All
this points to an antagonism between expensiveness and artistic
apparel. In point of practical fact, the norm of conspicuous
waste is incompatible with the requirement that dress should be
beautiful or becoming. And this antagonism offers an explanation
of that restless change in fashion which neither the canon of
expensiveness nor that of beauty alone can account for.
The standard of reputability requires that dress should show
wasteful expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native
taste. The psychological law has already been pointed out that
all men -- and women perhaps even in a higher degree abhor
futility, whether of effort or of expenditure -- much as Nature
was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the principle of conspicuous
waste requires an obviously futile expenditure; and the resulting
conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore intrinsically
ugly. Hence we find that in all innovations in dress, each added
or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by showing some
ostensible purpose, at the same time that the requirement of
conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these
innovations from becoming anything more than a somewhat
transparent pretense.
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