Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 319, 2 April 1928, Page 5

Mundane Musings

Shop-Window Gazing \

I adore gazing in shop-windows— j Jj almost any kind. 1 know it's supposed to be a sign of ; the weaker type of femininity, and it ! has just struck me as being one of j the minor hardships attached to the j position of Royal Personages, that : they can't. I wonder if they ever j want to. It’s fearfully tantalising when you [ can’t, and of course there are such | moments. When you’re running for a [ bus, for instance, or when you’re out j walking with intensely serious and i intellectual relations, or when some- j on© is making earnest love to you. < And yet it is at just such moments ! that your momentarily wandering eye i may light upon something almost ir- ! resistibly attractive and desirable and \ interesting. And you have to pass it j by! It isn’t only the handsome windows in the great shopping thoroughfares of big cities that attract me so powerfully (and when you come to think of it, it’s small wonder they should, considering the brains and taste that have gone to the furnishing of them), it’s almost every kind of shop, always barring, of course, butchers’ shops. You never know what you may find in even the grubbiest, squalidest, meanest little place if you star© hard enough and long enough. Queer little advertisements that do queer things, for instance! I know a little general draper’s in the town where I live where there’s idiotic celluloid clown who moves his head up and down. I always like to have a look at him. He’s like an old friend. The other day they’d put a toy parrot on his nose, and the parrot remained balanced there while he moved his head. And there are those truly wonderful affairs, special displays, when fullsized cardboard figures wield carpetsweepers or control refrigerators or cower cosily over real gas stoves in the most convincing way. Of course, the wax figures nowadays are simply marvellous, but they’re apt to be a little disconcerting. Not on account of the extreme frankness of their deshabille—one has grown used to that—but more because they are so like real people that one sometimes gets a shock when one catches sight of them unexpectedly, though it’s even worse when one takes a real person standing in a window for a wax figure. Suddenly the figure moves, and for a moment one doesn’t quite know what’s happened, or where one is. If Only . . . Second-hand- shops are. delightful, of course. I like to gaze into the very expensive ones and choose what I’d buy if “money were no object” (a phras© fraught with a curious kind of fantastic vulgarity), or if somebody standing beside me were to say: “You can have whatever you like best out of that window.” If only we could get rid of our wretched acquisitiveness and be content to look and admire and not desire, then shop-window gazing would be an excellent and educational pastime. But then, where would the shopkeepers be? Of all the materials, velvet is developed most consitsently on slim lines. The conservative V neck treatment and a side drape or shirred fullness in front are important details, with greyed blues and gravel tones prominent shades. Second in importance to velvet is taffeta, and here there is a decided contrast in the profile, for the stiffer weave invariably lollows Period lines. Typical of this type is a white taffeta which masses black velvet ribbon in a modernistic motif on the back of the bodice, and introduces a wide hemline border on the bouffant skirt. . i . | : ; • > : : ; ; , i : : ? . i . .