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The rich woman herself does not escape scot free. It is obvious that the woman chiefly occupied with thoughts of dress develops a peculiar kind of frivolity, that she becomes unfit to think of art, the public interest, perhaps of love. She is the worst social product, a parasite, and she is not even always beautiful. Sometimes she is insane: the investigations of Doctor Bernard Holz and of Doctor Rudolf Foerster connect the mania for fashion with paranoia, and have elicited extraordinary facts, such as the collection of clothes by insane women, and such as cases of pyromania which coincided with a craze for dress.

It is, indeed, quite possible that some women might go mad if they permanently felt themselves less well-dressed than their fellows; and that is the crux of the fashion idea. Woman does not desire to be beautifully dressed: she desires to be more beautifully dressed than her fellows. She wishes to insult and humiliate her sisters, and, as modern clothes are costly, she does not hesitate to give full play to human cruelty, to use all the resources of the rich husband on whom she preys to satisfy her pride and to apply her arrogant ingenuity to the torture of her sisters. And I said, “She wants to be more beautiful.” Is that quite right? Partly, though what woman mainly seeks is not to be beautiful but to be fashionable; the words have become synonymous. Yet the fashions are not always beautiful; sometimes they are hideous, break every line of the body, make it awkward, hamper its movements. If women truly wanted to be beautiful they would not follow the fashions: our little dark, sloe-eyed women would dress rather like the Japanese, and our big, ox-eyed beauties would appear as Greeks; but no, Juno, Carmen, and Dante’s Beatrice, all together and all in turn, don first the crinoline and then the hobble skirt.

Nor do they want to attract men. They think they do but they do not, for they know perfectly well that few men realize what they wear, that all they observe is “something blue” or an effect they call “very doggy”; they know also that men do not wed the dangerous smart, but the modest; that men fear the implication that smart women are unvirtuous, and that they certainly fear their dressmakers’ bills. Nor is it even true that women want many new clothes so as to be clean: if that were true, men in their well-worn suits could not be touched with a pitchfork. The truth is that changes in fashion are a habit and a hysteria, an advertisement, an insult offered by wealth to poverty, a degradation of women’s qualities which carries its own penalty in the form of growing mental baseness.

Well, what shall we do? Women must wear a uniform. Strictly, they already do wear a uniform, for what is a fashion but a uniform? Some years ago when musquash coats (and cheaper velveteen) were “in”, and hats were very small, there were in London scores of thousands of young women so exactly alike that considerable confusion was caused at tube stations and such other places where lovers meet; this simplifies the problem of choosing the new uniform. Let it not be thought that I wish women to dress in sackcloth, though they will certainly dress in sackcloth if ever sackcloth comes in; I do not care what they wear, provided they do not continually alter its form, and provided it is not too dear. The way in which old and young, tall and short, fat and thin, force themselves into the same color and the same shape is sheer socialism; I merely want to carry the uniform idea a little further, to make it a permanent uniform.

We already have uniforms for women, apart from the fashions, uniforms which never change: those of the nurse, the nun, the parlor-maid, the tea-girl. We have national costumes, Dutch, Swiss, Irish, Japanese, Italian; we have drill suits and sports dresses. And they are not ugly. All these uniformed women have as good a chance of marriage as any others, and her ladyship gains as many proposals on the golf links as at night on the terrace. I would suggest that women should have two or three uniforms of a kind to be decided, which would never change, and, I repeat, they need not be ugly uniforms.