Fashion is usually sold as pleasure, but Dave Bonta's poem opens by calling it a symptom: "this cruel discontent / we take to be a good servant." The restlessness that sends us shopping, the sense that what we have on is never quite right, is something "we take to be" useful. The phrasing admits that this is only an assumption. It recalls the old saying that fire is a good servant but a bad master, and the title shows which way the poem leans. If we are "slave to fashion," then the servant has quietly swapped places with its supposed owner. The central idea is that a feeling we think we control, and even congratulate ourselves for having, is the thing doing the controlling.
The second couplet makes that control explicit. We are "forced for the sake of wardrobe and fashion / to put on other things." The word "forced" sits oddly beside a topic as light as clothes, and the poem leaves it there without comment. "Other things" is the vaguest phrase in the poem, and the vagueness seems deliberate. Other than what? Other than ourselves, perhaps. Nothing is named, as if the clothes, the habits and the new self were interchangeable. "Put on" also hints that identity is something we wear.
From there the poem moves into costume and ritual. The speaker turns up for the first time as "my" and is "getting my war paint / and the arch book of dances." "War paint" turns getting ready into preparation for battle, and the sound of the word echoes "wardrobe" two lines earlier, so the closet has already become an armoury. "Arch" is a good choice for the next line. It can mean coy or knowingly playful, and it can also mean chief, as in "arch-enemy." A "book of dances" suggests a dance card or a manual of steps, a fixed script for how to move among other people. Social life appears here as choreography, charming on the surface and competitive underneath.
The ending is the most inventive part. "The play of bans like news / made up well" contains two puns. "Bans" are prohibitions, but they also recall the banns of marriage, announcements read aloud before a wedding. The "play" of them could be a stage performance or a game of what is allowed and forbidden. They circulate "like news," meaning gossip or rumour. Then "made up well" lands with a double meaning: a face that has been skilfully made up with cosmetics, and a story that has been made up, or invented. Appearance and fabrication become the same thing, and the poem finishes on the suggestion that the whole display is a convincing fiction.
The form supports this. There are four unrhymed couplets in free verse, with no capital letters and no punctuation at all. Without full stops, one thought slides into the next, and the poem never reaches a firm conclusion, much as the activity it describes never finishes. It is also striking how few complete actions there are. "Getting my war paint" is a participle with no real main verb behind it, so the speaker is always in the middle of preparing and never arrives anywhere. The couplets are uneven. The third line is the longest and the heaviest, with its repeated *f* sounds in "forced for the sake of wardrobe and fashion," and it makes the compulsion physically felt before the later lines thin out. There is also a faint chime between "discontent" and "servant," a near-rhyme on the *-nt* ending that ties the opening pair together.
The diction has a slightly antique, borrowed feel, with words like "arch," "bans" and "book of dances." Judging by that, the lines seem to be assembled from older registers of language, which suits a poem about putting on other people's styles.
The poem is significant for how much it compresses into so few words. Its social criticism is not delivered as a lecture. It comes through double meanings, a shift from "we" to "my" that implicates the speaker, and a final image that is both glamorous and faintly dishonest. It asks the reader whether the good servant we keep dressing for has ever worked for us at all.