Dress Design

Dress Design: An Account of Costume for Artists & Dressmaker by Talbot Hughes. The designing and making of Costume is a craft-sometimes artistic-with which we are all more or less concerned. It is also, in its own way, one of the living arts, that is, it is still carried forward experimentally by experts directly attached to the "business." It has not yet been subjected to rules of good taste formulated by Academies and Universities; but when Inigo Jones, the great architect, was asked to make some designs for fancy dress, he based them on the Five Orders of Architecture, and ponderous fancies they were. If we look for the main stem of principle on which modern Costume develops, we seem to find it in the desire for freshness, for the clean, the uncrushed, and the perfectly fitted and draped. Probably a modern lady's ideal would be to wear a dress once, and then burn it. A correlative of the ideal of freshness is the delight in perfect "cut," and the rapidly changing fashions are doubtless conditioned in part by the desire for the new and unsullied. "Novelty" is a guarantee of newness.