XIV. Aesthetic Education

I will keep it as simple as possible and draw it merely for the sake of clarification. If you then ask a student, “What are you doing?” the answer may be, “We first sew this pattern around the neck of the dress, then on the waistband, and finally around the hem of the dress.” This kind of remark is enough to make one despair, because it shows a total disregard for fitting beauty to a given purpose. If we are sensitive to these matters and see a girl or young lady sewing the same pattern to the upper, middle, and lower parts of a dress, we can’t help feeling that when someone wears such a dress, she will appear to have been compressed or telescoped, from top to bottom. We must open our students’ eyes to the necessity of adapting a pattern according to where it appears, whether around the neck, the middle, or around the hem. The uppermost ribbon could be varied somewhat like this (diagram 1), and the bottom one in this way (diagram 3). I am keeping the patterns simple, merely for clarification. Now students can safely sew the first pattern around the neck, because the form indicates that the head will rise above it. The second pattern can be sewn into a belt, and the third to the hem, showing that its place is below. There really is a difference between above and below in the human figure, and this needs to be expressed artistically.