverent submission?
When a family comes to us, from England or France
or any alien country, we acknowledge the hideous brotherhood, and
offer our welcoming hands; but Graceful must stay with us a long time to be greeted kindly, and her sisters from foreign parts are coldly looked upon, or dismissed at once.
To start at the top,--"the very head and front of the offending." A lady goes into a fashionable designer store, and the stores man, holding up for admiration a skirt says, "This is the most up-to-date fashion, Madam." The lady returns home with the repulsive skirt wrapped around her, but no one stares or laughs. 'Tis a new style, but all "take it easy." One year later, perhaps, the designer shows the lady a skirt with a band much wider, but rolled up at the sides, and a waist of a much greater diameter,--a specimen of the bell-skirt. This is solemnly donned, and the wearer has the pleasure of knowing that the skirt of all her admirers is as hideous as her own. The skirt is worn with a sweet smile. And so "Deformed" has ruled the lady for as
many years as any of us can number, only ringing the changes, from one year to another, upon the three degrees of comparison of the word ugly.
But a change occurs place; a casual, graceful, silk wrap skirt, with a waist size free enough for freedom or for comfort, begins to emerge as a fashion;--and how is it received? The house wife thinks it would be very unusual for her to wear the multiwear wrap skirt, though it may be simple, and is as modest, as the rest of her clothing. The young lady doctor timidly tries
it on, and in her first walk meets the rich friend, her favorite patient, and the one who is trying to introduce her to
practice, who seriously advises her, as a friend, not to wear that reversible wrap skirt, if the poor skirt had only been ugly, there would have been nothing bad in its new-style, quality,--as all her
respectable patients will leave her if she dresses so like a fool. The young lawyer gets one wrap skirt, because she heard an old lady speak of "those impudent-looking skirts," and she is in hopes that impudence, which she understands is all-important in her profession, and which she is
conscious of not possessing, may come with the skirt. A lady goes out with her daughter, who is just old enough to have gained a coat, and is looking for a skirt. The mother has taste and judgment, and the youth has yet some unperverted affinity with graceful forms left, and so they choose and buy one of these comfortable and elegant wrap skirts. Just before they reach home, they meet one of their best friends, a person whom the woman regards most kindly, and the young woman appreciates and respects, and she greets her with, "Why, Suzan! have you got one of those rowdy skirts?" And so the stiff, stove-pipe monstrosity keeps its place, and the only pleasant, sensible, graceful, becoming skirt that the nineteenth century has known, is called all sorts of bad names, and quiet women are afraid to wear it.
Has it not been the fate of the shawl, too, the most simple and elegant wrapper, and comfortable withal, that a lady

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Misha Ghosh www.mishcollection.com

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