The Cincinnati daily star. [volume] ([Cincinnati, Ohio]) 1875-1880, 1880-04-09
MUTATIONS IN FASHIONS.

MUTATIONS IN FASHIONS.
About everything that exists under
the sun is subject to the DEGREES Of fash
ion in one way or another. Every ar
ticle of dress that men or women wear
has to have the charges possible and i'm
possible rung over it about once in so
long, and comes round to the starting
point at last. Hats, coats, boots, bonnets,
purses, reticules, sleeve-buttons, parasols,
jewelry, claw-hammer coats, gored
dresses, hoops, even to Aunt Tabi-
tha's bonnet and Obadiah's bell
crown hat. There are fashions in
peoples aches and pains, in their
neuralgias, and even their fevers and
colics, that seem to fall into line for the
treatment of fashionable doctors, who
offer fashionable medicament from the
very latest style of broughams. Our
virtues, vices, amusements, theology,
politics, all have to pass through the
same hopper, and come out about as
much alike as two peas in pod, or
two potato vines in garden. Our
houses have prevalent style of finish
and ornamentation, our coaches and
drays prevailing cut and color, our
books must teach about the same tone of
sentiment, and the average run of people
are likely to be shocked by about the
same heterodoxy. ..
There is nothing, perhaps, surprising
in this when we reflect upon it. Man is
an initiative animal, and only does what
he is taught At birth he knows abso-
lutely nothing, except that he is hungry.
He can not build nest or build house
without learning how, like a bird or
beaver. He sees how others do things,
and generally follows their example. He
hears what others think and adopts
opinions of about the same profundity.
Once in the while man strikes out on
an original platform, but is apt to be
brought up with about as round turn
as the man or woman who adopts a
startling innovation in the cut of their
clothes Since, then, everything under
the sun resembles everything else under
the sun, how is it that the prevailing
fashions in about every one of these
mundane productions is constantly
shifting from their moorings? Why is
it and how is it, for instance, that the
huge bonnet Of forty years ago has passed
through multifarious gradations of form
within the time, from scoops, Navarinos,
flats, Gypsies, pokes, platters, postage
stamps, brigands, and nigh hundred
other shapes, while no one has been
shocked or seriously astonished over it!
Or how is it that mems head-gear has,
from bell-crowns, collapsed, and shrunk,
and been modified into round tops square
tops, swelled tops, half-bell, sugar-loaf,
the high crowns, the low crowns, the
wide rim, narrow rim, fiat rim, curled
rim, turbans with no rims at all, and hall
score other forms, and yet the very
most fashionable agony of last season OF
the season before is constantly the aver
sion of the exquisite of the present?
The fact is, we are all the time striving
for something new and novel; something
unknown and more beautiful than be
fore, and yet we are treading forever in &
circle that has been tread, how many
times already, he would be wise mar
who undertakes to say. The sea is for
ever advancing upon the shore, but
behind and beyond the sands are rising
constantly from the sea, and so the
march Of destiny goes on forever.
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