Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 78

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Popular Culture Review

gratuitous display. Veblen, lecturing his classes at the University of
Chicago in baggy pants, his thick wool socks safety-pinned to the
cuffs (Diggins 33), wrought his slashing indictment of the wasteful
ways of many Americans in his Leisure Class study of 1899. Flaying
the wealthy and flogging the well to do, Veblen excoriated America's
upper crust, reminding readers that John Adams' and Tocqueville's
worst prophecies had come to pass. The rapidly developing America
was not necessarily the desirable America.
Feather ornamentation had been popular in Europe since the time
of the Crusades, an affectation quite likely picked up from the more
sophisticated Islamic enemy (Parry). But the volume "did not
compare with the amounts which poured in from all continents to
meet demands of the nineteenth century's fashion-conscious, middleclass, urban women" (Repton 167). This phenomenon—more people
with more discretionary cash—nourished advanced environmental
impact. What sp>ecies were not being obliterated by the greedy meat
hunters were likely victimized by plume, fur, or hide gatherers.
As the eighteen-hundreds wore on "in almost every ten-year
period throughout the century," according to Paul Nystrom, noted
authority on women's fashion, "large additional group>s of people
were able to expand their standards of living beyond bare subsistence
levels" (Nystrom 229). This emergent Class not only swelled in
number and economic vigor, it represented a Class usurp>ation of the
traditional privileges of the elite. Market pressure really did
threaten entire species. Yet perhaps it was the threat of Class
instability which helped to lubricate the activity of the nation's
elite. Meanwhile, of course, bourgeois feminists also drew down on
the displayers from the marginal middle/upstart working class. If
the "bloomers" revolution was most often met by derision in the press,
it, also, held the ridiculously wasteful, as well as unhealthy,
conventions of fashion, especially women's fashion, to the public eye.
Doughty, echoing Veblen's ideas of conspicuous consumption,
claims that "if plumes were costly looking, then ladies demanded
them by the crateload, and the elegant trinunings pictured in journals
meant that bird populations all over the world fell under the gun"
(Doughty 15). Contrary to Quaker and Puritan ideas of practicality,
so important in the formative period of the nation, squandering
resources in a self-indulgent manner was a clear precursor to a