Fashion | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 6, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 30.

Fashion.

AND now let us see what fashion does. We find an answer, which is here inserted. “Fashion rules the world,” and a most tyrannical mistress she is, compelling people to submit to the most inconvenient things imaginable, for fashion’s sake. She pinches our feet with tight boots, or chokes us with a tight neckerchief, or squeezes the breath out of our body by tight lacing. She makes it vulgar to wait on ourselves, and genteel enough to live idly and uselessly. She makes people visit when they would rather stay at home; eat when they are not hungry, and drink when they are not thirsty.

She invades our pleasure and interrupts our business. She compels people to dress gaily, whether upon their own property—or that of others, whether agreeable to the word of God or the dictates of pride. She makes people sit up when they should be in bed, and keeps them in bed in the morning when they ought to be up and doing. She ruins health and produces sickness, destroys life and occasions death. She makes foolish parents, invalids of children, and servants of all. She is a tormentor of conscience, a despoiler of morality, and an enemy of religion; and no one can be her companion and enjoy either.

Custom, like fashion, is the plague of wise men and the idol of fools. Fashion is an enemy to health, a foe to wealth, and the canker-worm of honor. It brings down men from high places which they secured by humility and economy. It strips one of the bloom of health obtained before the foolish customs of fashionable society were known or observed. It stops accumulation and dissipates the gatherings of former years.—Sel.