CLOTHES AND CAREERS

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 138, 7 December 1929, Page 23

CLOTHES AND CAREERS

SOME HOLLYWOOD NOTIONS

Most of the complications of life in 1929, according to a prominent women's club, are caused by the fact that we have a new woman but the same old man, says an American exchange. Women, if we can believe the current viewer-with-alarm, have become dominant, have changed their slave's chains for freedom's latch key; demonstrating their liberty by clothes, careers, and callousness. Men, on the other hand, symbolise where they are in the world's march of progress by sticking to the uncomfortable raiment of another century, their mind and hearts attuned to the music of harpsichord instead of ukuleles. ROMANCE GOES GLIMMERING. Romance under these distressing conditions has gone glimmering. Whereupon Bessie Love, one of the most popular girls in Hollywood, and Warner Baxter, also popular in the moving picture world, engage in" a discussion. "Men are essentially old-fashioneoj," says Bessie Love. "It's hard for them to change even when they know' a change would be for the better. You notice that almost'every man wants his particular woman to be oid-fashioned. "Don't, put on so much make-up! Why did you cut your hair? That skirt is too short. Those long earrings are frightfully conspicuous! I can't permit you to smoke! Where on earth are your stockings? "Aren't these sentences familiar? At least to every modern woman with a father, husband, brother, or fiance. "But when we go out with these fastidious males, what happens? We '•-an sit back against the wall with our long skirt, our modest fashion, our pale face, and covered logs, and our critical man will go and hang around the very woman he does not want us to imitate. She will be batting her mascara-laden eyelashes at him, smiling up at him with her rouged lips, her bare knee plainly visible, while be lights her cigarette. Don't tell me —I've seen them. "I think it's rather sweet to see a man so proud that his wife does not smoke, but it's juat a bit tiresome to have him proud that she's a fool about money. 'She doesn't understand business,' he will say when the woman has overdrawn her account or signed the wrong paper. If she isn't an, imbecile she can be taught to understand it." On the clothes question Warner Baxter refuses to be serious. When I look around at some of these Hollywood boys and see their golf pants, scarlet sweaters, bracelets, and loud socks —well, there are times that I feel all they need is a girl's hat to do a female impersonation," he says. MEN FIRST TO CAST LACE. PRILLS. "Don't you remember both men and women used to wear velvet and broadcloth, lace frills at their -wrists, and a poundage of long curls falling over their shonlders? Men were the first to cast the lace frills and the long curls aside and to climb into sensible business suits. Maybe the girls are a bit ahead in taking, off clothes this time, but you've got to consider "how much better girls look. Do you think we would look so well? "I shouldn't be surprised to see girls putting on more clothes now that they have succeeded in taking off nearly everything. They grew their hair after they got it clipped shorter than their brothers wore it. "The fine thing about women is that when they think they've made a mistake, they aren't afraid to admit it, and to turn around and do something else. "I saw not long ago an article concerning the girls in France. It seems that for some time the French maidens have been going in for football, boxing, and similar manly sports, but they have discovered that excelling in the 'rough stun" has not made them attractive. Probably no prospective husband relishes the idea that his bride may feel annoyed some fine morning and knock him out. At any rate, the girls have gone back to millinery and forgotten about the squared circles and the football field. "But I don't wish to be understood as saying that girls will ever relinquish their freedom. It is right that women should be as free as men, and that they should work together in the world." ALL WANT "CAREERS." "Careers aren't new,"argues Bessie .Love. "Every woman takes a career as an accepted fact—that is, if you glorify the £ood old job by calling it a career. Becoming independent does not make a woman hard and unfomantic. It gives her a chance to be truly romantic, for she can marry for love. In the old days a girl had to cater to men. It was necessary for her to attract the male and to flatter him into matrimony. It was not only a disgrace not to have a Mrs. in front of your name if you were a woman, but it was the way you arranged to keep alive if you did not care to be a dependent old maid or an unpaid servant of more fortunately married sisters or brothers. "This career business is something that can't be settled for everybody by ffr . s, fc. at l em«lV' declares Mr. Baxter. i. think that girls have- never been so interesting in the history of the world as they are now. They have brains they are not afraid of using, and they are in touch with the times, and know what's going on. The modern woman is a constant surprise, because you can never tell what she's likely to do next."