So that it will hold true in a general way that fashions are least stable and least becoming in those communities where the principle of a conspicuous waste of goods asserts itself most imperatively, as among ourselves.

All this points to an antagonism between expensiveness and artistic apparel.

In point of practical fact, the norm of conspicuous waste is incompatible with the requirement that dress should be beautiful or becoming.

And this antagonism offers an explanation of that restless change in fashion which neither the canon of expensiveness nor that of beauty alone can account for.
The standard of reputability requires that dress should show wasteful expenditure; but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste.

The psychological law has already been pointed out that all men--and women perhaps even in a higher degree abhor futility, whether of effort or of expenditure--much as Nature was once said to abhor a vacuum.