DISLIKES SHORT SKIRTS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 780, 28 September 1929, Page 29

DISLIKES SHORT SKIRTS

POETESS SPEAKS ON UGLY LEGS WANTS PLASTIC SURGERY So far as I can judge, it has been the custom throughout the ages to discuss the propriety, or the impropriety, of women's dress. Saint Paul interested himself in the subject: Signor Mussolini has, I believe, issued edicts on the matter. But never in the history of the world, so far as I know, has the subject been discussed from the point of view which really matters—its aesthetics, writes Edith Sitwell in “The Daily Mail.”

Short skirts are the fashion at present, and we are told that they are immodest. In many cases that is undoubtedly true, but in my opinion that is not the most convincing reason for not wearing them. It is quite certain that a woman who wears an immodest garment of her own free choice has something innately immodest in the constitution of her mind, and she will behave immodestly in one way or another, whatever the length of her skirt may be.

Consequently when I do not like to see a short skirt it is not my sense of propriety but my sense of beauty which Is being outraged. For short skirts have revealed to an amazed ■world the hitherto unsuspected fact that 99 women out of every 100 have extremely ugly legs. So why show them?

Sometimes the legs go in a straight line from the knee to the foot without any hint of an ankle. Sometimes (and this is a strange sight) they have protuberances on both sides, while remaining quite flat at the back. Sometimes they bend toward each other, sometimes away from each other, sometimes they appear to curve backward; rarely do they present themselves in such a shape that it is an aesthetic pleasure to look at them. And yet w-e see them in their thousands.

It is true that a short skirt gives great freedom of movement to the wearer, but I do not know that a woman, young or old, who goes shopping or walking in London, or in any other town, has any need for exaggerated freedom of movement.

There are no stiles to climb, no fivebarred gates to vault; indeed, no particular movement to make excepting the very ordinary and usual one of putting one foot in front of the other; and so long as one can do this with comfort it seems to me to be a form of affectation to insist upon having the knees uncovered.

And let us be honest in these things. Dresses became short as a matter of fashion, and then it was discovered that short skirts enabled us to move more easily; but the fashion was not brought into being for the purposo of emancipating women’s legs. What I would suggest with all seriousness is this: if women are going to continue to show their legs as freely as they show their faces ( and there are countries where the one thing is considered quite as immodest as the other), then, in order that we may be spared the curious sights which afflict us at present, there should be beauty parlours for legs, just as there are beauty parlours for faces. Dress should be made a question of aesthetics because what is, or is not, immodest in the eyes of the beholder is very largely a matter of custom An Eastern potentate has lost his throne quite recently because he unveiled the face of his wife and wished to unveil the faces of his women subjects. I do not want to be told that pseudo-Greek dancing is cultivated by its devotees in a pursuit of the beauty I am advocating. These archaic revivals strike me as being insincere, and in any case they are localised. To be really effective, a love of true beauty—which is something very different from the contemporary cult of prettiness—would have to be encouraged and developed in every child in the country, from the age of three years and on. Wliat chance has real beauty of any kind in face of modern popular taste? It is one thing to see a flute player and dancers in a Greek frieze, but it tyould be a very different sort of experience to watch a contemporary Girl Guide or Boy Scout attitudinising along a London street to the strains of “Sonny Boy,” played on a mouthorgan.

I do not know why so many women have such very ugly legs. Perhaps it was always so, and perhaps it was a feeling for aesthetics and not a sense of propriety, which urged so many reformers to insist upon women hiding themselves in long garments. But now that we know beyond any possibility of dispute that they are ugly, let us take steps to change them, if possible. We see elderly women for whose faces so much has been done that there is no more’ room for a wrinkle and what were once serviceable mouths ate sewn up at the corners in an attempt to make them look like rosebuds.

Two well-known hostesses who had recently undergone the latter operation in their quest for beauty were travelling in Spain, and were turned out of a cathedral by a deaf verger who, from looking at their faces, was under the impression that they were whistling. Cannot another kind of beauty specialist now come forward and give a normal shape to some of the strange legs we see? Can there be no plastic surgery for these unfortunates?