Friday, February 17, 2012

Rose Macaulay on Women, Fashion and Money

Ever since I read her The Towers of Trebizond, I have been drawn to Rose Macaulay, whose thoughts on women, fashion, and money I reproduce here without comment:

“Let us . . . consider sartorial problems -- those of them which belong peculiarly to women.  The chief of these is, of course, how to dress well on expenditure insufficient for that purpose.  And it may at once be admitted that this is impossible.  You must either dress badly or spend more money than you wish to -- in most cases more than you have got.  It is a simple alternative, and every woman must make up her own mind which she intends to adopt.  Many women adopt both.  Another sartorial problem has always been how to reconcile a certain conformity to fashion with a certain comfort and grace . . . And it, too, is insoluble.  You cannot be at once graceful, comfortable, and in the mode.  Probably you will be none of these things.  Life is hard for women, as the saying goes.”

Rose Macaulay, A Casual Commentary  (New York:  Boni & Liveright, 1926, p. 237)

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