THE subject is old and threadbare; and yet it would seem that every thoughtful Christian, and especially thoughtful Christian women, ought to raise voice against the manifestations of the thralldom of fashion at the present time. It is not the object of this writing to present a long essay upon the subject, but simply to gather together a few of the utterances which have been given by others.
First of all, the slavery of fashion leads to extravagance, to the constant demand for every change and whim of the fickle dame, and it is because of this that girls are tempted to secure money in immoral ways in order to keep abreast with the tide. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst declares that passion for luxury has been one of the causes assigned for the sinking of the Titanic, that extravagance “is both a form of lunacy and a form of immorality,—lunacy because there is no sense in it, immorality because it is a contemptuous waste of values.”
But the worst thing about fashion is not the matter of its mere extravagance; it is its immodesty, and it is not too strong to use the term “indecency.”
Margaret E. Sangster, Jr., conducts a department in the Christian Herald, and she speaks of the floods of letters which have come in to her regarding it. For instance, the matron of a home devoted to rescue of girls gives this advice:
“A girl’s clothing should be modest and simple, yet so neat and becoming that she can go on the street or in public places without attracting attention. Regardless of the demands of fashion, it would be well for us to bring up our standard of dress.”
A lady of the old South sends this message to the girls:
“A young man of high ideals said to me: ‘The women of the day are not due the courtesy and chivalric spirit as they once were. By their mode of dress they prove their own degeneracy.’”
Another woman thus writes:
“My husband, who is a street-car conductor, recently remarked, ‘I wonder if women talk about men the way men do about them.’”
And then she says:
“I am sure there is food for thought in that remark. Why shouldn’t men talk? Do you believe that the styles of to-day were created for women only? How many would slit their skirts quite so much just to let women see the color of their underskirt? Would they care whether women saw their new lace stockings?—Certainly not. It is for the men that these styles are created,—created by those who care only for men’s admiring glances.”
This sentiment is expressed by a New Jersey girl:
“I am counted as a well-dressed and fashionable girl, but however peculiar I may be called, no one shall ever see me dressed in the manner which is so appalling to all Christian humanity.”
Another woman, who places herself in the grandmother class, says:
“Since I can remember, fashions have come and gone, and it seems that about every possible change has been made; but for immodest dress surely the present-day styles exceed anything I can ever call to mind. I remember the low neck and short sleeves of the late fifties, but they were not to be compared with the present styles.”
England’s noble queen is endeavoring to correct this. The report is that she has recently refused to permit one of the highest noble ladies in the realm to appear at a royal wedding with a collar lower than one inch from the neck.
Classed with this immodest dressing are the indecent dances. A writer in the New York Musical Observer thus presents a picture:
“Is it not pitiful to look upon a little girl perhaps seven or eight years old, snapping her fingers, swaying from side to side, and lustily singing as if her very heart were in every note, ‘Ev’rybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it?’ She hears her big sister sing it; her big sister hears it at a ‘show,’ and her beau buys it for her. Glance at the sheet music displayed on the piano in the ‘front parlor’ of nearly every home in the country. Do you see any songs like ‘Annie Laurie,’ ‘Ben Bolt,’ or ‘The Last Rose of Summer’?—No; you see ‘The Devil’s Ball,’ ‘The Dippy Rag,’ ‘The Baboon Baby Dance,’ and ‘The Tango Twist,’ each one with a title-page picturing contortioned dancers partly clothed, and the printed words ‘The reigning success of the day.’ And the worst of it all is that these songs appeal not only to the low- and vicious-minded, but the great majority of our church-going, pious-minded people pay out their money to attend theaters in order to hear and applaud them.”
A writer in the Wesleyan Methodist, of Syracuse, says:
“If girls had a faint idea of the disgusting sight they presented, or could hear some of the unmanly, dissolute remarks made about them as they pass along the streets clad in transparent waists, or one of those short, outlandish, tight-gripping, hobble skirts, they would feel so ashamed that if they had a spark of virtue left in them they would go to their rooms or get out of sight somewhere till they had a sensible dress to put on. How can they expect people to distinguish them from the low and corrupt if they dress exactly like them?”
The same writer quotes a Catholic priest of New York City as saying that “never in history were the modes so abhorrently indecent as they are to-day. One may make the closest study of costumes through the prints and drawings and sculptures of five thousand years, and find nothing to equal the shameless styles worn unabashed in the crowded streets and summer resorts by hundreds of thousands of apparently respectable girls.”
The Kansas City Catholic Register says regarding the mode of to-day, “There is no artistic excuse for some of the costumes to be seen in public places,” and classifies certain garments as “designed to compel instant attention to their indecency.”
The New York Times, in a comment on a despatch from its Paris correspondent that woman’s dress models this summer are “the most audacious since the Directoire,” says:
“The Directoire audacity is understandable. France had been having a debauch in the name of freedom, religion had been insulted, anarchy had just been quelled; and in the slow process of restoration of law and order, old conventions had been nearly obliterated, morals were at a low ebb, and the social condition was exactly expressed in the dress of the women. But that social condition surely does not exist now. Therefore fashions, to express the new sense of the alarming development of evil and the need of suppressing it, should become more formal and modest, not take on the aspect of the bacchanalia. There is no accounting for the extravagance of the prevailing Parisian mode.”
But is this true? If the dress at that time exactly expressed the condition of social life and the morals of the day, may it not be said that such is the case now?
Dr. Edwin H. Lewis, in American Medicine, declares that “immodest dress is responsible for many a young girl’s ruin and downfall,” and proclaims it a fact that “every medical man of large practise and experience knows only too well the fires kindled by the present dress of young females.”
The Christian Work and Evangelist, referring to modern dances, tells us that the immorality in these dances is resented by professing Christians, but declares that the facts are against them, and says:
“What means all of the stir of to-day over the cabaret shows and afternoon dances, with their ‘tango’ and ‘turkey trots’ and ‘grizzly bears,’ and all the rest, too shameful to print? Police, church, and school authorities everywhere are stirred to conference and to action over the demoralization that is plainly evident through the incoming of these indecent dances which are sweeping over the country like an epidemic. Things must be bad, indeed, when public officials, never accused of being overscrupulous, are aroused and issue decrees against these forms of the dance.”
The Baptist Examiner, of New York, says that “the whole tendency of these outrageous performances is toward the indecent, the immoral, the putrid.”
This perhaps is sufficient, altho we might fill columns regarding the low, debasing tendencies of modern social functions. It would seem as tho Christian women, women who were not Christian, but were virtuous, would rise up en masse and protest against them, and, let fashion dictate what she would, would set their faces against fashion, and originate their own, which would at least be modest, and which could not be more ungraceful or deforming and ridiculous than the outrageous styles which fashion has been dictating for some time past.
