Gilded Age Glove Extravagence

“Gloves,” commented a woman recently, could never be had so satisfactorily as now. There is no excuse for any one wearing an ill fitting glove when they can be made to order and a perfect fit obtained. In some places here in New-York gloves are altered while you wait, just as a dress or cloak is. Often one finger will be too long or a thumb too broad or too tight, while the rest of the glove fits perfectly. 
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“Gloves,” commented a woman recently, could never be had so satisfactorily as now. There is no excuse for any one wearing an ill fitting glove when they can be made to order and a perfect fit obtained. In some places here in New-York gloves are altered while you wait, just as a dress or cloak is. Often one finger will be too long or a thumb too broad or too tight, while the rest of the glove fits perfectly. A recent feature in some of the New-York shops is the keeping in repair of gloves sold at such shops. This is often a real convenience to busy wonion, and as the stitch in time is apt to be taken if somebody else will take it, the gloves last longer in consequence.

All of this glove talk is for the economist. The fashionable woman of wealth buys her gloves by the dozen, wears them only till the first freshness has gone, will not have them cleaned, and tosses them aside as she does her faded flowers. Not long ago, in a pretty morning room up town, belonging to the daughter of a rich man even among New-York's rich men, there sat, chatting lightly after the fashion of their kind, four young girls– one the owner of the room, the other three friends. 

They had all been at the same dance the night before, and the hostess was taking down the gown she had worn from the clothes tree, where it hung, to show and comment on a mishap which had nearly ruined its new Parisian elegance. As she did so, the long gloves, exactly the shade of the dress, fell to the floor. One of the girls picked them up. “Thank you,” said their owner, noticing her. “Their usefulness is over, too; but, fortunately, I bought six pairs of the same shade to have plenty of fresh ones.” 

“But these look perfectly fresh yet,” commented another of the girls. “No, they're not,” was the answer. “A pair of gloves to a dance is my invariable rule. And I never wear cleaned gloves.” “Well. I do.” “And I,” “And I,” came from her companions. Whereupon the pretty hostess turned quickly: “Why, girls,” she cried, “if that's the case, go through my glove drawer and stock yourselves up. There’s many a pair there will bear cleaning.” And she drew out a wide, shallow drawer in the bottom of a wardrobe. “Here.” she said, “is where I throw discarded gloves, and every once in a while I bundle off a lot of them to a little friend of mine in the country. She won't miss one drawerful.”

The girls laughed, and seated themselves on the floor before the drawer. The gloves were in balls, a pair to a ball, and when they were unrolled, smoothed, and laid out, not a pair was found with a rent or any marked soil. Seventy genuine pairs of gloves by actual count was the yield of the drawer, which gave each of the three twenty-five pairs apiece, with four pair thrown back for “the little friend in the country.” – From “Her Point of View,” New York Times, 1892

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