the canon
of reputability to some extent shapes our tastes, so that under its
guidance anything will be accepted as becoming until its novelty wears
off, or until the warrant of reputability is transferred to a new and
novel structure serving the same general purpose. That the alleged
beauty, or "loveliness," of the styles in vogue at any given time is
transient and spurious only is attested by the fact that none of the
many shifting fashions will bear the test of time. When seen in the
perspective of half-a-dozen years or more, the best of our fashions
strike us as grotesque, if not unsightly. Our transient attachment to
whatever happens to be the latest rests on other than aesthetic grounds,
and lasts only until our abiding aesthetic sense has had time to assert
itself and reject this latest indigestible contrivance.

The process of developing an aesthetic nausea takes more or less time;
the length of time required in any given case being inversely as the
degree of intrinsic odiousness of the style in question. This time
relation between odiousness and instability in fashions affords ground
for the inference that the more rapidly the styles succeed and
displace one another, the more offensive they are to sound taste. The
presumption, therefore, is that the farther the community, especially
the wealthy classes of the community, develop in wealth and mobility and
in the range of their human contact, the more imperatively will the law
of conspicuous waste assert itself in matters of dress, the more will
the sense of beauty tend to fall into abeyance or be overborne by the
canon of pecuniary reputability, the more rapidly will fashions shift
and change, and the more grotesque and intolerable will be the varying
styles that successively come into vogue.

There remains at least one point in this theory of dress yet to be
discussed. Most of what has been said applies to men's attire as well
as to that of women; although in modern times it applies at nearly all
points with greater force to that of women. But at one point the dress
of women differs substantially from that of men. In woman's dress there
is obviously greater insistence on such features as testify to the
wearer's exemption from or incapacity for all vulgarly productive
employment. This characteristic of woman's apparel is of interest, not
only as completing the theory of dress, but also as confirming what has
already been said of the economic status of women, bo