To dress well requires something more than a full purse and a pretty figure. It needs taste, good sense, and refinement. Dress may almost be classed as one of the fine arts. It is certainly one of those arts, the cultivation of which is indispensable to any person moving in the upper or middle classes of society. Very clever women are too frequently indifferent to the graces of the toilette; and women who wish to be thought clever affect indifference. In the one case it is an error, and in the other a folly. It is not enough that a gentlewoman should be clever, or well-educated, or well-born. To take her due place in society, she must be acquainted with all that this little book proposes to teach. She must, above all else, know how to enter a room, how to perform a graceful salutation, and how to dress. Of these three important qualifications, the most important, because the most observed, is the latter.
Let your style of dress always be appropriate to the hour of the day. To dress too finely in the morning, or to be seen in a morning dress in the evening, is equally vulgar and out of place.
Light and inexpensive materials are fittest for morning wear; dark silk dresses for the promenade or carriage; and low dresses of rich or transparent stuffs for the dinner and ball. A young lady cannot dress with too much simplicity in the early part of the day. A morning dress of some simple material, and delicate whole colour, with collar and cuffs of spotless linen, is, perhaps, the most becoming and elegant of morning toilettes.
Never dress very richly or showily in the street. It attracts attention of no enviable kind, and is looked upon as a want of good breeding. In the carriage a lady may dress as elegantly as she pleases. With respect to ball-room toilette, its fashions are so variable, that statements which are true of it to-day, may be false a month hence. Respecting no institution of modern society is it so difficult to pronounce half-a-dozen permanent rules.
We may, perhaps, be permitted to suggest the following leading principles; but we do so with diffidence. Rich colours harmonize with rich brunette complexions and dark hair. Delicate colours are the most suitable for delicate and fragile styles of beauty. Very young ladies are never so suitably attired as in white. Ladies who dance should wear dresses of light and diaphanous materials, such as _tulle_, gauze, crape, net, &c., over coloured silk slips. Silk dresses are not suitable for dancing. A married lady who dances only a few quadrilles may wear a _décolleté_ silk dress with propriety.
