Dodge City times. [volume] (Dodge City, Kan.) 1876-1892, 1888-06-28
VARIETY IN BONNETS.
studies Made on the Street and in the Mil
lnery Shops.

linery Shops.
One of the curiosities of commerce il
the variety in woman's hats and bon
nets to be found in the millinery
stores. A man likes to have his hat
like the hat that every other man is
wearing, but if woman buys bon
net and then goes out on the street
and sees bonnet just like hers on the
head of another woman she loses her
temper. On the hat question woman
insists upon being q monopolist. She
will be exclusive or she won't play. As
a matter of fact women are not often
thus offended. Go over on State street
and see if You can find two bonnets
alike. A prize is offered for such
discovery, but you are not likely to
win it. More likely are you to find
blade of grass growing in the middle
of the great shopping thoroughfare.
How the makers and trimmers of bon
nets manage to avoid duplication is a
mystery, but they do it. 1t is tradi-
ton of the trade that every bonnet is
work of art, standing alone aud by
itself. But all bonnets are not works
of art, by any means. Some of them
are about as far from art as they can
get. But they are works of art in
that each is built from an original de-
sign, as a picture is painted. Mems
hats are mere articles of commerce,
turned out by machines and by the
thousands, all alike. A woman's bon
net is like painting. The picture
may be bad one, with inharmonious
coloring, clumsy arrangement of forms,
outlandishness of shapes. But it is
fashioned by nimble fingers, and not
by any machine. by fingers which new
er fashioned one bonnet just like an
other. Only the frames are machine
made. Thousands of these are of like
form and appearance. But the frame
is only the foundation. The super
structure is the bonnet. From
Paris each season come hun
dreds of bonnets representing
the latest and presumably the best
work of the fashionable milliners of
that city of the modes. On the general
lines of these Paris pattern bonnets
Chicago milliners build their wares,
taking care to make no two alike, but
to vary the detail, and to blend some
of the features of one pattern bonnet
with some of the features of another,
thus making an entirely new article.
The manufacturing departments of the
big wholesale millinery houses do make
bennets just alike, but in shipping
them they take good care that no du-
plicates be sent to the same town. Yet
with all the care and all the precaution
to secure variety as infinite as the va
riety of womankind itself, it some
times happens in the operation of the
laws of chance that woman with
new bonnet on her head will encounter
upon the street or see in the show WIN
dow of a nlilliner bonnet so near like
her own that upon superficial exam
nation she can not distinguish the diff
ference. What then happens? Why,
the woman is 'put OUT or 'morti-
fed or knocked silly OF becomes
$50 mad that she could cry" according
to the bent of her vocabulary. But this
is not all that happens. The woman
goes straightway to her home or to her
milliner, with such precipitateness
that all other errands and purposes are
utterly neglected, and pauses not until
ribbon or u feather or an ornament
has been taken from or put upon that
bonnet, and its resemblance to the
other entirely destroyed. When this
is done the woman may be happy again,
but not before. In this we find another
phase of that process of differentiation,
which gives to the world infinite vari-
ETY. in the species bonnet. b, that
natural selection and survival of the
tittest could apply as rigidly.-C Chicago
Herald.