Fashion

An 1887 book titled "The Golden Way" written by Rev. J. H Potts writes "One half the world worships at the shrine of fashion. All the preachers, doctors, lawyers, statesmen, and editors in Christendom cannot change the habit of the devotees. Nothing can crush out a new fashion, when once under way, except a fashion newer still. Like a contagious disease every fashion runs its course." "So one of the first inducements to fashion is the desire to be like somebody else. If we are odd we shall be despised; folks will laugh. If we are fashionable we shall be admired, perhaps envied. Folks will say 'How splendid so and so was dressed!' Everybody wears it so, is the chief reason why everybody wears it so. Dress like the rest - this is Fashion's plea, or command, rather, for if no one did as 'the rest' do, where would be the fashion? To a certain extent like things have a sympathy for each other. We desire the sympathy, or like feeling, of others. Dress furnishes a common body of unity; so we dress like everybody to get everybody's opinion. Sometimes this repels. As, for instance, one in a certain position in society, who prides herself on her good taste, dislikes to see another with poor taste dressed like herself. So strong is this feeling that it spoils the pleasure of wearing a fine, new article of apparel to see our lowly neighbor wearing a similar one. But how it heightens the pleasure if our rich and fashionable neighbor wears the same! This is pride. So, when the haughty rich ones see common people adopting their styles of dress, they scorn to keep that fashion any longer, and find something different, which in its turn goes the way of the other. And so the giddy chase goes on; the rich ever trying to keep beyond the poor, and the poor ever striving to come up to the rich. This, together with the love of novelty, keeps the fashion continually changing."

"As fashion pipes so the world dances. When she gets through her list of tunes she plays them over again, with such variations as seem agreeable to her fancy. So the course of fashion goes round - a sort of lunar cycle too eccentric to be calculated correctly. Why should a fashion which was pronounced charming ten years ago be declared ridiculous today? Are not the laws of beauty as unchangeable as truth? This instability and restlessness shows an exceeding vagueness and childishness in our ideas of beauty and of the fitness of things."