oman herself does not escape scot free. It is obvious that the
woman chiefly occupied with thoughts of dress develops a peculiar kind
of frivolity, that she becomes unfit to think of art, the public
interest, perhaps of love. She is the worst social product, a parasite,
and she is not even always beautiful. Sometimes she is insane: the
investigations of Doctor Bernard Holz and of Doctor Rudolf Foerster
connect the mania for fashion with paranoia, and have elicited
extraordinary facts, such as the collection of clothes by insane women,
and such as cases of pyromania which coincided with a craze for dress.

It is, indeed, quite possible that some women might go mad if they
permanently felt themselves less well-dressed than their fellows; and
that is the crux of the fashion idea. Woman does not desire to be
beautifully dressed: she desires to be more beautifully dressed than her
fellows. She wishes to insult and humiliate her sisters, and, as modern
clothes are costly, she does not hesitate to give full play to human
cruelty, to use all the resources of the rich husband on whom she preys
to satisfy her pride and to apply her arrogant ingenuity to the torture
of her sisters. And I said, "She wants to be more beautiful." Is that
quite right? Partly, though what woman mainly seeks is not to be
beautiful but to be fashionable; the words have become synonymous. Yet
the fashions are not always beautiful; sometimes they are hideous, break
every line of the body, make it awkward, hamper its movements. If women
truly wanted to be beautiful they would not follow the fashions: our
little dark, sloe-eyed women would dress rather like the Japanese, and
our big, ox-eyed beauties would appear as Greeks; but no, Juno, Carmen,
and Dante's Beatrice, all together and all in turn, don first the
crinoline and then the hobble skirt.

Nor do they want to attract men. They think they do but they do not, for
they know perfectly well that few men realize what they wear, that all
they observe is "something blue" or an effect they call "very doggy";
they know also that men do not wed the dangerous smart, but the modest;
that men fear the implication that smart women are unvirtuous, and that
they certainly fear their dressmakers' bills. Nor is it even true that
women want many new clothes so as to be clean: if that were true, men in
their well-worn suits could not be touched with a pitchfork. The truth
is that changes in fashion are a habit and a hyst