A WOMAN AGAINST FASHION

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1354, 3 February 1912, Page 11

A WOMAN AGAINST FASHION

It is something out of the beaten track to find a woman inveighing against the dictates of Fashion, but Ivatherinc Fullerton Gerould expressed an opinion of more than passing interest in the current number of the '-'Atlantic Monthly," on the foibles of woman's wardrobe. She says— The most damning thing about fashions is that they make inevitably, nine years out of ten; for the greatest ugliness of the greatest number. Can anything be moro absurd than, to impose a single style on the fat and the tliih, on the minimum wage and the maximum income? I admit that no fashion has eveT been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman; the dressmaker's ideal is undoubtedly the thin millionairess. But the fat woman and the loan purse must mako the best of each style, in turn, as it comes along. Since we must all dress, ■why.not invent dresses that are widely adaptable—to different materials, to different occasions, to different human types ? It would purge our streets of many a sorry and sordid spectacle, and in that sense would be an aesthetic-service both partioulai and public. ' And that is another sin against beauty, for it deprives a woman of tho privileges of dressing as best becomes her. • There is something peculiarly bitter in watching the superseding of a mode that wholly suits one. Now; and then a woman confides to mo her intention of keeping in some stylo that is especially adapted to her. "It: suits me, and I am going to stick to it," she declares. Our greatest danger is simply the loss of all standards of beauty in dress. "Why do all the women walk like ducks this yearwas the question put to a friend of mine, years since, by a younger brother. He did not know that a quite new kind of corset had suddenly, during the summer months, "come in.' To wear it meant change of gait and posture, eventually actual change of shape. Where is the woman who could ingenuously report: "Sho had on a lovely frock made in the style of the year before last"? I could not do it myself-, nor, I fancy, oould you. Mrs. Gerould gees on to disparage the woman who' attempts by her apparel to advertise her husband's riches, and concludes her diatribe:— But the fact that chiefly gives _ ono pauso is this—that a woman cannot mingle comfortably with her equals unless she can clothe herself each season in n way that both to her and to them would hav» looked preposterous a twelve-month before. ' It ifl odd that dress reform should always have meant something "ugly. There would be so tremendous a chance for anyone who wished' to reform dress in the interests of beauty!