Here I leave the 'Girl Graduate,' with much regret, for Mr. Wentworth
Huyshe. Mr. Huyshe makes the old criticism that Greek dress is unsuited
to our climate, and, to me the somewhat new assertion, that the men's
dress of a hundred years ago was preferable to that of the second part of
the seventeenth century, which I consider to have been the exquisite
period of English costume.
Now, as regards the first of these two statements, I will say, to begin
with, that the warmth of apparel does not depend really on the number of
garments worn, but on the material of which they are made. One of the
chief faults of modern dress is that it is composed of far too many
articles of clothing, most of which are of the wrong substance; but over
a substratum of pure wool, such as is supplied by Dr. Jaeger under the
modern German system, some modification of Greek costume is perfectly
applicable to our climate, our country and our century. This important
fact has already been pointed out by Mr. E. W. Godwin in his excellent,
though too brief, handbook on Dress, contributed to the Health
Exhibition. I call it an important fact because it makes almost any form
of lovely costume perfectly practicable in our cold climate. Mr. Godwin,
it is true, points out that the English ladies of the thirteenth century
abandoned after some time the flowing garments of the early Renaissance
in favour of a tighter mode, such as Northern Europe seems to demand.
This I quite admit, and its significance; but what I contend, and what I
am sure Mr. Godwin would agree with me in, is that the principles, the
laws of Greek dress may be perfectly realised, even in a moderately tight
gown with sleeves: I mean the principle of suspending all apparel from
the shoulders, and of relying for beauty of effect not on the stiff ready-
made ornaments of the modern milliner--the bows where there should be no
bows, and the flounces where there should be no flounces--but on the
exquisite play of light and line that one gets from rich and rippling
folds. I am not proposing any antiquarian revival of an ancient costume,
but trying merely to point out the right laws of dress, laws which are
dictated by art and not by archaeology, by science and not by fashion;
and just as the best work of art in our days is that which combines
classic grace with absolute reality, so from a continuation of the Greek
principles of beauty with the German principles of health will come, I
feel certain, the costume of the future.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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