Dress In London and Paris

Horowhenua Chronicle, 28 October 1916, Page 3

Dress In London and Paris

A COMPARISON. (From A Cor respondent.) The contrast between dress in Loudon and Paris is still marked. Both cities wear their August and war-timo significations, but each wears them in a different way. I The women who make up society in the ordinary years are not seen about the parks and streets unless for charitable or business purposes; consequently their clothes are simple and much what they were a month or two ago: a tailor-made on grey days and a cooi little frock when it is hot. The hat suits the weather, and there is an air of purpose about the whole outfit. This applies to society women as they are to be 6een about in both cities, and there is little to choose between them in good taste.

But there .is notable difference in the taste of the majority, the women who must dress in the big shops. A woman coming from. Paris in amazed at the apparent cheapness of clothes in London, at the enormous choice of things offered in all the shops, at the inexpensive copies of Paris models, not only in dresses and hats, coats and tailor-mades, but in all those little

frills with which the neck is adorned to-day. With such a wealth of material the women in London have every opportunity to dress well on a quite small income, and those with a sure and simple taste do so. When the taste is not very sure, and far from simple this wide choice is a danger. It bewilders the mind and causes a certain flutter and lack of neatness in tlie general effect. There is also a tendency to exaggerate minor fashions while neglecting the main lines. l''or instance, the tulle scarf is worn in London with a "fine abandon," but in Paris 'it is not worn at all. It unmistakably marks a difference in the taste of French and English women. The Frenchwomen looks on it as superfluous and, therefore, a mistake; the Englishwoman likes it for being soft and decorative without considering its superfluity.

iN'JSATN'ESS AND GOOD TASTE. The impression of a summer crowd in Paris is neat andi smart, that of a summer crowd in London is picturesque but not very neat. The love of the pictorial dress and hat is, apparently, ingrained in the women who read fashion papers and romantic novels, and it may be presumed that the buyers from tho big London shops who go to Pairis for their models encourage this predilection. They buy the picturesque, and in remodelling it exaggerate points which need mollification. The straight-waisted little dress, for example, which seems to have penetrated London to the most distant suburb, is no lwiger to be recognized as the offspring of its Parisian parent. Yet it was essentially suited to the slim Englash figure and pretty English face, as it first appeared in France. It would be patriotic to teach dress scientifically, and so modify the instinctive love of the picturesque which allows practical girls to wear clothes which suggest sentimental chromo-lithographs or travesties of male attire, just as incongruous.

Where neatness, economy, and good sens© are to be found together—and very many women in London slioiv all these qualities in dress—there remain." what the old-fashioned schoolmistress balled "deportment." It is easy to imagine Miss Austen's saircasm delicately denouncing the modern girl's widely-swinging arm, the round back of -the young woman, the narrow chest of those whose occupations are sedentai 7, andl the lack of 'rhythm in the movement of many splendid, healthy young Jigures. Without a graceful cariage no dress looks well, and the prettiest hat is a failure if the head is not well carried. To walk well and 6 't gracefully is more than half good dressing; the rest is a question of nestness. As neither good deportment nor neatness costs money or takes up time, they: can be studied with a clear conscience even in these serious davs.