ore. We humbly offer what we hope may prove a key to the rich
storehouse.

Simplicity, and pure line, were lost sight of when overabundance dulled
the senses of the world. We could prove this, for art shows that the
costuming of woman developed slowly, preserving, as did furniture, the
same classic lines and general characteristics until the fifteenth
century, the end of the Middle Ages.

With the opening up of trade channels and the possibilities of easy and
quick communication between countries we find, as we did in the case of
furniture, periods of fashion developing without nationality. Nations
declared themselves in the artistry of workmanship, as to-day, and in
the modification and exaggeration of an essential detail, resulting from
national or individual temperament.

If you ask, "Where do fashions come from,--why 'periods'?" we would
answer that in the last analysis one would probably find in the
conception of every fashion some artist's brain. If the period is a good
one, then it proves that fate allowed the artist to be true to his muse.
If the fashion is a bad one the artist may have had to adapt his lines
and colour or detail to hide a royal deformity, or to cater to the whim
of some wilful beauty ignorant of our art, but rich and in the public
eye.

A fashion if started is a demon or a god let loose. As we have said,
there is an interesting point to be observed in looking at woman as
decoration; whether the medium be fresco, bas relief, sculpture, mosaic,
stained glass or painting, the decorative line, shown in costumes,
presents the same recurrent types that we found when studying the
history of furniture.

For our present purposes it is expedient to confine ourselves to the
observation of that expression of civilisation which had root, so far as
we know, in Assyria and Egypt, and spread like a branching vine through
Byzantium, Greece, Rome, Gothic Europe and Europe of the Renaissance, on
through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, down to
the present time.

Costumes for woman and man are supposed to have had their origin in a
cord tied about the waist, from which was suspended crude implements
(used for the slaying of beasts for food, and in self-defence); trophies
of war, such as teeth, scalps, etc. The trophies suspended, partly
concealed the body and were for decoration, as was tattooing of the
skin. Clothes were not the result of modesty; modesty followed the
partial covering