y more
becoming than those of ten years ago, or than those of twenty, or fifty,
or one hundred years ago. On the other hand, the assertion freely goes
uncontradicted that styles in vogue two thousand years ago are more
becoming than the most elaborate and painstaking constructions of today.

The explanation of the fashions just offered, then, does not fully
explain, and we shall have to look farther. It is well known that
certain relatively stable styles and types of costume have been worked
out in various parts of the world; as, for instance, among the Japanese,
Chinese, and other Oriental nations; likewise among the Greeks, Romans,
and other Eastern peoples of antiquity so also, in later times, among
the peasants of nearly every country of Europe. These national or
popular costumes are in most cases adjudged by competent critics to
be more becoming, more artistic, than the fluctuating styles of modern
civilized apparel. At the same time they are also, at least usually,
less obviously wasteful; that is to say, other elements than that of a
display of expense are more readily detected in their structure.

These relatively stable costumes are, commonly, pretty strictly and
narrowly localized, and they vary by slight and systematic gradations
from place to place. They have in every case been worked out by peoples
or classes which are poorer than we, and especially they belong in
countries and localities and times where the population, or at least
the class to which the costume in question belongs, is relatively
homogeneous, stable, and immobile. That is to say, stable costumes
which will bear the test of time and perspective are worked out under
circumstances where the norm of conspicuous waste asserts itself less
imperatively than it does in the large modern civilized cities, whose
relatively mobile wealthy population today sets the pace in matters of
fashion. The countries and classes which have in this way worked out
stable and artistic costumes have been so placed that the pecuniary
emulation among them has taken the direction of a competition in
conspicuous leisure rather than in conspicuous consumption of goods. So
that it will hold true in a general way that fashions are least stable
and least becoming in those communities where the principle of a
conspicuous waste of goods asserts itself most imperatively, as among
ourselves. All this points to an antagonism between expensiveness and
artistic apparel. In point of