...the art of dressing well consists in knowing the prevailing fashions, and adapting them to your particular style. What suits one will not always look beautiful on another. There should be discrimination, the result of a cultivated taste. To deviate from the prevailing mode entirely is, on the other hand, a grave blunder; for anything odd makes a lady a laughing-stock, and the dress quite out of fashion is, therefore, to be avoided. Peterson's Magazine, June 1879

A lady, unless she wishes to be eccentric, must follow the fashions, at least in a modified degree. The first requisite to dressing well yourself, is to know what is going to be worn. You may then adapt the style to suit your complexion, etc. But you cannot entirely ignore it. - Peterson's Magazine, October 1875

As to the Berlin fashions, which some of our contemporaries have been trying to introduce, they are unutterably ugly. Paris is, and must always remain, the fountain-head of fashion. Nobody, with any pretentions to style, will dress after any other mode. - Peterson's Magazine, May 1871

To dress out of fashion is to make one's self the subject of remark, a contingency which every woman ought to avoid. How would even a man like to go down the street, in knee-breeches, and with powdered hair, as his great-grandfather did? For a woman to be behind fashion is absurd. To make one's self conspicuous, in any way, is a mistake. - Peterson's Magazine, September 1872