WHAT IS ELEGANCE?

Taranaki Daily News, 28 January 1933, Page 5 (Supplement)

WHAT IS ELEGANCE?

IMPORTANCE OF FASHION. THE PAST ALWAYS DOWDY. Four years ago an elegant woman was a woman whose waist was below her hips and whose skirts were almost above her knees. To-day we turn round in the streets to stare with astonishment at anyone who still persists in so extraordinary a fashion, writes James Laver in the Daily Mail. In 1912 women wore hats as big as cartwheels; to-day their hats are so small that we hardly know whether they are wearing hats or not. In 1860 a thousand yards of muslin could be absorbed in the flounces of one evening dress; in 1928 half a yard of material was apparently sufficient. In why multiply instances? The vagaries of fashion are so well-known that they are taken for granted, and we are apt to forget that this continual change in the accepted standard of feminine attire is one of the oddest facts of human life. SPELL OF THE MOMENT. For most of us are completely under the spell of the moment, so much so that we not only believe present fashion to be elegant but are unable to believe that bygone modes ever were. In fact it is the surest sign of approaching old age when a man begins to believe that the women of to-day are less elegant than the women of yesterday. Such an opinion places him at once on the shelf with the old buffers of the clubs who sigh for the days of tight waists, exuberant hips, and voluminous tresses—in a word for the fashions of the days when they themselves were young. What is this elegance which captivates our judgment of the past, and makes us the helpless slaves of every caprice of fashion?

The usual opinion of the psychologists, especially / bf the more fanatical followers of Freud, is that it all boils down to sex, that dress is a provocation, and that therefore, presumably, the more provocative a woman is the better she is dressed. The problem is not quite so simple. The figurante of the Folies Bergere is provocative, but she is hardly elegant; and even youth and beauty, obvious attractions, are not entirely decisive, since elegance can exist without them, and they can exist without elegance. The Irish peasant girl is often both young and beautiful, but she is not elegant, and the elegant Parisienne is frequently no longer young, and not beautiful when she was. IS ELEGANCE NEATNESS.

Nor is it entirely a matter of good grooming, for although a well-groom-ed appearance is one of the elements of elegance, it is not elegance itself. It is sometimest suggested that elegance is a certain neatness, a simplicity of line, a slimness of figure, but even this, although the truth, is by no means the complete answer to the problem. For there are fussy fashions as well as simple ones, and when the Paris dressmakers began, a few years ago, to introduce what is called “more feminine modes,” with softer materials and fluffier outlines, they did so in the name of elegance, and with such success that the simple silhouettes of yesterday already look dowdy. The silhouettes of yesterday are always dowdy; that is one of the most astonishing aspects of the matter, and we shall never understand what elegance is unless we pause a moment to consider why this is so. There is an undoubted element of snobbery in our appreciation of women’s clothes. So soon as a fashion has had time to filter down to the cheaper shops, it ceases to be fashionable and a new fashion comes along to take its place. In a year or two the inspiration Of some master dress designer has been copied in ever cheaper and cheaper materials, and in every copying has lost a little of its line, until it becomes hopelessly vulgarised. The fashion of three or four years ago can never be elegant, for it is what the washerwoman is wearing now.

CLUES TO THE RIDDLE. This undoubted fact offers us several clues which we can follow in turn. The first is a very important one. The first requirement of elegance is that a woman’s clothes should look as if they

3 were made for her, and for no one else. " Now this, except in the case of film- ■ stars who have their dresses sewn on 3 to their bodies, is nearly always a de- ‘ fusion, and some wealthy women, how- ! ever much they may pay for their clothes, never succeed in convincing us ! that it is anything else. They thought • that what suited that svelte blonde mannequin would •’ also suit them, but ! they were wrong. No woman can be elegant unless she has a view of her own limitations and imperfections relentless in its clarity. No self-indulgent sentimentalist can be an elegant woman. It has long rejoiced the hearts of cynics that a woman is never more certain that she is expressing her own personality that when she is following the latest fashion. But the cynics are wrong; for the “latest fashion” is not something cut and dried, fixed and definite, a uniform that can be assumed or discarded at will. Rather is it a tendency, an atmosphere, a general direction of line, an emphasis now on this part of the body, now on that It is a paradox that no one knows what the fashion is until it is over, no one, that is, except those queens of elegance upon whose bodies it takes shape and substance. It takes a very clever woman to realise in time the essential lines of the dominant mode, and when she succeeds in adapting them to her own personality she is an elegant woman. THE INVISIBLE LINE. They must, however, be adapted without extravagance. Emphasis, even exaggeration, there must obviously be. This is the essence of fashion. But there is a line, unfortunately invisible, beyond which it is impossible' to go without being overdressed, vulgar, and ridiculous. Elegance is a tight-rope, or rather it is like walking along the edge of a precipice. To retreat from the edge is to . mingle with the crowd; to step over the edge is to fall into the abyss. In every period costume has some essential line, and when we look back over the fashions of the past we can see quite plainly , what it is, and we can see (what is surely very strange) that the forms of dresses, apparently so haphazard, so dependent on the whim of the designer, have an extraordinary relevance to the Spirit of the Age.

The aristocratic stiffness of the old regime in France is completely mirrored in the brocaded gowns of the eighteenth century. The Republican, yet licentious, notions of the Directoire find their echo in the plain transparent dresses of the time; Victorian modesty openly expressed itself in a multiplicity of petticoats.

We touch here on something very mysterious, as if the Time Spirit were a reality, clothing itself ever in the most suitable garments and rejecting all others. The elegant woman is she wfio has an instinctive knowledge of what these garments are, and who because of this knowledge is able to assume them as if they were made for her and wear them as if she had invented them herself.