Identifier: welldressedwoma00ecob (find matches)
Title: The well-dressed woman: a study in the practical application to dress of the laws of health, art, and morals
Year: 1892 (1890s)
Authors: Ecob, Helen Gilbert
Subjects: Women's clothing Women
Publisher: New York, Fowler & Wells Co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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BEAUTY OF FORM. 193

equal parts, and each feature of the right side
balances and plays into each feature of the left.
We say, at the first moment, here is an element of
beauty with which fashionable dress does not in-
terfere. A corset, tight sleeves, tight boots, leave
the same rigid impression on the right and left
sides. But the symmetry of nature is never formal
nor accurate. She takes the greatest care to secure
some difference between the corresponding things
or parts of things. The bough on the left side of
the tree is not precisely like the bough on the
right. If it were there would be an effect of
stiffness and formality. The right and left eyes
working in exactly the same method would have
the animation of eyes which turn to the right and
left by machinery. The symmetry of the corset-
figure is mathematical. The rigidity of the waist
is the fixed symmetry of an inanimate being.
There is no delicate balancing of the sides by the
interplay of muscles. The muscles indeed seem
petrified. The precise and tapering lines of the
corset-figure are of no higher quality than the
mantua-maker's dummy..

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