hes exactly that Mrs. Gilding wore in her victoria, or trailed
over a Ming rug. The French woman has always been (and the American woman
of taste is now) too great an artist to sit in a little room with its
cotton-print slip covers, muslin curtains, and geranium pots on the window
ledge, in anything strikingly elaborate and expensive. Charming as her
dress may be in line and cut and color, she keeps it (no matter how
intrinsically good it may be) in harmony with her geranium pots and her
chintz.

On the other hand, clothes that are too plain can be equally out of
proportion. Last winter, for instance, a committee of ladies met in what
might safely be called the handsomest house in New York, in a room that
would fit perfectly in the Palace of Versailles, filled with treasures
such as those of the Wallace collection. The hostess presided in a black
serge golf skirt, a business woman's white shirt-waist, and stout walking
boots, her hair brushed flat and tidily back and fastened as though for
riding, her face and hands redolent of soap. No powder, not a nail
manicured. Had she been a girl earning her living, she could not have been
more suitably dressed, but her millions and her palace background demand
that her clothes be at least moderately in keeping.

One does not have to be dowdy as an alternative to being too richly
dressed, and to define differences between clothes that are notable
because of their distinction and smartness, and clothes that are merely
conspicuous and therefore vulgar, is a very elusive point. However, there
are certain rules that seem pretty well established.

=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. The woman of uncultivated taste has no more sense of
moderation than the Queen of the Cannibals. She will elaborate her
hair-dressing to start with (this is all right, if elaboration really
suits her type) 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-weight