The Real Cost of Dressing

THE figures given in a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, showing the prices women pay for clothes, are startling; but may it not be true that the real cost of dressing is not money, chiefly, but time and anxious thought? A woman spends more or less money on dress, according to her income; probably neither the very rich nor the very poor spend out of proportion to their income. Nearly all women, however, except the miserably poor who do not ‘dress’ at all, but simply cover their nakedness, give more time to clothes than they can afford. Whatever our condition in life, we all must live on twenty-four hours a day. Of those hours, clothes claim more than their due.

Yesterday I was calling on a friend who lives in a fashionable New York apartment. She told me she went every morning for a ‘ fitting.’

I protested.

‘You mean in the spring and fall, when you are getting your things, don’t you ? ’

‘No; I mean every day, through the eight winter months. It’s an awful nuisance. No wonder I’m a nervous wreck. I wash John would let me wear readymade things. It’s absurd, but it’s a fact that I hardly ever go through the day without going either to the tailor or the dressmaker, or to try on hats or shoes or corsets. I have a good many things made between seasons, when the prices are lower. And I have to squeeze in time to go shopping; for white I buy very little in the shops, I want to see what the new imported things look like, and go to the openings. I’ve found a dear little Frenchwoman who makes all my lingerie,’—my friend wears lingerie, not underwear, — ‘ and very cheaply, too, considering the exquisite work she does, but she expects me to tell her just how I want everything done, and to choose designs for the embroidery, and to buy the lace and ribbon; and of course I try on every garment. Stockings and veils are about the only things I can get ready-made, and it takes a lot of time selecting them. Don’t you think the new veils are awfully trying?’

I hurried away to conceal my ignorance of the new veils, and went up town to look up an old school friend whom I had not seen for twenty years, and who had lately come to live in New York. I remembered her as a clever girl, with a gift for music.

‘ Oh, dear, no, I never go to concerts and picture exhibitions,’ she said. ‘To tell the truth I don’t do anything all day long but make clothes, and mend them, and remodel them, and go to bargain sales, and hunt up cheap dressmakers. John teases me, and says I wear my brains on my back, but he ought to be glad I ’m not wearing every dollar he earns. I’m not extravagant, and I don’t run up bills or buy finery that I’d wear once and then throw away. I wash my lace blouses myself, and my silk stockings, and I make all my underclothes by hand.

‘New York is mighty hard on your clothes. Of course I’m a good deal of a stranger, and I have n’t many invitations, and so don’t need so large a wardrobe as I did in Dallas, but still I have to dress better than I did there. The standard is higher. There never is a time when you can just put on any old thing. In New York people dress up to go to market, or to early church. When John takes me to the theatre I’ve got to look nice, or I could n’t enjoy the play. If I walk down the Avenue in a suit that is n’t just right, I am self-conscious and pessimistic. I see nothing but the reflection of my “tacky” self in the big windows. I simply must dress well, if it takes all my time. Is n’t the war news awful? I’ve read only the headlines, but won’t it be funny if next year we have to get our fashions from Berlin? ’

On the way home, in the street-car, I heard two high-school girls talking.

‘Did you pass in algebra? I only got 55 for a mark. Ain’t it a shame! And I have n’t written my essay, either. I have n’t had no time to go to the Library to look up anything. Mother said I could n’t go to the Hallowe’en dance without I made my costume myself, and my new shirtwaist I’m embroidering has just loads of work on it, and oh! you just ought to see my new tailor suit. I copied it from an awfully swell dress I saw in the movies, and I spent four whole afternoons chasing round before I could find a little tailor that was willing to press it, after I’d made it myself. It’s some suit, if I do say it.’

I got off the car, reflecting gloomily on the vanity of my sex, stopped at a shop on ‘the Avenue’ to satisfy my curiosity about the ‘ new veils,’ bought one, after about twenty minutes’ indecision, and then went home and spent an hour dressing for dinner.