Having so explained the phenomenon of shifting fashions, the next
thing is to make the explanation tally with everyday facts. Among these
everyday facts is the well-known liking which all men have for the
styles that are in vogue at any given time. A new style comes into vogue
and remains in favor for a season, and, at least so long as it is
a novelty, people very generally find the new style attractive. The
prevailing fashion is felt to be beautiful. This is due partly to the
relief it affords in being different from what went before it, partly
to its being reputable. As indicated in the last chapter, the canon
of reputability to some extent shapes our tastes, so that under its
guidance anything will be accepted as becoming until its novelty wears
off, or until the warrant of reputability is transferred to a new and
novel structure serving the same general purpose. That the alleged
beauty, or "loveliness," of the styles in vogue at any given time is
transient and spurious only is attested by the fact that none of the
many shifting fashions will bear the test of time. When seen in the
perspective of half-a-dozen years or more, the best of our fashions
strike us as grotesque, if not unsightly. Our transient attachment to
whatever happens to be the latest rests on other than aesthetic grounds,
and lasts only until our abiding aesthetic sense has had time to assert
itself and reject this latest indigestible contrivance.
The process of developing an aesthetic nausea takes more or less time;
the length of time required in any given case being inversely as the
degree of intrinsic odiousness of the style in question. This time
relation between odiousness and instability in fashions affords ground
for the inference that the more rapidly the styles succeed and
displace one another, the more offensive they are to sound taste. The
presumption, therefore, is that the farther the community, especially
the wealthy classes of the community, develop in wealth and mobility and
in the range of their human contact, the more imperatively will the law
of conspicuous waste assert itself in matters of dress, the more will
the sense of beauty tend to fall into abeyance or be overborne by the
canon of pecuniary reputability, the more rapidly will fashions shift
and change, and the more grotesque and intolerable will be the varying
styles that successively come into vogue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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