Why let fashion dictate what we shall wear? Radiate your distrust of its judgment. Radiate your refusal to submit to its dictates. Radiate your full and calm determination, without argument, to live in your own way. If a certain "style" of dress, which is structural, honest, neat, is suited to you to-day, it is suited to you to-morrow and for all time. Be yourself and _wear that style_ regardless of the fluctuations of fashion. Why should fashion say that a man's overcoat this year shall fit him tightly and keep him warm, and next year fit him loosely and send him into the cold, through a storm, shivering and chilled? What sense, what manliness, what dignity, is there in allowing a "fashion-designer" to thus have the opportunity of ruining our health? Let us radiate our positive repudiation of such insane follies, of such sins against our bodies, and in our dress, our food, our social customs, be ourselves in a kindly, unselfish, unobtrusive manner.
Wherever fashion dictates in matters of dress, of personal custom, there you find at once a restricted and "provincial" people. For fashion compels adherence to her silly commands, hence picturesque individuality disappears. A few years ago the clever editor of the New York _Journal_ wrote an editorial against men's wearing whiskers. One part of his argument was that the hairs were carriers of disease-germs, and that, therefore, a man with whiskers was dangerous and to be shunned. Thousands of the poor people of New York read and believed this man's preposterous screed, and were thus made unhappy and miserable, and by mental suggestion rendered more liable to the attacks of disease than they would have been had these foolish words never been penned.
It was fashion--not a care for health--that dictated those words. We Americans so love the intellectual conversation and edifying monologues of our barbers that we allow them to dictate to us whether we shall have hair on our cheeks or not, whether we shall have our necks shaved, and how much and whose "restorer" we shall put upon our hair.
I use the barber here merely as a type. He by no means stands alone.
I am determined to radiate a quiet but forceful protest against having my life or that of my fellows dictated to, in purely personal matters, by any one, whether he be priest, doctor, lawyer, barber, or editor. Let each live his own life, within reasonable bounds, and let each _expect_ every other to be himself. In nature there are no two things alike, yet fashion would have us _all alike_; and, it might be added, therefore, all foolish.
