2011年10月21日星期五

The ramp is not the testing ground for unconventional

 fashion but only for the approved fashions conforming to the rules of the fashion designers and fashion leaders. Thus no time is to be wasted on frivolous topics. The fashion showsNike Requin, and perhaps the fashion parades, will no longer be the occasion of satisfying the appetite for fashion or of gossip, but a perfectly choreographed business platform satisfying the majority - conventional fashion. The same repeats at the dinner party where the giver of the dinner will furnish the topic of Nike Air Max LTD Homme conversation. It is not conventional and moreover not approved by the social and fashion leaders who make the rules. By this concentration we shall be able as one man or one woman to reach the human limit of cultivation, and get rid of all the aberrations of individual assertion and feeling. The natural, comfortable, casual, affordable, ordinary fashion like Multiwear Wrap Skirts will not be allowed. Is it true that being too fashionable, what we call sophistication kills individuality? Or, worse than that even, that one loses her taste by being over-fashionable? Those women are boring, certainly, who have gone so far in culture that they accept conventional standards supposed to be correct, to which they refer everything, and by which they measure everyone. The art of true appreciation is lost. When we meet we shall talk on set topics, determined beforehand. Society is taking alarm at this, and the women as usual are leaders in a reform. Are you wasting your sweet lives by rule? Is your dress graceful, your make up perfect, your shoes in order - liable to be monotonous in its gay repetition of the same thing week after week? Is there nothing outside of that envied circle which you make so brilliant? Is the Atlantic shore the only coast where beauty may lounge and spread its net of enchantment? You might come back to your original selves, and find again that freedom and that charm of individuality that are so attractive.Some sparkling summer morning, if you chanced to wear just a wrap skirt and a cotton top and drive four-in-hand along the broad beach at Santa Barbara, inhaling, the spicy breeze from the Sandwich Islands, along the curved shore where the blue of the sea and the purple of the mountains mingle together,Bottes Timberland Homme would you not, we wonder, come to yourselves in the sense of a new life where it is good form to be enthusiastic and not disgraceful to be surprised? A whole world of new sensations lies on the way, experiences for which you will have no formula of experience. The ordinary natural flow of rejoinder and repartee, the swirling of talk around one obstacle and another, its winding and rippling here and there as individual whim suggests, will not be allowed, but all will be improving, and tend to that general culture of which we have been speaking. Perhaps each lady on taking her seat may find in her napkin a written slip of paper which shall be the guide to her remarks. In the fashion world this information is now brought into use. It is easier to go on in the subordination of one's personality to the strictly conventional life. Two persons may not speak at once; two persons may not talk with each other; all talk is to be general and on the topic assigned, and while one is speaking, the others must listen. It expects rather to record a continually perfected system, a life in which not only fashion and style but speech and ideas are brought into rule.We have to comment occasionally on fashion and style - the art of being individual, which is in danger of being lost in the confused rules, conventions, culture and rigidity. I am not urging any break-up of the social order, no mater how painful a return to individuality may be. Already, by reason of clubs-literary, scientific, economic--woman is the well-informed part of our society. Style & taste usually implies a sort of selection; the cultivated taste of which we speak is merely a comparison, no longer an individual preference or appreciation, but only a reference to the conventional and accepted standard. We shall live more by rule and less by impulse. To take the journey is perhaps too heroic treatment for the disease of conformity--the sort of malaria of our exclusive civilization. When woman has reached this stage of propriety we are never curious any more concerning their opinions on any subject. We know that the opinions expressed will not be theirs, evolved out of their own feeling, but that they will be the cut-and-dried results of conventionality.It is undoubtedly a great comfort to a woman to know exactly how to feel, what to wear and what to say in every new contingency, but whether the zest of life is not dulled by this ability is a grave question, for it leaves no room for surprise and little for emotion. When we dress, we strictly follow rules and convention. The ladies' lunch is not to be exactly a debating society, but an open occasion for the delivery of matured thought and the acquisition of information.I anticipate a period of repose in all our feverish social life. By studying together in clubs, by conversing in monotone and by rule, by thinking the same things and exchanging ideas until we have none left, we shall come into that social placidity which is one dream of the nationalists--one long step towards what may be called a prairie mental condition--the slope of Kansas, where those who are five thousand feet above the sea-level seem to be no higher than those who dwell in the Missouri Valley.http://www.mishcollection.com.





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