CLOTHES are to us what fur and feathers are to beasts and birds; they not only add to our appearance, but they are our appearance. How we look to others entirely depends upon what we wear and how we wear it; manners and speech are noted afterward, and character last of all. In the community where we live, admirableness of character is the fundamental essential, and in order to achieve a position of importance, personality is also essential; but for the transient impression that we make at home, abroad, everywhere in public, two superficial attributes are alone indispensable: good manners and a pleasing appearance. It is not merely a question of vanity and inclination. In New York, for instance, a woman must dress well, to pay her way. In the world of smart society—in America at any rate—clothes not only represent our ticket of admission, but our contribution to the effect of a party. What makes a brilliant party? Clothes! Good clothes!

Fashion Has Little in Common with Beauty

  Fashion ought to be likened to a tide or epidemic; sometimes one might define it as a sort of hypnotism, seemingly exerted by the gods as a joke. Fashion has the power to appear temporarily in the guise of beauty, though it is the antithesis of beauty nearly always. If you doubt it, look at old fashion plates. Even the woman of beautiful taste succumbs occasionally to the epidemics of fashion, but she is more immune than most. All women who have any clothes sense whatever know more or less the type of things that are their style—unless they have such an attack of fashionitis as to be irresponsibly delirious.  

   To describe any details of dress, that will not be as “queer” tomorrow as today’s fashions are bound to be, would seem at the outset pretty much like writing about next year’s weather. And yet, there is one unchanging principle which must be followed by every woman, man and child that is well dressed—suitability. Nor does suitability mean merely that you must choose clothes suitable to your age and appearance, and that you must get a ball dress for a ball, and a street dress to walk in; it means equally that you must not buy clothes out of proportion to your income, or out of keeping with your surroundings.  

Disproportionate Expenditure is Bad Taste

  About fifteen years ago the extravagance in women’s dress reached such a high-water mark that it was not unheard of for a New York woman to spend a third of her husband’s income on clothes. All women of fashion bought clothes when it would not have occurred to them to buy furniture—when it would have seemed preposterous to buy a piece of jewelry—but clothes, clothes, and more clothes, each more hand-embroidered than the last, until just as it seemed that no dress was fit to be seen if it hadn’t a month or two of some one’s time embroidered on it, the work on clothes subsided, until now we are at the other extreme; no work is put on them at all. At least, clothes today are much more sensible, and let us hope the sense will be lasting.  

Vulgar Clothes

  Vulgar clothes are those which, no matter what the fashion of the moment may be, are always too elaborate for the occasion; too exaggerated in style, or have accessories out of proportion. People of uncultivated taste are apt to fancy distortions; to exaggerate rather than modify the prevailing fashions.  

    For example: A conspicuous evidence of bad style that has persisted through numberless changes in fashion, is the over-dressed and over-trimmed head. She will elaborate her hairdressing to start with and then she will “decorate” it with everything in the way of millinery and jewelry that she can lay her hands on. Or, in the daytime, she fancies equally over-weighted hats, and rich-looking fur coats and the latest edition in the most conspicuous possible foot-wear. And she much prefers wearing rings to gloves. Maybe she thinks they do not go together? She despises sensible clothing; she also despises plain fabrics and untrimmed models. She also cares little for staying at home, since she is perpetually seen at restaurants and at every public entertainment. The food she orders is rich, the appearance she makes is rich; in fact, to see her often is like nothing so much as being forced to eat a large amount of butter—plain.  

   When one attracted too much notice, one could be sure of being not well-dressed but over-dressed, has for a hundred years been the comfort of the dowdy. It is, of course, very often true, but not invariably. A person may be stared at for any one of many reasons. It depends very much on the stare. A woman may be stared at because she is indiscreet, or because she looks like a left-over member of the circus, or because she is enchanting to look at. If you are much stared at, what sort of a stare do you usually meet? Is it bold, or mocking, or is it merely that people look at you wistfully? If the first, change your manner; if the second, wear more conventional clothes; if the third, you may be left as you are. But be sure of your diagnosis of this last.  

Dress for Dinners and Balls

Supposing, since clothes suitable to the occasion are the first requisite of good taste, we take up a few details that are apart from fashion. A dinner dress really means every sort of low, or half low evening dress. A formal dinner dress, like a ball dress, is always low-necked and without sleeves, and is the handsomest type of evening dress that there is. A ball dress may be exquisite in detail but it is often merely effective. The perfect ball dress is one purposely designed with a skirt that is becoming when dancing. A long wrapped type of dress would make Diana herself look like a toy monkey-on-a-stick, but might be dignified and beautiful at a dinner. A dinner dress differs from a ball dress in little except that it is not necessarily designed for freedom of movement.  

Hair ornaments always look well at a ball but are not especially appropriate unless universally in fashion on other occasions. A lady in a ball dress with nothing added to the head, looks a little like being hatless in the street. This sounds like a contradiction of the criticism of the vulgarian. But because a tiara is beautiful at a ball, or a spray of feathers, or a high comb, or another ornament, does not mean that all of these should be put on together and worn in a restaurant; which is just what the vulgarian would do. Whether, to wear a head-dress, however, depends not alone upon fashion but upon the individual. If the type of hair ornament at the moment in fashion is becoming, wear it, especially to balls and in a box at the opera. But if it is not becoming, don’t.  

Ladies of fashion, by the way, do not have their hair especially dressed for formal occasions. Each wears her hair a certain way, and it is put up every morning just as carefully as for a ball. The only time it is arranged differently is for riding. An informal dinner dress is merely a modified formal one. It is low in front and high in the back, with long or elbow sleeves—or perhaps it is Dutch neck and no sleeves. When trains are in fashion, all older women should wear them. Fashion or no fashion, no woman who has passed forty looks really well in a cut-off evening dress. An effect of train, however, can very adequately be produced with any arrangement or trimming that extends upon the floor. The informal dinner dress is worn to the theater, the restaurant (of high class), the concert and the opera. Informal dinner dresses are worn in the boxes at the opera on ordinary nights, such as when no especially great star is to sing, and when one is not going on to a ball afterward, but a ball dress is never inappropriate, especially without head-dress. There is one rule that is fairly safe to follow: When in doubt, wear the plainer dress. It is always better far to be under-dressed than over-dressed. If you don’t know whether to put on a ball dress or a dinner dress, wear the dinner dress. Or, whether to wear cloth or brocade to a luncheon, wear the cloth.  

Country Clothes and Habit

    Nothing so marks the “person who doesn’t know” as inappropriate choice of clothes. To wear elaborate clothes out of doors in the country, is quite as out of place as to parade “sports” clothes on the streets in town. It is safe to say that “sport” clothes are appropriate country clothes—especially for all young people. Young people going to the country for the day wear sports clothes; which if seen early in the morning in town and again late in the afternoon, merely show you have been to the country. But town clothes in the country proclaim your ignorance of fitness. Sport shoes are naturally adapted to the sport for which they are intended. High-heeled slippers do not go with any country clothes, except organdie or muslins or other distinctly feminine “summer” dresses. Elaborate afternoon dresses of “painted” chiffons, embroidered mulls, etc., are seen only at weddings, lawn parties, or at watering-places abroad.  

    Never mind if you look like Mme. Recamier with your hair fluffed and like a skinned rabbit with it tight back, tight, flat back it must go. Brush it smooth as you can, braid it or coil it about level with the top of your ears and wind it in a door mat, not a knob in the back. If you have a great quantity of hair, you should take all the inner part of it, coil it on top of your head so it will go under your hat out of the way. Then take the outer edge of it and braid or wind it as flat as possible. A large bun at the back of the head is almost as bad as hair drawn over the ears at the side. If you have short hairs likely to blow, you must wear a hunting hair net. And if it is bobbed, it must be drawn back into a silk riding net and made to look trim.  

When the Income is Limited  

 No one can dress well on nothing a year; that must be granted at the outset. But a woman who has talent, taste, and ingenuity can be suitably and charmingly dressed on little a year, especially at present.  

    First of all, to mind wearing a dress many times because it indicates a small bank account, is to exhibit a false notion of the values in life. Any one who thinks well or ill of her, in accordance with her income, can not be too quickly got rid of! But worthwhile people are influenced in her disfavor when she has clothes in number and quality out of proportion to her known financial situation.  

It is tiresome everlastingly to wear black, but nothing is so serviceable, nothing so unrecognizable, nothing looks so well on every occasion. A very striking dress can not be worn many times without making others as well as its owner feel bored at the sight of it. “Here comes the Zebra” or “the Cockatoo!” is inevitable if a dress of stripes or flamboyant color is worn often. She who must wear one dress through a season and have it perhaps made over the next, would better choose black or cream color. Or perhaps a certain color suits her, and this fact makes it possible for her habitually to wear it without impressing others with her lack of clothes.

Supposing you are a young woman with more beauty than wealth! Let us also suppose you have three evening dresses, a blue, a pink and a green. At the moment you can wear flesh-colored slippers and stockings with everything, which rather weakens the argument—however, a blue fan does not look well with a pink or a green dress, nor do the other combinations. Supposing, however, you had instead a cream-colored dress, a flesh-colored, and an orchid one. Flesh-colored slippers look much better with cream and orchid than with either green or blue, at any rate! A watermelon pink fan is lovely in night-light with all three; so is a cream one. Or perhaps by changing both fan and slippers, a different effect is produced, since the colors of your clothes are background colors.  

Don’t Get too Many Clothes

   Choose the clothes which you must have, carefully, and if you must cut down, cut down on elaborate ones. There is scarcely anywhere that you can not fittingly go in plain clothes. Very few, if any, people need fancy things; all people need plain ones.  

   A very beautiful Chicago woman who is always perfectly dressed for every occasion, worked out the cost of her own clothes this way: On a sheet of paper, thumb tacked on the inside of her closet door, she put a complete typewritten list of her dresses and hats, and the cost of each. Every time she put on a dress she made a pencil mark. By and by when a dress was discarded, she divided the cost of it by the number of times it had been worn. In this way she found out accurately which were her cheapest and which her most expensive clothes. When getting new ones she has the advantage of very valuable information, since she avoids the dress that is never put on, which is a bigger handicap for the medium-sized allowance than many women realize.  

A Few General Remarks

  The fault of bad taste is usually in over-dressing. Quality not effect, is the standard to seek for. Cut and fit are the two items of greatest importance in women’s clothes, as well as in men’s. But fashion changes too rapidly to make value of material always wise expenditure for one of slender purse. Better usually have two dresses, each cut and made in the whim of the moment, than one which must be worn after the whim has become a freak. In men’s clothes the opposite rule should be followed since good style in men’s clothes is unchanging.  

   To buy things at sales is very much like buying things at an auction; if you really know what you want and something about values, you can often do marvellously well; but if you are easily bewildered and know little of values, you are apt to spend your good money on trash. A woman of small means must either be (or learn to be) discriminatingly careful, or she would better have her clothes made at home, or if she is of “model” type, buy them ready-made. The ready-to-wear clothes in the Misses’ Department are growing every year better looking; unfortunately and for some inexplicable reason, the usual Women’s Department does not compare in good taste in selection of models with the former, and it is unusual to find a dress that a lady of fashion would choose except among the imported models, for which store prices are as a rule higher than those asked by the greatest dressmakers. Evening clothes are still usually unbuyable by the over-fastidious, and the ultra-smart woman is still obliged to go to the private importers for her daughter’s ball-dresses as well as her own—or else into her own sewing-room.  

The Clothes of a Gentleman

    If you would dress like a gentleman, you must do one of two things; either study the subject of a gentleman’s wardrobe until you are competent to pick out good suits from freaks and direct your misguided tailor, or, at least until your perceptions are trained, go to an English one. This latter method is the easiest, and, by all odds, the safest. It is not Anglomania but plain common sense to admit that, just as the Rue de la Paix in Paris is the fountainhead of fashions for women, Bond Street in London is the home of irreproachable clothes for men. And yet, curiously enough, just as a woman shopping in Paris can buy frightful clothes—or the most beautiful; a man can in America buy the worst clothes in the world—and the best. However, let us suppose that you are either young, or at least fairly young; that you have unquestioned social position, and that you are going to get yourself an entire wardrobe. Let us also suppose your money is not unlimited, so that it may also be seen where you may not, or may if necessary, economize.   

The Business Suit

   The business suit or three-piece sack is made or marred by its cut alone. It is supposed to be an every-day inconspicuous garment and should be. A few rules to follow are:  

   Don’t choose striking patterns of materials; suitable woolen stuffs come in endless variety, and any which look plain at a short distance are “safe,” though they may show a mixture of colors or pattern when viewed closely.  

   Don’t get too light a blue, too bright a green, or anything suggesting a horse blanket. At the present moment trousers are made with a cuff; sleeves are not. Lapels are moderately small. Padded shoulders are an abomination. Peg-topped trousers equally bad. If you must be eccentric, save your efforts for the next fancy dress ball, where you may wear what you please, but in your business clothing be reasonable.  

   Above everything, don’t wear white socks, and don’t cover yourself with chains, fobs, scarf pins, lodge emblems, etc., and don’t wear “horsey” shirts and neckties. You will only make a bad impression on every one you meet. The clothes of a gentleman are always conservative; and it is safe to avoid everything that can possibly come under the heading of “novelty.”  

Other Hints

   The well-dressed man is always a paradox. He must look as though he gave his clothes no thought and as though literally they grew on him like a dog’s fur, and yet he must be perfectly groomed. He must be close-shaved and have his hair cut and his nails in good order (not too polished). His linen must always be immaculate, his clothes “in press,” his shoes perfectly “done.” His brown shoes must shine like old mahogany, and his white buckskin must be whitened and polished like a prize bull terrier at a bench show. Ties and socks and handkerchief may go together, but too perfect a match betrays an effort for “effect” which is always bad. The well-dressed man never wears the same suit or the same pair of shoes two days running. He may have only two suits, but he wears them alternately; if he has four suits he should wear each every fourth day. The longer time they have “to recover” their shape, the better.  

What to Wear on Various Occasions

   The appropriate clothes for various occasions are given below. If ever in doubt what to wear, the best rule is to err on the side of informality.

A Few Tips

Always:

Dress in a simple and clean manner.

Wear underwear and makeup that will not attract attention

Wear plain shoes with closed heels and toes.

Err on the conservative side if you are uncertain

Select clothing a step more formal than the job you are interviewing for.

Never:

Wear anything sexy for an interview.                  Wear any kind of knitted garment.

Dress in men’s clothes                             Wear a fad item or new fashion.

Wear anything too bold, bright or sharply contrasting

Wear anything with a designer’s name or logo showing.

Advice:

Clean and polished dress shoes are imperative.   Suit, shirt and skirt should be clean and pressed.

Hair should he well-groomed.                Make sure fingernails cleaned and trimmed.

Avoid perfume (some people are allergic).     Avoid flashy jewelry and watches. Keep it simple.

Well-brushed teeth and fresh breath are a must.

Finally, check your attire in the rest room just before your interview and make sure you are ready for the moment.

（鲁东大学 滕延江 整理）