A Gilded Age Coveted Degree

French style and fashion from 1895

What Is Style?

What we call style is almost precisely synonymous with what the French call “chic.” Either word means much or little, anything and everything; is definite to the mind and indefinable to the tongue. No one expects to find what is chic outside of Paris. No New Yorker, at least, expects to find style much beyond the fifty-mile radius with Central Park as a center. What the Parisienne is to the Old World the Manhattanese is to the New. 

The latter is rarely born where she makes her home. She comes from every part of the republic, from North, South, East and West, from city, village and hamlet, to the great municipal school of art, fashion, manners, and receives there the coveted degree M.S., Mistress of Style. So, if she reflects luster upon herself she reflects luster in a way on the whole country, showing what anyAmerican may become under properly plastic agencies and in aiming at her own. 

The mistress of style must be, in regard to the multitude, as one in a hundred: but she is a familiar figure in every cultured household, and a creature to be esteemed, to be admired, to be patterned after. She is not only the woman of the present, she is the woman of the future as well, for the future cannot eclipse her.— Harper's Bazaar, 1895

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