On page 2 of his 12 page pamphlet Rational Dress, containing 150 pictures illustrating Foolish and Sensible Fashions of Our Own and Many Lands Cole says:
One curious feature of this tyrant fashion is the pride and tenacity with which its votaries hold to it. The Indian with his fashionably flat head, the New Zealander with his fashionably tattooed face, the Chinese woman and her fashionably pinched feet, and the Caribbean woman with her fashionably spindled-shaped leg, each look down with contempt upon ordinary mortals who are not in the fashion as they are. So, too, the more civilised woman looks down with contempt upon those who are not in her fashion; but the march of mind is onward, even the newly-awakened womanly mind, and soon this unnatural monstrosity of fashion will be swept from the face of the earth, and mankind will finally go rationally clothed in their right mind.
A copy of his pamphlet has been digitised by the State Library of Victoria and is available here (5.6MB). Cole makes his own commentary interspersed among the 150 pictures and a transcript is available here (8 pages, 12MB). He expresses his views as follows:
Page 2 (as above) – Foolish Fashions
Page 8 – Tight-lacing
Page 9 – Sensible Dresses
Page 12 – Fashion Torturing the Poor Feet. The image below comes from this page.
The section on Tight-lacing is drawn from a book of Cole’s entitled Advice of One Hundred Doctors on Tight-lacing and the featured image above left, comes from page 120. The entire 160 page book (235MB) .pdf is available here.
