Woman as Decoration Part 3

Now this intense and soul-, as well as line-destroying self-consciousness, may be prenatal, and it may result from the Puritan att.i.tude toward beauty; that old New England point of view that the beautiful and the vicious are akin. Every young child needs to have cultivated a certain degree of self-reliance. To know that one's appearance is pleasing, to put it mildly, is of inestimable value when it comes to meeting the world. Every child, if normal, has its good points--hair, eyes, teeth, complexion or figure; and we all know that many a stage beauty has been built up on even two of these attributes.

Star your good points, clothes will help you. Be a winner in your own setting, but avoid the fatal error of d.a.m.ning your clothes by the spirit within you.

The writer has in mind a woman of distinguished appearance, beauty, great wealth, few cares, wonderful clothes and jewels, palatial homes; and yet an envious unrest poisons her soul. She would look differently, be different and has not the wisdom to shake off her fetters. Her perfect dressing helps this woman; you would not be conscious of her otherwise, but with her natural equipment, granted that she concentrated upon flashing her spirit instead of her wealth, she would be a leader in a fine sense. The Beauty Doctor can do much, but show us one who can put a gleam in the eye, tighten the grasp, teach one that ineffable grace which enables woman, young or old, to wear her clothes as if an integral part of herself. This quality belongs to the woman who knows, though she may not have thought it out, that clothes can make one a success, but not a success in the enduring sense. Dress is a tyrant if you take it as your G.o.d, but on the other hand dress becomes a magician's wand when dominated by a clever brain. Gown yourself as beautifully as you can afford, but with judgment. What we do, and how we do it, is often seriously and strangely affected by what we have on. The writer has in mind a literary woman who says she can never talk business except in a linen collar! Mark Twain, in his last days, insisted that he wrote more easily in his night-shirt. Richard Wagner deliberately put on certain rich materials in colours and hung his room with them when composing the music of The Ring. Chopin says in a letter to a friend: "After working at the piano all day, I find that nothing rests me so much as to get into the evening dress which I wear on formal occasions." In monarchies based on militarism, royal princes, as soon as they can walk, are put into military uniforms. It cultivates in them the desired military spirit. We all a.s.sociate certain duties with certain costumes, and the extraordinary response to colour is familiar to all. We talk about feeling colour and say that we can or cannot live in green, blue, violet or red. It is well to follow this colour instinct in clothes as well as in furnishing. You will find you are at your best in the colours and lines most sympathetic to you.

We know a woman who is an unusual beauty and has distinction, in fact is noted for her chic when in white, black or the combination. She once ventured a cerise hat and instantly dropped to the ranks of the commonplace. Fine eyes, hair, skin, teeth, colour and carriage were still hers, but her effectiveness was lessened as that of a pearl might be if set in a coral circle.

CHAPTER V

ESTABLISH HABITS OF CARRIAGE WHICH CREATE GOOD LINE

Woman's line is the result of her costume, in part only. Far more is woman's costume affected by her line. By this we mean the line she habitually falls into, the pose of torso, the line of her legs in action, and when seated, her arms and hands in repose and gesture, the poise of her head. It is woman's line resulting from her habit of mind and the control which her mind has over her body, a thing quite apart from the way G.o.d made her, and the expression her body would have had if left to itself, ungoverned by a mind stocked with observations, conventions, experience and att.i.tudes. We call this the physical expression of _woman's personality_; this personality moulds her bodily lines and if properly directed determines the character of the clothes she wears; determines also whether she be a decorative object which says something in line and colour, or an undecorative object which says nothing.

PLATE VIII

Queen Elizabeth in the absurdly elaborate costume of the late Renaissance. Then crinoline, gaudy materials, and ornamentations without meaning reached their high-water mark in the costuming of women.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Metropolitan Museum of Art_ _Tudor England Portrait of Queen Elizabeth_]

Woman to be decorative, should train the carriage of her body from childhood, by wearing appropriate clothing for various daily roles.

There is more in this than at first appears. The criticism by foreigners that Americans, both men and women, never appear really at home in evening clothes, that they look as if they felt _dressed_, is true of the average man and woman of our country and results from the lax standards of a new and composite social structure. America as a whole, lacks traditions and still embodies the pioneer spirit, equally characteristic of Australia and other offshoots from the old world.

The little American girl who is brought up from babyhood to change for the evening, even though she have a nursery tea, and be allowed only a brief good-night visit to the grown-ups, is still the exception rather than the rule. A wee English maiden we know, created a good deal of amused comment because, on several occasions, when pa.s.sing rainy afternoons indoors, with some affluent little New York friends, whose luxurious nurseries and marvellous mechanical toys were a delight, always insisted upon returning home,--a block distant,--to change into white before partaking of milk toast and jam, at the nursery table, the American children keeping on their pink and blue linens of the afternoon. The fact of white or pink is unimportant, but our point is made when we have said that the mother of the American children constantly remarked on the unconscious grace of the English tot, whether in her white muslin and pink ribbons, her riding clothes, or accordion-plaited dancing frock. The English woman-child was acquiring decorative lines by wearing the correct costume for each occasion, as naturally as a bird wears its feathers. This is one way of obviating self-consciousness.

The Eton boy masters his stick and topper in the same way, when young, and so more easily pa.s.ses through the formless stage conspicuous in the American youth.

Call it technique, or call it efficiency, the object of our modern life is to excel, to be the best of our kind, and appropriate dress is a means to that end, for it helps to liberate the spirit. We of to-day make no claim to consistency or logic. Some of us wear too high heels, even with strictly tailored suits, which demand in the name of consistency a sensible shoe. Also our sensible skirt may be far too narrow for comfort. But on the whole, women have made great strides in the matter of costuming with a view to appropriateness and efficiency.

CHAPTER VI

COLOUR IN WOMAN'S COSTUME

Colour is the hall-mark of our day, and woman decoratively costumed, and as decorator, will be largely responsible for recording this age as one of distinct importance--a transition period in decoration.

Colour is the most marked expression of the spirit of the times; colour in woman's clothes; colour in house furnishing; colour on the stage and in its setting; colour in prose and verse.

Speaking of colour in verse, Rudyard Kipling says (we quote from an editorial in the Philadelphia _Public Ledger_, Jan. 7, 1917):

"Several songs written by Tommy and the Poilu at the front, celebrate the glories of camp life in such vivid colors they could not be reproduced in cold, black, leaden type."

It is no mere chance, this use of vivid colour. Man's psychology to-day craves it. A revolution is on. Did not the strong red, green, and blue of Napoleon's time follow the delicate sky-blues, rose and sunset-yellows of the Louis?

Colour pulses on every side, strong, clean, clear rainbow colour, as if our magicians of brush and dye-pot held a prism to the sun-beam; violet, orange and green, magentas and strong blue against backgrounds of black and cold grey.

We had come to think of colour as vice and had grown so conservative in its use, that it had all but disappeared from our persons, our homes, our gardens, our music and our literature. More than this, from our point of view! The reaction was bound to come by reason of eternal precedent.

Half-tones, antique effects, and general monotony,--the material expression of complacent minds, has been cast aside, and the blase man of ten years ago is as keen as any child with his first linen picture book,--and for the same reason.

Colour, as we see it to-day, came out of the East via Persia. Bakst in Russia translated it into terms of art, and made the Ballet Russe an amazing, enthralling vision! Then Poiret, wizard among French couturieres, a.s.sisted by Bakst, adapted this Oriental colour and line to woman's uses in private life. This supplemented the good work of _le Gazette du Bon Ton_ of Paris, that effete fashion sheet, devoted to the decoration of woman, whose staff included many of the most gifted French artists, masters of brush and pen. Always irregular, no issue of the _Bon Ton_ has appeared of late. It is held up by the war. The men who made it so fascinating a guide to woman "who would be decorative," are at the front, painting scenery for the battlefield--literally that: making mock trees and rocks, gra.s.s and hedges and earth, to mislead the fire of the enemy, and doubtless the kindred Munich art has been diverted into similar channels.

This Oriental colour has made its way across Europe like some gorgeous bird of the tropics, and since the war has checked the output of Europe's factories, another channel has supplied the same wonderful colours in silks and gauze. They come to us by way of the Pacific, from China and from j.a.pan. There is no escaping the colour spell. Writers from the front tell us that it is as if the G.o.ds made sport with fate's anvil, for even the blackened dome of the war zone is lurid by night, with sparks of purple, red, green, yellow and blue; the flare of the world-destroying projectiles.

PLATE IX

A Velasquez portrait of the Renaissance, when the human form counted only as a rack on which was heaped crinoline and stiff brocades and chains and gems and wigs and every manner of elaborate adornment, making mountains of poor tottering human forms, all but lost beneath.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Vienna Hofmuseum_ _Spain-Velasquez Portrait_]

The present costuming of woman, when she treats herself as decoration, owes much to the prophets of the "new" theatre and their colour scale.

These men have demonstrated, in an unforgettable manner, the value of colour; the dependence of every decorative object upon background; shown how fraught with meaning can be an uncompromising outline, and the suggestiveness of really significant detail.

Bakst, Rheinhardt and Granville Barker have taught us the new colour vocabulary. Gordon Craig was perhaps the first to show us the stage made suggestive by insisting on the importance of clever lighting to produce atmosphere and elimination of unessential objects, the argument of his school being that the too detailed reproducing of Nature (on the stage) acts as a check to the imagination, whereas by the judicious selection of harmonics, the imagination is stimulated to its utmost creative capacity. One detects this creed to-day in certain styles of home decoration (woman's background), as well as in woman's costumes.

_Portable Backgrounds_

The staging of a recent play showed more plainly than any words, the importance of background. In one of the scenes, beautiful, artistic gowns in delicate shades were set off by a room with wonderful green walls and woodwork (mignonette). Now, so long as the characters moved about the room, they were thrown into relief most charmingly, but the moment the women seated themselves on a very light coloured and characterless chintz sofa, they lost their decorative value. It was lacking in harmony and contrast. The two black sofa cushions intended possibly to serve as background, being small, instantly disappeared behind the seated women.

A sofa of contrasting colour, or black, would have looked better in the room, and served as immediate background for gowns. It might have been covered in dark chintz, a silk damask in one or several tones, or a solid colour, since the gowns were of delicate indefinite shades.

One of the sofas did have a dark Chinese coat thrown over the back, with the intent, no doubt, of serving as effective background, but the point seemed to escape the daintily gowned young woman who poured tea, for she failed to take advantage of it, occupying the opposite end of the sofa.

A modern addition to a woman's toilet is a large square of chiffon, edged with narrow metal or crystal fringe, or a gold or silver flexible cord. This scarf is always in beguiling contrast to the costume, and when not being worn, is thrown over the chair or end of sofa against which our lady reclines. To a certain degree, this portable background makes a woman decorative when the wrong colour on a chair might convert her lovely gown into an eyesore.

One woman we know, who has an Empire room, admires the lines of her sofa as furniture, but feels it ineffective unless one reclines a la Mme.

Recamier. To obviate this difficulty, she has had made a square (one and a half yards), of lovely soft mauve silk damask, lined with satin charmeuse of the same shade, and weighted by long, heavy ta.s.sels, at the corners; this she throws over the Empire roll and a part of the seat, which are done in antique green velvet. Now the woman seated for conversation with arm and elbow resting on the head, looks at ease,--a part of the composition. The square of soft, lined silk serves at other times as a couvrepied.

CHAPTER VII

FOOTWEAR

Footwear points the costume; every child should be taught this.

Give most careful attention to your extremities,--shoes, gloves and hats. The genius of fashion's greatest artist counts for naught if his costume may not include hat, gloves, shoes, and we would add, umbrella, parasol, stick, fan, jewels; in fact every detail.