Changing Fashions9 Effect on Business

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 323, 7 April 1928, Page 22

Changing Fashions 9 Effect on Business

DEMISE OF THE HAIRPIN KING —CULT OF THE REVEALED KNEE—LESS IN SKIRTS, BUT OH, THE STOCKINGS!

Y bobbing their tresses women are charged by some most interested in the making and selling of hairpins with having practically ruined a great

and deserving industry. The slump in hairpins may cause displacement of labour, the London “Daily Telegraph” concedes, but not on balance increase unemployment, and it calls attention to the fact that though this is a despiteful time for hairpin kings, it must be the golden age of the hairdresser. We are asked then to: “Consider the other end of the girl of the period, the hosiery department. A Committee of the Board of Trade has just been offered evidence that England is now consuming 22,750,000 pairs of hose a year. Most of these are stockings for female legs. The experts calculate that modern woman uses half as many stockings again as she did in 1912. Such is the costly consequence of the sacrifice of the skirt. “It was no master-mind in a dressmaker’s which instructed civilised woman that the time had come to cut short her skirts. No great and noble exemplar led the way. The voice of the people, the female people, spoke and the short skirt was the law. and to the knee legs were revealed for the first time in 3,000 years.”

The skirtless leg, its owners testify, has increased their available energy beyond calculation, and “we are bound to accept their assurance that this is for the general good.” But the deletion of their draperies has upset the textile trade..

But why liberty or equality or fraternity should prefer muslin to lace is a riddle without an answer, this newspaper then says, just as no one can tell by what principle of modern thought all trousers are required to be turned up. Neither our beauty nor our convenience is enhanced by this “universal trick,” yet it has, acccording to Sir Edwin Stockton, set up a trade in that it has “created the demand for the fancy sock.” A different point of view on clothes of men and women is presented by Edith Shackleton in the London “Evening Standard.” and her contention is that Dame Fashion, “that perfect noodle,” is dead, and almost hysterically deplored now and then by manufacturers whose fathers made easy fortunes out of things like hairpads and long-skirt binding. This writer continues as follows:

“It doesn’t matter what queens or beauties do. The young woman of to-day insists on dressing to suit her own life as well as she can with the available materials, and is ready to make experiments. “So, indeed, the less eagerly, is man. The sons of those who felt that their stiff dark clothes were at least as fixed as the alphabet and likely to denote a European gentleman as persistently as coloured lozenges denote a harlequin, they, too. are looking at clothes with a less prejudiced eye. To another generation the clothes worn by statues of John Bright will look stranger than the clothes of the bronze Charles I. at Charing Cross. (Continued on Page 2»