BACKLESS COSTUMES

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 398, 6 December 1932, Page 3

BACKLESS COSTUMES

LATEST RAGE OF BATHERS ON ADELAIDE BEACHES. DENOUNCED FROM PULPIT. Adelaide, Monday. Backless bathing costumes, wbich were bitterly denounced by the Rev. S. H. Cox, in Sydney, are likely to be the rage on Adelaide beach'es this summer. Rqws and rows of them adorn every sports costume department in Adelaide stores. "We expect them to sell so well that we have hardly more than a dozen high-hacked suits," said the head of one department to-day. "The really popular suit will be the oue which has a brassiere top and nothing except two strap's from th'e waistline to the neck. We have prepared for a record demand." "Disgusting costumes," Mr. Cox called them— "likely to attract the attention of the evil-minded." He said the fashion was to return to the old paganism of the Epicureans, who lived only for the pleasures of life. A stauneh rebuttal of this was made by several Adelaide people. The women police, whose duty it is to keep a wary eye on the beach'es, say that backless bathers have nothing to do with the morals of the wearers. -If the evil-minded are to be attracted, neither backless nor high-backed bathers will make any difference. "There is nothing whatever wrong with the new bathers, but there is a whole lot wrong with the man or woman who mixes bathing suits with morality," said Mrs. 0. Polkinghorne, an executive officer of the Women's Non-Party Association. . "Ministers may thunder a hundred ■times from the pulpits against the suits, but I do not think they will stop one girl from wearing them. "Their whole idea is wrong. There is nothing indecent in the human body, provided it is clean and healthy." 'If you live at the beach you get so used to backless bathing costumes that you don't take any notice of them," said the Rev. A. C. Stevens, of Glenelg. "Clothes are a matter1 of convention. In the East if a woman unveils her faee she is considered immoral, but we don't look at it that way. To say that a girl wh'o wears a backless bathing suit cannot be p-er-fectly moral is ridiculous. By the end of the summer we will be so used to them that they will pass unnoticed.