When The Income Is Limited

No one can dress well on nothing a year; that must be granted at the outset. But a woman who has talent, taste, and ingenuity can be suitably and charmingly dressed on little a year, especially at present.

First of all, to mind wearing a dress many times because it indicates a small bank account, is to exhibit a false notion of the values in life. Any one who thinks well or ill of her, in accordance with her income, can not be too quickly got rid of! But worthwhile people are influenced in her disfavor when she has clothes in number and quality out of proportion to her known financial situation.

It is tiresome everlastingly to wear black, but nothing is so serviceable, nothing so unrecognizable, nothing looks so well on every occasion. A very striking dress can not be worn many times without making others as well as its owner feel bored at the sight of it. " Here comes the Zebra" or " the Cockatoo! " is inevitable if a dress of stripes or flamboyant color is worn often. She who must wear one dress through a season and have it perhaps made over the next, would better choose black or cream color. Or perhaps a certain color suits her, and this fact makes it possible for her habitually to wear it without impressing others with her lack of clothes. But whether her background be black or cerise it should invariably blend with her whole wardrobe, so that all accessories can be made to do double or quadruple service.

Supposing you are a young woman with more beauty than wealth! Let us also suppose you have three evening dresses, a blue, a pink and a green. At the moment you can wear flesh-colored slippers and stockings with everything, which rather weakens the argument—however, a blue fan does not look well with a pink or a green dress, nor do the other combinations. Supposing, however, you had instead a cream-colored dress, a flesh-colored, and an orchid one. Flesh-colored slippers look much better with cream and orchid than with either green or blue, at any rate! A watermelon pink fan is lovely in night-light with all three; so is a cream one. Or perhaps by changing both fan and slippers, a different effect is produced, since the colors of your clothes are background colors.

But nothing really can compare with the utility and smartness of black. Take a black tulle dress, made in the simplest possible way; worn plain, it is a simple dinner dress. It can have a lace slip to go over it, and make another dress. With a jet harness—meaning merely trimming that can be added at will—it is still another dress. Or it can have a tunic of silver or of gold trimming; and fans, flowers and slippers in various colors, such as watermelon or emerald, change it again. In fact, a black tulle can be changed almost as easily as though done with a magician's wand.

To choose daytime clothes that go with the same hats, shoes, parasols, wrist-bags, and gloves, is equally important. A snuff-colored dress and a gray one need entirely different accessories. Russet shoes, chamois gloves, and sand-colored hat go also with henna, raspberry, reds, etc.; but gray must have gray or white shoes, gloves, and hat, which also go with blues, greens and violets.

Don't Get Too Many Clothes

Choose the clothes which you must have, carefully, and if you must cut down, cut down on elaborate ones. There is scarcely anywhere that you can not, fittingly go in plain clothes. Very few, if any, people need fancy things; all people need plain ones.

A very beautiful Chicago woman who is always perfectly dressed for every occasion, worked out the cost of her own clothes this way: On a sheet of paper, thumb-tacked on the inside of her closet door, she put a complete typewritten list of her dresses and hats, and the cost of each. Every time she put on a dress she made a pencil mark. By and by when a dress was discarded, she divided the cost of it by the number of times it had been worn. In this way she found out accurately which were her cheapest and which her most expensive clothes. When getting new ones she has the advantage of very valuable information, since she avoids the dress that is never put on, which is a bigger handicap for the medium-sized allowance than many women realize.