Longer Skirts and New Fashion Modes Cause Rebellion

Lake County Mail, Issue 27, 26 November 1947, Page 9

Longer Skirts and New Fashion Modes Cause Rebellion

“Fashion is that by which the fantastic becomes the universal,” was Oscar Wilde’s comment on the vagaries of women’s apparel. And his observation provides reassurance to the designers who start the “fantastic” styles on their way to become gradually less expensive and, therefore, the fashion. The ladies are expected to agree with Mark Twain, who said: “No woman can look as well out of the fashion as in, it.” Eventually, it is predicted, women will have to accept the new modes or go naked or (worse still) wear last year’s styles. The new fashions launched in high-priced specialty shops, are rapidly trickling down to popular priced outlets. Women’s modes, presumably since one morning when Helen of Troy adjusted her peplum to a new disposal about the hips, have always been subject to changd and the changes have always aroused (at least temporarily) both feminine and masculine protest. The, latest change,, the longer skirt, like its predecessors, certainly did not come without notice. Months ago the Western world learned that skirts this autumn would be full and longer, hips padded, waists waspishly thin, shoulders daintily rounded. It was to be a sharp, a virtually complete, break with the immediate past, when swaggeringly mannish shoulders, short skirts, and “ natural ” waists were the fashion. Rebellion Against Fashion Now comes the reaction: —“ rebellion ” against the new dictate. Ladies, it is reported, are parading in kneelength garments. They; will not be earth-bound by lengthened skirts, hemmed in by hour-glass waists, made to look coy and Victorian by natural, as opposed to robust and puffed shoulders. ; ■ V 1 Though news, this is §till an old story. Forty years ago the “ hobble skirt ” was passionately condemned as a menace to safety in' walking. In the roaring Twenties the period of “flaming youth,” moralists linked the slab-shaped, leggy patterns of the “flappers” to a decline in'public decency. So it has generally gone, but such protests in the past have never succeeded. Fashion has continued in its cycles of' change* for which no better reason has been adduced than the activity of an alert industry armed with almost invincible prestige serv,ing the natural human desire for novelty.