SHORT SKIRTS DEBATED

Hokitika Guardian, 21 January 1930, Page 8

SHORT SKIRTS DEBATED

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 24. Miss Gertrude Lawrence, charming British actressy and Miss Rita Weiman, playwright and short story writer, went at it hammer and tongs metaphorically in the Grand Central Palace in New York in a sizzling debate entitled “short skirts versus long skirts.” ■

And Rex Beach, a big he-man with a misshaped nose, who probably at the moment was hunting wild turkey in Highlands County, Florida, won the argument without even knowing it existed.

Miss Lawrence and Miss Weiman crossed swords before an eager audience of club women, fashion experts, shop girls and stenographers, and they turned them away from the door lo minutes before the curtain

went up. Miss Lawrence wore a dress of the new mode, since she chose to defend the long goal. Her skirts were several inches below her knees. Miss Weiman’s hemline was an inch or two higher, and the chairman, Mrs William Sporborg and had on a green dress which almost concealed her ankles., Miss Lawrence went to the hat first reading her contribution from a manuscript. When the wrangling was all over quite a number of the ladies had the pretty actress beleaguered in a corner of the room, pleading for autographed pages from the manuscript. The British girl’s attack was well executed. Long skirts, she said, are much more attractive to the eye—they are more aesthetic. The tall woman loses her stringy, beanpole aspect. The short woman seems to gain height by wearing them. “We have reached the point,” she said, “where limbs have become legs. Knees are no longer joints—they are institutions. Suggestion is much better than revelation. Our chief asset is our femininity, and we’ll lose it unless we wear our skirts longer. I favour the short skirt for business and street wear, an irregular hemline for afternoon attire, long dresses for evening, and trailing for tengowns.”