Chapter 7: Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture
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It will in
place, by way of illustration, to show in some detail how the
economic principles so far set forth apply to everyday facts in some
one direction of the life process. For this purpose no line of
consumption affords a more apt illustration than expenditure on
dress. It is especially the rule of the conspicuous waste of goods
that finds expression in dress, although the other, related
principles of pecuniary repute are also exemplified in the same
contrivances. Other methods of putting one's pecuniary standing in
evidence serve their end effectually, and other methods are in vogue
always and everywhere; but expenditure on dress has this advantage
over most other methods, that our apparel is always in evidence and
affords an indication of our pecuniary standing to all observers at
the first glance. It is also true that admitted expenditure for
display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps, more universally
practiced in the matter of dress than in any other line of
consumption. No one finds difficulty in assenting to the commonplace
that the greater part of the expenditure incurred by all classes for
apparel is incurred for the sake of a respectable appearance rather
than for the protection of the person. And probably at no other
point is the sense of shabbiness so keenly felt as it is if we fall
short of the standard set by social usage in this matter of dress.
It is true of dress in even a higher degree than of most other items
of consumption, that people will undergo a very considerable degree
of privation in the comforts or the neCessaries of life in order to
afford what is considered a decent amount of wasteful consumption;
so that it is by no means an uncommon occurrence, in an inclement
climate, for people to go ill clad in order to appear well dressed.
And the commercial value of the goods used for clotting in any
modern community is made up to a much larger extent of the
fashionableness, the reputability of the goods than of the
mechanical service which they render in clothing the person of the
wearer. The need of dress is eminently a "higher" or spiritual need.
This spiritual need of dress is not wholly, nor even chiefly, a
naive propensity for display of expenditure. The law of conspicuous
waste guides consumption in apparel, as in other things, chiefly at
the second remove, by shaping the canons of taste and decency. In
the common run of cases the conscious motive of the wearer or
purchaser of conspicuously wasteful apparel is the need of
conforming to established usage, and of living up to the accredited
standard of taste and reputability. It is not only that one must be
guided by the code of proprieties in dress in order to avoid the
mortification that comes of unfavorable notice and comment, though
that motive in itself counts for a great deal; but besides that, the
requirement of expensiveness is so ingrained into our habits of
thought in matters of dress that any other than expensive apparel is
instinctively odious to us. Without reflection or analysis, we feel
that what is inexpensive is unworthy. "A cheap coat makes a cheap
man." "Cheap and nasty" is recognized to hold true in dress with
even less mitigation than in other lines of consumption. On the
ground both of taste and of serviceability, an inexpensive article
of apparel is held to be inferior, under the maxim "cheap and
nasty." We find things beautiful, as well as serviceable, somewhat
in proportion as they are costly. With few and inconsequential
exceptions, we all find a costly hand-wrought article of apparel
much preferable, in point of beauty and of serviceability, to a less
expensive imitation of it, however cleverly the spurious article may
imitate the costly original; and what offends our sensibilities in
the spurious article is not that it falls short in form or color,
or, indeed, in visual effect in any way. The offensive object may be
so close an imitation aS to defy any but the closest scrutiny; and
yet so soon as the counterfeit is detected, its aesthetic value, and
its commercial value as well, declines precipitately. Not only that,
but it may be asserted with but small risk of contradiction that the
aesthetic value of a detected counterfeit in dress declines somewhat
in the same proportion as the counterfeit is cheaper than its
original. It loses caste aesthetically because it falls to a lower
pecuniary grade.
But the function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does not
end with simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable goods in
excess of what is required for physical comfort. Simple conspicuous
waste of goods is effective and gratifying as far as it goes; it is
good prima facie evidence of pecuniary success, and consequently
prima facie evidence of social worth. But dress has subtler and more
far-reaching possibilities than this crude, first-hand evidence of
wasteful consumption only. If, in addition to showing that the
wearer can afford to consume freely and uneconomically, it can also
be shown in the same stroke that he or she is not under the
necessity of earning a livelihood, the evidence of social worth is
enhanced in a very considerable degree. Our dress, therefore, in
order to serve its purpose effectually, should not only he
expensive, but it should also make plain to all observers that the
wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor. In the
evolutionary process by which our system of dress has been
elaborated into its present admirably perfect adaptation to its
purpose, this subsidiary line of evidence has received due
attention. A detailed examination of what passes in popular
apprehension for elegant apparel will show that it is contrived at
every point to convey the impression that the wearer does not
habitually put forth any useful effort. It goes without saying that
no apparel can be considered elegant, or even decent, if it shows
the effect of manual labor on the part of the wearer, in the way of
soil or wear. The pleasing effect of neat and spotless garments is
chiefly, if not altogether, due to their carrying the suggestion of
leisure-exemption from personal contact with industrial processes of
any kind. Much of the charm that invests the patent-leather shoe,
the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the
walking-stick, which so greatly enhance the native dignity of a
gentleman, comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer
cannot when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is
directly and immediately of any human use. Elegant dress serves its
purpose of elegance not only in that it is expensive, but also
because it is the insignia of leisure. It not only shows that the
wearer is able to consume a relativeLy large value, but it argues at
the same time that he consumes without producing.
The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of
demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive employment. It
needs no argument to enforce the generalization that the more
elegant styLes of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making
work impossible than does the man's high hat. The woman's shoe adds
the so-called French heel to the evidence of enforced leisure
afforded by its polish; because this high heel obviously makes any,
even the simplest and most necessary manual work extremely
difficult. The like is true even in a higher degree of the skirt and
the rest of the drapery which characterizes woman's dress. The
substantial reason for our tenacious attachment to the skirt is just
this; it is expensive and it hampers the wearer at every turn and
incapacitates her for alL useful exertion. The like is true of the
feminine custom of wearing the hair excessively long.
But the woman's apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern man
in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it also adds
a peculiar and highly characteristic feature which differs in kind
from anything habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the
class of contrivances of which the corset is the typical example.
The corset is, in economic theory, substantially a mutilation,
undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and
rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work. It is true,
the corset impairs the personal attractions of the wearer, but the
loss suffered on that score is offset by the gain in reputability
which comes of her visibly increased expensiveness and infirmity. It
may broadly be set down that the womanliness of woman's apparel
resolves itself, in point of substantial fact, into the more
effective hindrance to useful exertion offered by the garments
peculiar to women. This difference between masculine and feminine
apparel is here simply pointed out as a characteristic feature. The
ground of its occurrence will be discussed presently.
So far, then, we have, as the great and dominant norm of dress, the
broad principle of conspicuous waste. Subsidiary to this principle,
and as a corollary under it, we get as a second norm the principle
of conspicuous leisure. In dress construction this norm works out in
the shape of divers contrivances going to show that the wearer does
not and, as far as it may conveniently be shown, can not engage in
productive labor. Beyond these two principles there is a third of
scarcely less constraining force, which will occur to any one who
reflects at all on the subject. Dress must not only be conspicuously
expensive and inconvenient, it must at the same time be up to date.
No explanation at all satisfactory has hitherto been offered of the
phenomenon of changing fashions. The imperative requirement of
dressing in the latest accredited manner, as well as the fact that
this accredited fashion constantly changes from season to season, is
sufficiently familiar to every one, but the theory of this flux and
change has not been worked out. We may of course say, with perfect
consistency and truthfulness, that this principle of novelty is
another corollary under the law of conspicuous waste. Obviously, if
each garment is permitted to serve for but a brief term, and if none
of last season's apparel is carried over and made further use of
during the present season, the wasteful expenditure on dress is
greatly increased. This is good as far as it goes, but it is
negative only. Pretty much all that this consideration warrants us
in saying is that the norm of conspicuous waste exercises a
controlling surveillance in all matters of dress, so that any change
in the fashions must conspicuous waste exercises a controlling
surveillance in all matters of dress, so that any change in the
fashions must conform to the requirement of wastefulness; it leaves
unanswered the question as to the motive for making and accepting a
change in the prevailing styles, and it also fails to explain why
conformity to a given style at a given time is so imperatively
necessary as we know it to be.
For a creative principle, capable of serving as motive to invention
and innovation in fashions, we shall have to go back to the
primitive, non-economic motive with which apparel originated -- the
motive of adornment. Without going into an extended discussion of
how and why this motive asserts itself under the guidance of the law
of expensiveness, it may be stated broadly that each successive
innovation in the fashions is an effort to reach some form of
display which shall be more acceptable to our sense of form and
color or of effectiveness, than that which it displaces. The
changing styles are the expression of a restless search for
something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as
each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of
conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place
is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more
beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it
displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of
expensiveness.
It would seem at first sight that the result of such an unremitting
struggle to attain the beautiful in dress should be a gradual
approach to artistic perfection. We might naturally expect that the
fashions should show a well-marked trend in the direction of some
one or more types of apparel eminently becoming to the human form;
and we might even feel that ge have substantial ground for the hope
that today, after all the ingenuity and effort which have been spent
on dress these many years, the fashions should have achieved a
relative perfection and a relative stability, closely approximating
to a permanently tenable artistic ideal. But such is not the case.
It would be very hazardous indeed to assert that the styles of today
are intrinsically more becoming than those of ten years ago, or than
those of twenty, or fifty, or one hundred years ago. On the other
hand, the assertion freely goes uncontradicted that styles in vogue
two thousand years ago are more becoming than the most elaborate and
painstaking constructions of today.
The explanation of the fashions just offered, then, does not fully
explain, and we shall have to look farther. It is well known that
certain relatively stable styles and types of costume have been
worked out in various parts of the world; as, for instance, among
the Japanese, Chinese, and other Oriental nations; likewise among
the Greeks, Romans, and other Eastern peoples of antiquity so also,
in later times, among the, peasants of nearly every country of
Europe. These national or popular costumes are in most cases
adjudged by competent critics to be more becoming, more artistic,
than the fluctuating styles of modern civilized apparel. At the same
time they are also, at least usually, less obviously wasteful; that
is to say, other elements than that of a display of expense are more
readily detected in their structure.
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.
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. Even in its freest flights, fashion
rarely if ever gets away from a simulation of some ostensible use.
The ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details of dress,
however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and their
substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our
attention as to become unbearable, and then we take refuge in a new
style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of
reputable wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently becomes
as odious as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy which the
law of waste allows us is to seek relief in some new construction,
equally futile and equally untenable. Hence the essential ugliness
and the unceasing change of fashionable attire.
Having so explained the phenomenon of shifting fashions, the next
thing is to make the explanation tally with everyday facts. Among
these everyday facts is the well-known liking which all men have for
the styles that are in vogue at any given time. A new style comes
into vogue and remains in favor for a season, and, at least so long
as it is a novelty, people very generally find the new style
attractive. The prevailing fashion is felt to be beautiful. This is
due partly to the relief it affords in being different from what
went before it, partly to its being reputable. As indicated in the
last chapter, the canon of reputability to some extent shapes our
tastes, so that under its guidance anything will be accepted as
becoming until its novelty wears off, or until the warrant of
reputability is transferred to a new and novel structure serving the
same general purpose. That the alleged beauty, or "loveliness," of
the styles in vogue at any given time is transient and spurious only
is attested by the fact that none of the many shifting fashions will
bear the test of time. When seen in the perspective of half-a-dozen
years or more, the best of our fashions strike us as grotesque, if
not unsightly. Our transient attachment to whatever happens to be
the latest rests on other than aesthetic grounds, and lasts only
until our abiding aesthetic sense has had time to assert itself and
reject this latest indigestible contrivance.
The process of developing an aesthetic nausea takes more or less
time; the length of time required in any given case being inversely
as the degree of intrinsic odiousness of the style in question. This
time relation between odiousness and instability in fashions affords
ground for the inference that the more rapidly the styles succeed
and displace one another, the more offensive they are to sound
taste. The presumption, therefore, is that the farther the
community, especially the wealthy classes of the community, develop
in wealth and mobility and in the range of their human contact, the
more imperatively will the law of conspicuous waste assert itself in
matters of dress, the more will the sense of beauty tend to fall
into abeyance or be overborne by the canon of pecuniary
reputability, the more rapidly will fashions shift and change, and
the more grotesque and intolerable will be the varying styles that
successively come into vogue.
There remains at least one point in this theory of dress yet to be
discussed. Most of what has been said applies to men's attire as
well as to that of women; although in modern times it applies at
nearly all points with greater force to that of women. But at one
point the dress of women differs substantially from that of men. In
woman's dress there is obviously greater insistence on such features
as testify to the wearer's exemption from or incapacity for all
vulgarly productive employment. This characteristic of woman's
apparel is of interest, not only as completing the theory of dress,
but also as confirming what has already been said of the economic
status of women, both in the past and in the present.
As has been seen in the discussion of woman's status under the heads
of Vicarious Leisure and Vicarious Consumption, it has in the course
of economic development become the office of the woman to consume
vicariously for the head of the household; and her apparel is
contrived with this object in view. It has come about that obviously
productive labor is in a peculiar degree derogatory to respectable
women, and therefore special pains should be taken in the
construction of women's dress, to impress upon the beholder the fact
(often indeed a fiction) that the wearer does not and can not
habitually engage in useful work. Propriety requires respectable
women to abstain more consistently from useful effort and to make
more of a show of leisure than the men of the same social classes.
It grates painfully on our nerves to contemplate the necessity of
any well-bred woman's earning a livelihood by useful work. It is not
"woman's sphere." Her sphere is within the household, which she
should "beautify," and of which she should be the "chief ornament."
The male head of the household is not currently spoken of as its
ornament. This feature taken in conjunction with the other fact that
propriety requires more unremitting attention to expensive display
in the dress and other paraphernalia of women, goes to enforce the
view already implied in what has gone before. By virtue of its
descent from a patriarchal past, our social system makes it the
woman's function in an especial degree to put in evidence her
household's ability to pay. According to the modern civilized scheme
of life, the good name of the household to which she belongs should
be the special care of the woman; and the system of honorific
expenditure and conspicuous leisure by which this good name is
chiefly sustained is therefore the woman's sphere. In the ideal
scheme, as it tends to realize itself in the life of the higher
pecuniary classes, this attention to conspicuous waste of substance
and effort should normally be the sole economic function of the
woman.
At the stage of economic development at which the women were still
in the full sense the property of the men, the performance of
conspicuous leisure and consumption came to be part of the services
required of them. The women being not their own masters, obvious
expenditure and leisure on their part would redound to the credit of
their master rather than to their own credit; and therefore the more
expensive and the more obviously unproductive the women of the
household are, the more creditable and more effective for the
purpose of reputability of the household or its head will their life
be. So much so that the women have been required not only to afford
evidence of a life of leisure, but even to disable themselves for
useful activity.
It is at this point that the dress of men falls short of that of
women, and for sufficient reason. Conspicuous waste and conspicuous
leisure are reputable because they are evidence of pecuniary
strength; pecuniary strength is reputable or honorific because, in
the last analysis, it argues success and superior force; therefore
the evidence of waste and leisure put forth by any individual in his
own behalf cannot consistently take such a form or be carried to
such a pitch as to argue incapacity or marked discomfort on his
part; as the exhibition would in that case show not superior force,
but inferiority, and so defeat its own purpose. So, then, wherever
wasteful expenditure and the show of abstention from effort is
normally. or on an average, carried to the extent of showing obvious
discomfort or voluntarily induced physical disability. there the
immediate inference is that the individual in question does not
perform this wasteful expenditure and undergo this disability for
her own personal gain in pecuniary repute, but in behalf of some one
else to whom she stands in a relation of economic dependence; a
relation which in the last analysis must, in economic theory, reduce
itself to a relation of servitude.
To apply this generalization to women's dress, and put the matter in
concrete terms: the high heel, the skirt, the impracticable bonnet,
the corset, and the general disregard of the wearer's comfort which
is an obvious feature of all civilized women's apparel, are so many
items of evidence to the effect that in the modern civilized scheme
of life the woman is still, in theory, the economic dependent of the
man -- that, perhaps in a highly idealized sense, she still is the
man's chattel. The homely reason for all this conspicuous leisure
and attire on the part of women lies in the fact that they are
servants to whom, in the differentiation of economic functions, has
been delegated the office of putting in evidence their master's
ability to pay.
There is a marked similarity in these respects between the apparel
of women and that of domestic servants, especially liveried
servants. In both there is a very elaborate show of unnecessary
expensiveness, and in both cases there is also a notable disregard
of the physical comfort of the wearer. But the attire of the lady
goes farther in its elaborate insistence on the idleness, if not on
the physical infirmity of the wearer, than does that of the
domestic. And this is as it should be; for in theory, according to
the ideal scheme of the pecuniary culture, the lady of the house is
the chief menial of the household.
Besides servants, currently recognized as such, there is at least
one other class of persons whose garb assimilates them to the class
of servants and shows many of the features that go to make up the
womanliness of woman's dress. This is the priestly class. Priestly
vestments show, in accentuated form, all the features that have been
shown to be evidence of a servile status and a vicarious life. Even
more strikingly than the everyday habit of the priest, the
vestments, properly so called, are ornate, grotesque, inconvenient,
and, at least ostensibly, comfortless to the point of distress. The
priest is at the same time expected to refrain from useful effort
and, when before the public eye, to present an impassively
disconsolate countenance, very much after the manner of a
well-trained domestic servant. The shaven face of the priest is a
further item to the same effect. This assimilation of the priestly
class to the class of body servants, in demeanor and apparel, is due
to the similarity of the two classes as regards economic function.
In economic theory, the priest is a body servant, constructively in
attendance upon the person of the divinity whose livery he wears.
His livery is of a very expensive character, as it should be in
order to set forth in a beseeming manner the dignity of his exalted
master; but it is contrived to show that the wearing of it
contributes little or nothing to the physical comfort of the wearer,
for it is an item of vicarious consumption, and the repute which
accrues from its consumption is to be imputed to the absent master,
not to the servant.
The line of demarcation between the dress of women, priests, and
servants, on the one hand, and of men, on the other hand, is not
always consistently observed in practice, but it will scarcely be
disputed that it is always present in a more or less definite way in
the popular habits of thought. There are of course also free men,
and not a few of them, who, in their blind zeal for faultless
reputable attire, transgress the theoretical line between man's and
woman's dress, to the extent of arraying themselves in apparel that
is obviously designed to vex the mortal frame; but everyone
recognizes without hesitation that such apparel for men is a
departure from the normal. We are in the habit of saying that such
dress is "effeminate"; and one sometimes hears the remark that such
or such an exquisitely attired gentleman is as well dressed as a
footman.
Certain apparent discrepancies under this theory of dress merit a
more detailed examination, especially as they mark a more or less
evident trend in the later and maturer development of dress. The
vogue of the corset offers an apparent exception from the rule of
which it has here been cited as an illustration. A closer
examination, however, will show that this apparent exception is
really a verification of the rule that the vogue of any given
element or feature in dress rests on its utility as an evidence of
pecuniary standing. It is well known that in the industrially more
advanced communities the corset is employed only within certain
fairly well defined social strata. The women of the poorer classes,
especially of the rural population, do not habitually use it, except
as a holiday luxury. Among these classes the women have to work
hard, and it avails them little in the way of a pretense of leisure
to so crucify the flesh in everyday life. The holiday use of the
contrivance is due to imitation of a higher-class canon of decency.
Upwards from this low level of indigence and manual labor, the
corset was until within a generation or two nearly indispensable to
a socially blameless standing for all women, including the
wealthiest and most reputable. This rule held so long as there still
was no large class of people wealthy enough to be above the
imputation of any necessity for manual labor and at the same time
large enough to form a self-sufficient, isolated social body whose
mass would afford a foundation for special rules of conduct within
the class, enforced by the current opinion of the class alone. But
now there has grown up a large enough leisure class possessed of
such wealth that any aspersion on the score of enforced manual
employment would be idle and harmless calumny; and the corset has
therefore in large measure fallen into disuse within this class.
The exceptions under this rule of exemption from the corset are more
apparent than real. They are the wealthy classes of countries with a
lower industrial structure -- nearer the archaic, quasi-industrial
type -- together with the later accessions of the wealthy classes in
the more advanced industrial communities. The latter have not yet
had time to divest themselves of the plebeian canons of taste and of
reputability carried over from their former, lower pecuniary grade.
Such survival of the corset is not infrequent among the higher
social classes of those American cities, for instance, which have
recently and rapidly risen into opulence. If the word be used as a
technical term, without any odious implication, it may be said that
the corset persists in great measure through the period of snobbery
-- the interval of uncertainty and of transition from a lower to the
upper levels of pecuniary culture. That is to say, in all countries
which have inherited the corset it continues in use wherever and so
long as it serves its purpose as an evidence of honorific leisure by
arguing physical disability in the wearer. The same rule of course
applies to other mutilations and contrivances for decreasing the
visible efficiency of the individual.
Something similar should hold true with respect to divers items of
conspicuous consumption, and indeed something of the kind does seem
to hold to a slight degree of sundry features of dress, especially
if such features involve a marked discomfort or appearance of
discomfort to the wearer. During the past one hundred years there is
a tendency perceptible, in the development of men's dress
especially, to discontinue methods of expenditure and the use of
symbols of leisure which must have been irksome, which may have
served a good purpose in their time, but the continuation of which
among the upper classes today would be a work of supererogation; as,
for instance, the use of powdered wigs and of gold lace, and the
practice of constantly shaving the face. There has of late years
been some slight recrudescence of the shaven face in polite society,
but this is probably a transient and unadvised mimicry of the
fashion imposed upon body servants, and it may fairly be expected to
go the way of the powdered wig of our grandfathers.
These indices and others which resemble them in point of the
boldness with which they point out to all observers the habitual
uselessness of those persons who employ them, have been replaced by
other, more dedicate methods of expressing the same fact; methods
which are no less evident to the trained eyes of that smaller,
select circle whose good opinion is chiefly sought. The earlier and
cruder method of advertisement held its ground so long as the public
to which the exhibitor had to appeal comprised large portions of the
community who were not trained to detect delicate variations in the
evidences of wealth and leisure. The method of advertisement
undergoes a refinement when a sufficiently large wealthy class has
developed, who have the leisure for acquiring skill in interpreting
the subtler signs of expenditure. "Loud" dress becomes offensive to
people of taste, as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress
the untrained sensibilities of the vulgar. To the individual of high
breeding, it is only the more honorific esteem accorded by the
cultivated sense of the members of his own high class that is of
material consequence. Since the wealthy leisure class has grown so
large, or the contact of the leisure-class individual with members
of his own class has grown so wide, as to constitute a human
environment sufficient for the honorific purpose, there arises a
tendency to exclude the baser elements of the population from the
scheme even as spectators whose applause or mortification should be
sought. The result of all this is a refinement of methods, a resort
to subtler contrivances, and a spiritualization of the scheme of
symbolism in dress. And as this upper leisure class sets the pace in
all matters of decency, the result for the rest of society also is a
gradual amelioration of the scheme of dress. As the community
advances in wealth and culture, the ability to pay is put in
evidence by means which require a progressively nicer discrimination
in the beholder. This nicer discrimination between advertising media
is in fact a very large element of the higher pecuniary culture.
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