Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic. . . it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. . . . Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.
Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.