The tendency of luxury is toward demoralization. Rome never became dissipated and corrupt until her citizens became wealthy, and adopted luxurious modes of living. Nothing is much more conducive to sound morals than full occupation of the mind with useful labor. Fashionable idleness is a force to virtue. The young man or the young woman who wasted the precious hours of life in listless dreaming or in that sort of senseless twaddle which forms the bulk of the conversation in some circles, is in very great danger of demoralization. Many of the usages and customs of fashionable society seems to open the door to vice, and to insidiously, and at first unconsciously, lead the young and inexperienced away from the paths of purity and virtue. There is a good evidence that the amount of immorality among what are known as the higher classes is every year increasing. Every now and then a scandal in high life comes to the surface; but the great mass of corruption is effectually hidden from the general public. Open profligacy is of course frowned upon in all respectable circles; and yet wealth and accomplishments will cover a multitude of sins. This freedom allowed to the vile and vicious is one of the worst features of fashionable society. Such persons carry about them a moral atmosphere more deadly than the dreaded upastress.

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.

Insanity was not unknown among the wealthy. Indeed, some forms of madness had sometimes been cultivated as fashionable accessories.

Fashion and Vice.-Let us glance at the second manner n which dress lends its influence to vice, by obstructing the normal functions of the body. 1. Fashion requires a woman to compress her waist with bands or corsets. In consequence, the circulation of the blood toward the heart is obstructed. The venous blood is crowded back into the delicate organs of generation. Congestion ensures, and with it, through reflect action, the unnatural excitement of the animal propensities. 2. The manner of wearing the clothing, suspending several heavy garments from the hips, increases the same difficulty by bringing too large a share of clothing where it is least needed, thus generating unnatural local heat. 3. The custom of clothing the feet and limbs so thinly that they are exposed to constant chilling, by still further unbalancing the circulation, adds another element to increase the local mischief. All of these causes bombined, operating almost constantly,-with others that might be mentioned,-produce permanent local congestions, with ovarian and uterine derangements. The latter affections have long been recognized as the chief pathological condition in hysteria, and especially in that peculiar form o disease known as “nymphomania”, under the excitement of which a young woman, naturally chaste and modest, may be impelled to the commission of the most wanton acts. The pernicious influence of fashionable dress in occasioning this disorder cannot be doubted.

A fashion always has some meaning. The fashion, or style, of renunciation really meant something then. It was inspired by the war, or it ran parallel to the war, and could not have been conceived without the war... It stood for the will to sacrifice — if the unlimited will to throw away can be called the will to sacrifice. It was arrogant and elegantly cynical — because it is arrogant and elegantly cynical when the symbol of the élite becomes hunger. The superfluous here threw away the necessary quite simply. In its inner essence it was the disdain of death.

It is necessary to make virtue fashionable.

What makes the spectacle of Western bourgeois society so repulsive is the waste and squander of resources on needless products of status or display (e.g., the large, heavy automobile; the extravagant packaging of consumer items) for the sake of consumption.

But fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath — tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.

Among civilized peoples, especially the very wealthy population of the United States of America, women have become objects of luxury who consume but do not produce.

All fashionable clothes, as Thorstein Veblen has pointed out in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), are highly symbolic: materials, cut, and ornament are dictated only to a slight degree by consideration of warmth, comfort, or practicability. The more we dress up in fine clothes, the more we restrict our freedom of action. But by means of delicate embroideries, easily soiled fabrics, starched shirts, high heels, long and pointed fingernails. and other such sacrifices of comfort, the wealthy classes manage to symbolize, among other things, the fact that they don't have to work for a living.

I am surprised you should say fancy and aesthetic tastes have led me to my present state of mind: these would be better satisfied in the Church of England, for bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism.

The unfashionable faith is the very one to attract worldly people on their first awakening to spiritual sensibility. The show of worldliness is then, to the worldly, particularly offensive. "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life," delight in abasing themselves before rags and filth, wishing to reach the opposite extreme. The graces of the religious character, humility, meekness, self-accusation, contrition, find in associations with the coarse, the hard, the repulsive, their fittest expression. Hence it was that Judaism, heretofore the faith of the despised, became the faith of the despisers.

Fashion—a word which knaves and fools may use,
Their knavery and folly to excuse.
To copy beauties, forfeits all pretence
To fame—to copy faults, is want of sense.