Show all files. The essay remained unknown to scholarship until when it was rediscovered and published for the first time in book form by Wilde historian John Cooper in Oscar Wilde On Dress CSM Press, , making it the only previously unknown work that Wilde intended for publication to have been released since he died in The essay is Wilde's treatise on Victorian Dress Reform and its relationship to art in which he expands on his public lecture entitled Dress , which was one of several lectures given in Great Britain and Ireland between and A significance of The Philosophy of Dress is that Wilde's only previously published prose works had been a handful of short reviews and letters that appeared in journals or newspapers.
With this essay Wilde announced himself as a commercial writer: it was the first work by him prepared as a composition for specific and separate publication, and it is the only piece of his journalism out of over examples that was copyrighted. Uploaded by VeritasValebit on March 29, Sarony 3A :: Photograph of Oscar Wilde. Sarony 18 :: Photograph of Oscar Wilde. The Last Four. With Short Hair Portrait of Sarony. Lecture Tour. The Lectures. Lecture Subjects. The Decorative Arts. The Full List.
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The only thing is to see them. Size is a mere accident of existence, it is not 43 a quality of Beauty ever. A great cathedral is beautiful, but so is the bird that 44 flies round its pinnacle, and the butterfly that settles on its shaft. A foot is not 45 necessarily beautiful because it is small. The smallest feet in the world are those of 46 the Chinese ladies, and they are the ugliest also.
Indeed in modern 51 costume the horizontal line is used far too often, the vertical line far too rarely, and 52 the oblique line scarcely at all. A long waist implies a 54 short skirt, which is always ungraceful as it conveys an effect of short limbs, 55 whereas a high waist gives an opportunity of a fine series of vertical lines falling in 56 the folds of the dress down to the feet, and giving a sense of tallness and grace.
And the 60 oblique line, which one gets by a cloak falling from the shoulder across the body, or 61 by a gown looped up at the side, is suitable to almost all figures. It is a line which 62 corresponds to the direction of motion and conveys an impression of dignity as well 63 as of freedom.
There are of course many other applications of these lines. I have 64 mentioned merely one or two in order to remind people how identical the laws of 65 architecture and of dress really are, and how much depends on line and proportion. In decorating a room, unless one wants 69 the room to be either chaos or a museum, one must be quite certain of one's 70 color-scheme.
So also in dress. The harmony of color must be clearly settled. If one 71 is small the simplicity of one color has many advantages. If one is taller two colors 72 or three may be used. I do not wish to give a purely arithmetical basis for an 73 aesthetic question, but perhaps three shades of color are the limit. All good colors are equally beautiful; it 81 is only in the question of their combination that art comes in. And one should have 82 no more preference for one color over another than one has for one note on the 83 piano over its neighbor.
Nor are there any sad colors. And the tertiary and 86 secondary colors are for general use the safest, as they do not show wear easily, pg 87 and besides give one a sense of repose and quiet.
A dress should not be like a 88 steam-whistle, for all that M. Worth may say. It should not be too definite. A strongly marked 90 check, for instance, has many disadvantages.
To begin with, it makes the slightest 91 inequality in the figure, such as between the two shoulders, very apparent; then it is 92 difficult to join the pattern accurately at the seams; and lastly, it distracts the eye 93 away from the proportions of the figure, and gives the mere details an abnormal 94 importance. I mention this, because I 96 happened lately in London to be looking for some stamped gray plush or velvet, 97 suitable for making a cloak of.
Every shop that I went into the man showed me the 98 most enormous patterns, things far too big for an ordinary wall paper, far too big for 99 ordinary curtains, things, in fact, that would require a large public building to show them off to any advantage.
I entreated the shopman to show me a pattern that would be in some rational and relative proportion to the figure of somebody who is not over ten or twelve feet in height. He replied that he was extremely sorry but that it was impossible; small patterns were no longer being woven, in fact the big patterns were the fashion. Now when he said the word fashion, he mentioned what is the great enemy of art in this century, as in all centuries.
Fashion is ephemeral, Art is eternal. Indeed what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months!
It is quite clear that were it beautiful and rational we would not alter anything that combined those two rare qualities. And wherever dress has been so, it has remained unchanged in law and principle for many hundred years. And if any of my practical friends in the States refuse to recognize the value of the permanence of artistic laws, I am quite ready to rest the point entirely on an economic basis.
The amount of money that is spent every year in America on dress is something almost fabulous. I have no desire to weary my readers with statistics, but if I were to state the sum that is spent yearly on bonnets alone, I am sure that one-half of the community would be filled with remorse and the other half with despair! So I will content myself with saying that it is something quite out of proportion to the splendor of modern dress, and that the reason must be looked for, not in the magnificence of the apparel, but rather in that unhealthy necessity for change which Fashion imposes on its beautiful and misguided votaries.
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