because it is bad
form. If, therefore, a permanent clothing scheme were established by
strong patrons, if it were agreeable to the eye, which is easy to
arrange, I believe that fashions could be fixed because it would be
known that a woman who went beyond the uniform must either be
disreputable or suffer from bad taste.

6

I shall be told that I am warring against art. That is not true: some
fashions are beautiful, some are hideous. Who would to-day wear the
crinoline? Who would wear the gigot sleeve? They are ugly--but, stay!
Are they? Will they not be worn in an adapted form some time within the
next generation? They will, because fashions are not works of art; they
are only fashions. Women do not adapt the fashions to themselves, they
adapt themselves to the fashions, and it is a current joke that even
woman's anatomy is adjusted to suit the clothes of the day.

Doubtless I shall be challenged on this, and told that woman's
individuality expresses itself in her clothes. That again is not true;
the girl with a face like a Madonna will wear a ballet skirt if it comes
in, and if she has to "adapt" the ballet skirt to the Madonna idea I
should like to know how it is going to be done. Indeed the one thing
woman avoids doing is expressing her individuality; she wants what Oscar
Wilde called "the holy calm of feeling perfectly dressed", that is, like
everybody else, and a little more expensively.

It may be retorted, however, that uniform is not cheap. That again is
untrue. When a uniform is standardized, turned out in quantities and
never varied, it can be made very cheaply. Men's clothing, which is not
fully standardized, is such that no man need spend more than $250 a
year. That is the condition I want for women. Of course it will make
unemployed, and our sympathy will be invoked for dressmakers thrown out
of work: that is the old argument against railways on behalf of coaches,
against the mule-jenny, against every engine of human progress, and it
is sheer barbarism. Labor redistributes itself; money wasted on women's
clothes will be used in other trades which will reabsorb the labor and
make it useful instead of sterile.

An apparently more powerful argument is that uniform would deprive women
of their individuality: it cannot be much of an individuality that
depends upon a frock, and I am reduced to wonder whether some women lose
their personality once their frock is taken off. Still, there is a
little force