When we women first entered factories and workshops in numbers, we met unfair conditions on every side. This was particularly true of the garment trades, which were among the first to employ a great many women. And when we met this unfair treatment, women dreamed of legislating virtue into manufacturers. But it can’t be done! And now it is dawning upon the consciousness of a number of women that the way to reform clothing manufacturers, textile manufacturers, etc., the way to cut down insane speeding, overwork, underpay, is to change our insane conception of clothing—to strive to make it a normal, useful thing, instead of a hampering, exotic, extravagant thing, which works one group of women to death at a miserable wage, because a far smaller group of parasitic women wish to be arrayed like peacocks! Knowing this to be true, one naturally turns to the fundamental question, and asks—what _is_ dress—what is fashion? And what, indeed, is dress? Is it simply a means of protection from cold? A concession to so-called modesty, a means of displaying wealth, and advertising leisure? Of attracting the opposite sex? It has been all of these in the past, and many of the same factors are still apparent in our present-day use of garments: but a new interpretation of the word has come in with our new industrial conditions. Dress is an enormous economic factor the world over, and nowhere more so than in America, where it is an over-exploited industry, whose markets have been stretched abnormally, not only by the increasing production of inferior articles, but by a psychological factor, far more potent even than the law of normal supply and demand; and that factor is Fashion: a purely hypothetical need of change in order to meet a purely hypothetical standard, which is entirely ephemeral and continually altered, artificially. Year after year, we are made to put the money we begrudge, that we can ill afford, money we would honestly rather put into other things; money, often, _that we have not got_, into that particular twist to skirt or coat or hat which will keep us as ridiculous-looking as our neighbor, while, at the same time, safe from his ridicule; in other words, to save ourselves the discomforts of being out of style. And yet, detesting fashion, as I think the majority of us do in our most secret hearts, we are often hypnotized by it to such an extent that free action is prevented.