The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-03-23

social barrier in his way to the highest place
in the land-all these give him sense of his
own dignity, which instinctively seeks utter
ance in o becoming dress and more or less
dignifed carriage.
Nature has endowed the American lady
with profusion of rich gifts, far beyond
their less favored sisters abroad. II really
great beauties are comparatively rare-and
even on this point the diversity of taste may
lead to difference of opinion-the majority
Of women are more than merely fair. They
are almost without exception delicately made,
and in this respect very different from the
robust type of the English girl of the PERIOD
with her ruddy color, her full form, and her
deep, masculine voice, and still more differ
ent from the heavy, angular German girl,
who combines so mysteriously an immense
amount of sentimentality with an unlimited
appetite. The neck and the extremities are
uniformly so small that European establish
ments have to make collars, gloves, and
shoes, especially for the American market,
certain sizes of these three articles being
utterly unstable in Europe. Hence, when
the Americen girl reaches her national
heaven, Paris, and has been for few weeks
in the hands of French artists she is
simply perfection. She outshines the Pari-
sian on her own privileged ground. Elderly
men will remember q fair New York beauty,
who visited Paris when the Emperor was still
President, and the .tu10re her exquisite toi-
lettes created, whenever she appeared at the
OPERA at the Elysee, or at the Bois. Younger
men need not be reminded of the recent
rivalry between one of their beautiful coun-
trywomen and the brilliant Metternich and
the desperate but futile efforts made by the
great arbter of fashion to wrest the crown of
victory from her hands. Combining great
natural advantages in beauty and grace with
admirable taste and an almost instructive per-
ceptlon of the becoming, American women
abroad very easily outstrip all competitors in
the art of dressing.
All the more is it to be regretted that their
taste at home has been vitiated by fierce
competition, SO as to make them prefer rich
ness of texture, brightness of color, and often
simple costliness, to what is handsome in it.
self or becoming in individual cases. From
the days of Mad'lle Victorine, Partisan mo-
diSteS have had their show-rooms for their
country women, another for English ladies',
and still another for transatlantic visitors: in
the first are seen things pretty and elegant,
but cheap; in the second, marvellous struc-
lures, specially designed to please the
peculiar taste of Miladi; and in the
third, the most expensive articles, the
most gorgeous costumes. But worse
still is behind. When the great New
York milliner performs her semi-annual pill
Il
full well how happily the interests of her
purse agree with the taste of her customers,
and she selects only the most striking and
most expensive of novelties. These. and
these only-often worn by none but the
demi-monde, but endorsedSby the prestige of
her name-become the fashion, and the
American ladies, to their great injury, forego
the immense variety of less snowy and less
costly articles of dress, which enable the
l1..
what is really pretty and becoming to her size
color, and character, to appear always to great
advantage at very little expense. And if this
is the penalty paid by the fashionable lady of
New York and New Orleans-where alone
fashions are directly imported-sad is the fate
of the American lady in the remoter inland
town. Never was there known in history
such abject slavery to fashion; not even in the
saddest days of Germany, when she was
Frenchifed from the courts of her forty odd
princes down to the humblest home of the
green grocer. If Flora McFlimsey wears
crimson gloves, the epidemic spreads like
wildfre, and in a few weeks every
lady, from Maine to Texas, and from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, has bloody
hands. If Mme La Mode proclaims
the crinoline defunct, the dresses collapse in
stantly all over the Union, and present mar
vellous shapes in the insane desire to obey
the edict before the newly-devised substitute
can be procured. AS every woman is lady
as Biddy the Irish maid dresses as nearly as
she can like her mistress, and even Dinah,
the scullion, now has entered the lists-the
trade in fashions is brisk beyond all concep-
ton. The example of New York is followed
by the great milliners in the large cities of
each State; from these centres the smaller
towns are supplied, and thanks to the match
less facility of travelling and of conveying
goods to vast distances by means of express
agencies, the last novelty reaches the
most remote regions in an incredibly
short time. The traveller can hardly over
take them, and is pretty sure to find the far
mer's wife in the Far West in q costume he
has seen in Broadway, and to meet the last
style of bonnet that came over in the same
vessel with him in every shop window
throughout the land. At least he will recog-
nize a faint resemblance for the exaggera-
tion increases with the distance from New
| York, the great metropolis of the Union; and
the short dress, which nearly touched the
Inud-defiled pavement of the city, has shrunk
up above the boot-tops by the time it has
reached the South, while the little rosebud in
the coquettish hat has bloomed forth into q
colossal bouquet, glowing in all the colors OF
| the rainbow.
But the sad effects of this universal and
almost slavish submission to fashion are not
limited to the injury done to taste and pro-
priety; they go much further and do more
fatal damage. AS economy is an almost un
known virtue in this land of plenty, so tha
even a five years war could not teach it, the
good people of the South and their womer
dress as richly and brilliantly now as ever
No one thinks of wearing last seasons tinery
or turning half worn dress to make it serve