It may not be amiss to remember the fact, flatly expressed by Carlyle, that “the first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration, as, indeed, we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.” In women, dress is this “spiritual want” touched by artistic sentiment, I had almost said religion; and whatever we may say of the essential barbarism of the sentiment, it seems quite likely to prove one of those barbarisms that are fundamental and permanent. If we might remember that it is fundamental much of modern discussion would be simplified. I find Mr. Finck giving the following elements as explaining the Fashion Fetish: the vulgar display of wealth, milliners’ cunning, the tyranny of the ugly majority, cowardice and sheepishness. These are all good explanations, but the list seems sadly deficient without an allusion to this instinctive and ineradicable desire for decoration. Mr. Theodore Child seems to have in mind the instinctive and final phase of the situation when he bids us “enjoy in imagination what the meanness of the age refuses to the desire of the eyes.” Woman herself seems to have adopted the view of Epictetus that “we ought not, even by the aspect of the body to scare away the multitude from philosophy.” Socrates meant the same thing when he said to one of his too-ragged followers, “I see thy vanity shining through the holes in thy coat.” Clothes, then, are not merely to warm or to conceal, but also to decorate. Wherein they warm or conceal, they are a science. Wherein they decorate, they are an art. The science is exact; the art is rich in variety and change, making every other art its handmaiden, every season its holiday, every sentiment its theme. It is an art redolent of the years, tingling with the daring of youth. Above all, it is an art in which woman chooses to express herself in a language free from the inhibitions placed upon other arts, in which, ignoring when she chooses, the primary excuses and incentives, she takes an art-for-art’s-sake justification for showing us the separate and independent fascination, in themselves, of sublimated clothes. No one who cannot perceive the inherent interest, if not the inherent justification, of clothes as clothes, ever can see deeply into the philosophy of dress, or ever can see deeply into the philosophy of women. [Illustration] [Illustration]