The Art of Dressing Well & Being Well-Dressed | Lifestyle Podcast

Podcast Transcript: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. If you have a friend or family member who will be graduating high school or college this year, our book Evergreen: 50 Inspirational Life Lessons makes for an excellent gift. You can now purchase this beautiful hardcover book at a special 25% discount, with the coupon code: Give25. This coupon is good through January 28th. To learn more, please visit: InspirationalLifeLessons.com.

Now, on to today’s reading, which was edited and adapted from the book: “The Man Who Pleases, and the Woman Who Fascinates” by John Albert Cone, published in 1901.

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There is an old Spanish proverb that says, ”No woman is ugly who is well dressed.” And, of course, Shakespeare has said that “the apparel oft proclaims the man.”

I believe in dress. I believe that God delights in beautiful things, and as nothing is more beautiful than the human form, I believe that that mode of dressing the form and face which best harmonizes with our personal beauty is that which pleases best the Divine.

As I am a man, this discourse on dress is, of course, written from a man’s point of view. I know very well that were I to attempt to write elaborately of woman’s clothes I would be lost. No one but a woman or fashion designer can do that. The ordinary man who tried it would soon find himself bewildered by a maze of terms and expressions which seem absolutely necessary to describe exactly what is meant.

Possibly, however, I can take a broad view of the subject apart from and above the finesse with which feminine writers would treat the subject. Clothes are the woman’s weapons, one of the resources of civilization with which woman marches forth to the conquest of the world, and I wish to estimate from a man’s standpoint just how much the fabrics, the accessories, and the designs have to do in influencing the masculine heart.

What one wears is accepted as an index of one’s character. Whether this is as it should be or not, it is true; and we all feel, more or less, that coarseness or refinement finds visible expression in apparel as in no other way.

“Surely,” says The Boston Journal, “nothing so intensifies the personality as the clothes one wears; through association they become a part of us, help to identify us, even in some peculiar, reactionary way, serve to control our mental states.”

Many women will tell you that their most infallible cure for weariness and the blues is to go and dress up in one of their most attractive outfits. Many men will tell you that a clean shave, clean linen, and a fresh suit of clothes are most reviving and soothing in their effect upon the psychical, as well as the physical, man.

The old-fashioned statement, once often made, that women dress well only to please men, is only a fraction of the truth. They dress to please men; to please one another, and to please themselves. Which of these three motives is the strongest depends upon the individual, and it is absurd to make any attempt to analyze motives or to formulate principles which will apply to all women.

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