Themes
Art made for life
Wilde accepts that 'what is ugly in fact may in its effect become beautiful', and calls this 'the real modernité of art'. His objection is practical: 'Were we able to carry our chiaroscuro about with us, as we do our umbrellas, all would be well'. Since we cannot, people should not wear ugly clothes in the hope that Whistler will refine them 'into a mist'. The painter's way of seeing is not a rule for how a nation should dress.
Surroundings make the artist
Wilde's case for reform is that artists grow out of what they see. 'It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist', and 'the real schools should be the streets.' Every line of Greek dress is echoed in Greek architecture, while a nation in stove-pipe hats and dress improvers could build only the Pantechnichon. He ends with a French phrase for the whole idea: as the surroundings are renewed, art is renewed.
The model and the fancy ball
Wilde's scorn falls on dressing up. The Italian model 'reappears on the walls of our summer exhibitions as everything that he is not, and as nothing that he is', a patriarch here and a brigand there, and so becomes 'the sign of the decadence'. From this Wilde draws a principle: 'all costumes are caricatures' and 'where there is loveliness of dress, there is no dressing up.'