As Western civilization met the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution and Western fashion met to match the whims of its people. As increased trade and travel lead to accessible styles, prolific publications announced the latest trends, and improved technology innovated variety and rapid changes in fashion, Hazlitt denounced the “giddy innovation and restless vanity” of fashion with a critical tone created through his control of syntax, parallel structure, and diction.
Hazlitt begins by defining fashion—a “jumble of contradictions,” “sympathies and antipathies.” He uses a derisive tone, critical of the “external and fantastic symbols” used solely to “excite the envy” of others. Using the parallel structure formed by “it” followed by …show more content…
Hazlitt ends the paragraph with attacks on the “flimsy and narrow minds” of those who obsess with fashion in order to validate themselves with what “others” declare to be “excellent,” who are conceited enough to “confine the opinion” of “excellence” to “themselves” and people just like them, shifting his attack to the people who participate in the vapid