made by fashionable dress-makers who irritate their customers by overcharging them for the "trimmings," instead of having it understood that a consultation-fee of from three to fifty dollars, according to the brain-work required in designing a dress, will be charged to begin with. There is no fear but that the costume-artist would make a handsome income, when we consider the need women have of dress to heighten their charms and to palliate their defects, and the little knowledge or instinct that many of them possess for the successful accomplishment of these results.
How Dress-making may become a Fine Art.
The whole subject of the aesthetics of dress is in a crude, and in some respects positively savage state, among us. What, for instance, does the clerk who urges the stuff upon the buyer, or the dress-maker who cuts and trims it, know about that harmony of texture, colour, and form which should subsist between the wearer and her robe? What, about the grace of outline which should control its fashion? the effectiveness of inline and crossline which should guide its omamention, and manifold other subtile considerations? Nothing; and therefore nothing could better repay the co-operative housekeepers than to offer inducements and facilities to those two or three in every circle who are distinguished for taste and elegance in dress, to make a study of the whole matter, with a view to elevating it into one of the finer arts, instead of perpetuating the coarse, often vulgar, apology for beauty and fitness that it is at present. The imperfect adaptation by women of the means of dress to its true ends is a never-failing subject of complaint and ridicule against us by the other sex; but it is not surprising that the fashions are so often grotesque, exaggerated, inconvenient, and even physically and morally injurious, when it is known who sets them. Not the ladies of the French Court, not even the "queens of the demi-monde" that the newspapers so love to talk about, design the things that
