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Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 292, 2 May 1913, Page 4

MOTHER EVE. The insidious hat pin and the hobble skirt are coming- in for a good deal of attention, in company with the open yoke and other atrocities of modern dress. One American State lias already passed legislation prohibiting any lady from displaying her neck for more than two inches from her chin, or her arms above the elbow. This is rough, of course, on the washerlady, but perhaps

some arrangement will be arrived at by which she may bq.jillowed to turn up her sleeves in private in the sanctuary of the laundry, and fasten her shoes behind locked doors after obtaining special permission from the. nearest Magistrate. But this sort of thing is getting nearer home, for a cablegram from Melbourne states that the City Council has adopted a by-law against unprotected hat-pins. The discussion, it is added, was productive of strong comments on women's present mode of dressing. One councillor declared that it was conducive to pneumonia and immorality. The good old petticoat had down, and in two or three years they would have girls walking the streets in tights. But ever since Mother Kvc donned the latest thing in fig-leaves, that whimsical jade Fashion has had her unbending way, as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians, and it is something almost approaching a sacrilege for mere man, with his horrid disabilities and ignorance of style, to question any of her dictates. Perhaps the progressive congestion of traction had something to do with banishing the hoops and furbelows of our grandmothers, along with tlie succeeding '"improver," to the limbo of forgotten things. Now we have gone to the other extreme, and we really have some sympathy with the Melbourne City Council in its abomination of the hobble skirt. Mankind is different to the animal world, inasmuch as where the birds and the beats and the fishes are concerned Nature Ims proclaimed that "the male insect" shall have the more gorgeous plumage and tlie thicker coat and the most brilliant scales. Humanity, in its adopted artificiality, has reversed this process, and it is femininity that walks abroad in glad garments and suns itself ' in silks and satins. We are, of course, ,

allowed to look on, and in the privacy of domesticity to express guarded opinions, but there is woe and desolation awaiting'tlie man who dares to suggest that his wife's latest hat—for which he has had the privilege of paying—does not suit her. "It is an awkward thing to play with souls, and matter enough to save one's own," wrote Browning; but it is a far more awkward thing, he might have added, for the masculine mind to interfere in matters of feminine apparel. Fashion is woman's dress is not a matter for masculine legislation. The hobble skirt is an abomination, and it is as ugly as it is embarassing, but it is not a universal habiliment by any means. It "cuts no ice".with masculinity, and 'we poor males, knowing that our women love to dress to please us, do not require the intervention of any legislative body to instruct them as to what they shall put on and what they shall take off. Thank goodness, we can trust to their modesty and their maidenliness to rest assured that they will not overstep the bounds of decency and good taste, and that not even the "Queen Rose of the Rosebud Garden of Girls" will unfold one more sun-kissed petal than she ought to do. The hobble skirt will follow the crinoline just as soon as our women wish, and no sooner, but it will not be replaced by tights, and no amount of civic legislation will banish it 51 moment sooner than the finger of Fashion decrees.