about it.

"The fact is, that a style of dress which allows the use of
everything in heaven above or earth beneath requires more taste and
skill in disposition than falls to the lot of most of the female sex
to make it even tolerable. In consequence, the flowers, fruits, grass,
hay, straw, oats, butterflies, beads, birds, tinsel, streamers,
jinglers, lace, bugles, crape, which seem to be appointed to form a
covering for the female head, very often appear in combinations so
singular, and the results, taken in connection with all the rest of
the costume, are such, that we really think the people who usually
assemble in a Quaker meeting-house are, with their entire absence of
ornament, more becomingly attired than the majority of our public
audiences. For if one considers his own impression after having seen
an assemblage of women dressed in Quaker costume, he will find it to
be, not of a confusion of twinkling finery, but of many fair, sweet
faces, of charming, nice-looking women, and not of articles of dress.
Now this shows that the severe dress, after all, has better answered
the true purpose of dress, in setting forth the _woman_, than our
modern costume, where the woman is but one item in a flying mass of
colors and forms, all of which distract attention from the faces they
are supposed to adorn. The dress of the Philadelphian ladies has
always been celebrated for its elegance of effect, from the fact,
probably, that the early Quaker parentage of the city formed the eye
and the taste of its women for uniform and simple styles of color, and
for purity and chastity of lines. The most perfect toilets that have
ever been achieved in America have probably been those of the class
familiarly called the gay Quakers,--children of Quaker families, who,
while abandoning the strict rules of the sect, yet retain their modest
and severe reticence, relying on richness of material, and soft,
harmonious coloring, rather than striking and dazzling ornament.

"The next source of beauty in dress is the impression of truthfulness
and reality. It is a well-known principle of the fine arts, in all
their branches, that all shams and mere pretenses are to be
rejected,--a truth which Ruskin has shown with the full lustre of his
many-colored prose-poetry. As stucco pretending to be marble, and
graining pretending to be wood, are in false taste in building, so
false jewelry and cheap fineries of every kind are in bad taste; so
also is powder i