d, London, and New York. They
are _outre_ to a degree, yet each one suggests the whole or parts of
costumes for modern woman--adorable lines, unbelievable combinations of
colour! No wonder Poiret, the Paris dressmaker, seized upon Bakst as
designer (or was it Bakst who seized upon Poiret?).

Bakst got his inspiration in the Orient. As a bit of proof, for your own
satisfaction, there is a book entitled _Six Monuments of Chinese
Sculpture_, by Edward Chauvannes, published in 1914, by G. Van Oest &
Cie., of Brussels and Paris. The author, with a highly commendable
desire to perpetuate for students a record of the most ancient
speciments of Chinese sculpture, brought to Paris and sold there, from
time to time, to art-collectors, from all over the world; selected six
fine speciments as theme of text and for illustrations.

Plate 23 in this collection shows a woman whose costume in _outline_
might have been taken from Bakst or even Vogue. But put it the other way
round: the Vogue artist to-day--we use the word as a generic term--finds
inspiration through museums and such works as the above. This is
particularly true as our little handbook goes into print, for the reason
that the great war between the Central Powers and the Entente has to a
certain extent checked the invention and material output of Europe, and
driven designers of and dealers in costumes for women, to China and
Japan.

Our great-great-grandmothers here in America wore Paris fashions shown
on the imported fashion dolls and made up in brocades from China, by the
Colonial mantua makers. So we are but repeating history.

To-day, war, which means horror, ugliness, loss of ideals and illusions,
holds most of the world in its grasp, and we find creative
artists--apostles of the Beautiful, seeking the Orient because it is
remote from the great world struggle. We hear that Edmund Dulac (who has
shown in a superlative manner, woman decorative, when illustrating the
_Arabian Nights_ and other well-known books), is planning a flight to
the Orient. He says that he longs to bury himself far from carnage, in
the hope of wooing back his muse.

If this subject of background, line and colour, in relation to costuming
of woman, interests you, there are many ways of getting valuable points.
One of them, as we have said, is to walk through galleries looking at
pictures only as decorations; that is, colour and line against the
painter's background.

Fashions change, in dress