These relatively stable costumes are, commonly, pretty strictly
and narrowly localized, and they vary by slight and systematic
gradations from place to place. They have in every case been
worked out by peoples or classes which are poorer than we, and
especially they belong in countries and localities and times
where the population, or at least the class to which the costume
in question belongs, is relatively homogeneous, stable, and
immobile. That is to say, stable costumes which will bear the
test of time and perspective are worked out under circumstances
where the norm of conspicuous waste asserts itself less
imperatively than it does in the large modern civilized cities,
whose relatively mobile wealthy population today sets the pace in
matters of fashion. The countries and classes which have in this
way worked out stable and artistic costumes have been so placed
that the pecuniary emulation among them has taken the direction
of a competition in conspicuous leisure rather than in
conspicuous consumption of goods. So that it will hold true in a
general way that fashions are least stable and least becoming in
those communities where the principle of a conspicuous waste of
goods asserts itself most imperatively, as among ourselves.
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