practical fact, the norm of conspicuous
waste is incompatible with the requirement that dress should be
beautiful or becoming. And this antagonism offers an explanation of that
restless change in fashion which neither the canon of expensiveness nor
that of beauty alone can account for.

The standard of reputability requires that dress should show wasteful
expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste. The
psychological law has already been pointed out that all men--and women
perhaps even in a higher degree abhor futility, whether of effort or
of expenditure--much as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum. But the
principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile expenditure;
and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore
intrinsically ugly. Hence we find that in all innovations in dress, each
added or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by showing some
ostensible purpose, at the same time that the requirement of conspicuous
waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming
anything more than a somewhat transparent pretense. Even in its freest
flights, fashion rarely if ever gets away from a simulation of some
ostensible use. The ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details
of dress, however, is always so transparent a make-believe, and
their substantial futility presently forces itself so baldly upon our
attention as to become unbearable, and then we take refuge in a new
style. But the new style must conform to the requirement of reputable
wastefulness and futility. Its futility presently becomes as odious
as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy which the law of waste
allows us is to seek relief in some new construction, equally futile and
equally untenable. Hence the essential ugliness and the unceasing change
of fashionable attire.

Having so explained the phenomenon of shifting fashions, the next
thing is to make the explanation tally with everyday facts. Among these
everyday facts is the well-known liking which all men have for the
styles that are in vogue at any given time. A new style comes into vogue
and remains in favor for a season, and, at least so long as it is
a novelty, people very generally find the new style attractive. The
prevailing fashion is felt to be beautiful. This is due partly to the
relief it affords in being different from what went before it, partly
to its being reputable. As indicated in the last chapter,