Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 241, 31 December 1927, Page 16

Mundane Musings

Dressing Us Down

I was walking down town the other luncheon hour with a semi-elderlv gentleman friend. He sighed with pleasure. The world, in his eyes, was very good to look upon. “You know,” he murmured, “when I was a young man the streets of any town were a most depressing sight. Women dressed so badly. Only one in a thousand knew how to appear at her best in the atrocious garments of the ’eighties and ’nineties. She had to be a howling swell of a beauty to get away with them, I can tell you, or else extremely well off. Most of the women seemed to rig themselves out in blacks and greys and stone. “Stone! Whoever wears a stonecoloured frock to-day? Miss and Mrs. 1927 would throw a couple of fits if you asked them to do so. It’s a shade absolutely guaranteed to ruin the charms of any good-looking female, and turn a plain one into a positive eyesore. But they were very fond of it in my day. It was considered to be so ladylike. “And now!” He waved a lordly and appreciative hand. “Walking along the street these days is as great a colour feast to the eye as being in the small birdcage at the zoo. Fools say all girls are dressing alike, and that you can’t tell one from t’other, or the grandmother from the granddaughter. It isn’t true. But what does it matter if it is when they all look so uniformly tidy, smart, nice and buoyant? “In the precious ’eighties most women looked alike —dowdy creatures, who would have been all the better for a few of the complexion dodges you girls can buy on all the chemists’ counters. “I, for one, take off my hat to the clothes of to-day. Our modern wenches are the best-dressed women in the world.” It is strange, is it not, that although most discriminating men, and all the doctors without exception, praise us for having at last hit upon a really practical, healthy and attractive clothes sense, and the insurance companies tell us that, owing to increased all-round health, our chances of life are appreciably degrees higher than they were a quarter of a century ago, other people, from certain illustrious church dignitaries downwards, haven t a good word to say lor it? Naturally, I have every sympathy for the Church’s attitude, and I am all m favour o£ a greater discretion and sobriety in apparel when a woman is receiving spiritual comfort. She ought not to distract herself with thoughts of her appearance, nor should she so attire herself that she distracts others. But when it comes to expecting me to tolerate unfair criticism from any other source, well, it’s beyond me. I think our dress at the present time is the most nearly perfect thing that woman in all the ages has ever worn. We have never been more comfortable, more serene, more free and easy (speaking in the clothes-fitting sense! ), more hygienic or more becoming. Whenever I see fashion pictures of some of the corsets that were worn when my mother was a young woman, I wonder how tlieir wearers managed to bath the babies, sweep under the beds and bend over washtubs. Even in my childhood, which is not so very far back, I remember a family doctor saying- in my hearing that it was inadvisable in the case of a fainting woman to wait to undo her corsets. It was better to cut the laces at once!

But it’s my belief there’s a catch to most of the present-day criticism. For instance:— A speaker at a textile society meeting said: “It used to take two sheep to clothe a woman. Now a silkworm could do it!” You see? I expect if you asked this gentleman what he really thought of our two yards single-width dresses; our absence of petticoats other than one vegetable silk one; those wonderful new corsettes or combinaires that give us (some of us!) the fashionable and very sweet boyish figure, and which have almost entirely superseded the cruel, bony atrocity: our cute little jumper suits; our light-weight overcoats; our feather-weight summer garments, why, he’d just foam at the mouth. Of course, you expect it of him. He’s m the trade. And that s the only real horror or crj ing shame that I can put down to the account of these modern clothes of ours. They seem to have “ruined” everyone in the clothes and accessories manufacturing business. From China comes the news that women are starving in their thousands because AA estern women don’t want any more hair-nets. Manufacturers of the old-type corset and petticoat have gone completely out of business. And e\ery other hairdresser is to be heard groaning because we don’t keep our hair on. 1 Well, well. And yet the girl who wears the same coat more than two winters (if that), or the same hat more than one summer, is a positive rarity. I*. I keep away from my friends for longer than two weeks at a time, when j I meet them again they are sure to be

arrayed in new jumpers, new hats, new shoes, new gloves, or new dance frocks, its all very mysterious, -isn’t it? • Y s ’ and tb f greatest joke of the lot critic :Vi al s H te °. f all this tremendous hand we e SSI ? S ‘ doWn we eet on every Sjfeiv]s e *35 ttn^Vo^To^r 1 haPPineSS ' fl — Manufacturers, instead of arguing with us, ought to watch the trend of and mels C u? fOr Ve aS t^° n W Cater f ° r :“l S n r ay than we’have’ever done* buy more ?f°ten m ° ney ° n thera ’ und " * want’? 11 m ° re d ° men in lhe busi ness