Topics and Trifles

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 163, 30 September 1927, Page 5

Topics and Trifles

Sunshades, Shoes and Sherry

FROM our buttonholes flowers crept to our bats, and now they are higher still, for quite two-thirds of the sunshades of the several-guinea kind are bedecked with the loveliest of realistic flowers. You needn't worry, though, if you cannot afford them. The simplest chiffon sunshade, provided it is the flat Japanese, sixteen-ribbed shape, can be . turned into an expensive model by the proper application of the right, kind of flower. On a green sunshade, for instance, you must have trails of nasturtiums or hunches of cowslips.

THE BUNCH OF FLOWERS PARASOL Of course, the most impressive sunshade I’ve seen looked like a great bunch of parma violets when shut up, and there are others covered with realistic love-in-a-mist. Most of them have handles that, resemble those of the most marvellous semi-precious stones. Or if you are going to have a magpie costume, you can have your black handle encrusted with tiny seed pearls and crystal beads at intervals —if you can pay the price! BLACK AND BLUE It is difficult to decide what is the fashionable woman’s uniform, but there isn’t really much indication of that breaking away from the all-alike vogue. I thought I had found the .right thing the other day when I went to a five o’clock Cocktail party, with a little music thrown in, and found twothirds of -the women in black. They wore fine face cloth suits or black charmeuse frocks or satin coats, mostly with pearl grey jumpers or silver tissue ones when a suit was worn, and all with enormous buttonholes of white or pale grey. Alas! The \ r ery next day at another party, at which many of the same women were present, they were almost all wearing navy blue, either with a long navy coat lined with patterned crepe 'de chine, with a frock of the same material as the lining, or coats and skirts over pale beige jumpers. COURT SHOES I was told the other day, says an English correspondent, by one of those wonderful women who train the debutante in the way she should walk, hold her head, he.r bouquet, raise her eyes, and all the rest of it on her presentation that it was a great mistake to wear new shoes to Court, that they should in any case always be “broken in” and perfect as to fit. Which reminds me of a funny story about one of last year’s debutantes, who took off a shoe to have the button altered just before starting, and slipped on an odd one for the moment. She forgot to change it, and made her curtsey with one new gold shoe and one worn silver shoe on. Everyone thought that she had hurt her foot, so it didn't really matter! COLOURFUL TENNIS I wonder if tennis will really become colourful this year! Of course, it’s too early to see any signs of it yet, but I hear of scarlet and bright green tennis balls, and tennis rackets bound with coloured gut, and all sorts of dyed shantung frocks in some of the outfitters. On the other hand, the oldfashioned white pique frock is coming back. Personally, I am all for colour. It would make watching one’s pet players from a distance so much easier. HESITATION She who hesitates is lost, used to be a warning given to us when young, but she who does not hesitate when waltzing nowadays is out of fashion, which is much worse. And how pretty some of the hesitations are,

especially a sort of feather step one, and another in which the feet are locked one behind the other as in the Tango. With the death of the smooth foxtrot the smooth waltz is the salvation of the middle-aged, when they have learned it! The secret of the Black Bottom Blues lias been revealed to me as: “Keep one knee bent and the other straight instead of bending both at

once as in the Charleston.” I pass it on for what it is worth. SHERRY AND SIMPLICITY Sherry is the sophisticated drink of the moment. Go into any place anywhere and ask for a high note or a side-car, and you will command no respect, but demand a. dry sherry, and people will mentally make a note of the fact that you are a knowledgeable person!