This article first appeared in a one hundred-and-one year-old issue of The New Republic and regardless of the fact that it was penned by a scribe who seldom gave much thought to fashion, many of his reflections regarding mode and those who are enslaved by it are still relevant today.
It all started for this fellow when he recognized that wherever he walked in the city of New York he would see throngs of black-clad women:
"The youngster and the elderly woman seem to rejoice in it equally. It gives a note of elegance to the pocket-size shop-girl. It gives a notion of slimness to to the lady in quarto-size. On Fourteenth Street one meets it in cheap improvisation. One sees it on Park Avenue, stepping in conscious precision of fashion into, or out of a motor. It comes in polite demureness into a hotel restaurant. It goes in modest righteousness to the shopping district, or or to tea..."
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