DRESS REFORM.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 21, 13 June 1914, Page 5

DRESS REFORM.

ADVuI'ATED HY AMERICAN WOMEN. By Cable—Press Association—Copyright New York, June 11'. The General Federation of Women's\ Clubs, at Chicago, advocated dress reform. An the. annual convention speakers demanded that women should wear dresses large enough to walk in without inconvenience. Thousands of women were ready to dress in a sane manner, if manufacturers would allow them. "The shopgirl really made the fashions for the society women. When she asked for the very latest, the shopgirl always brought her idea of the latest fashions, and women accordingly adopted them. If manufacturers assisted reform inigUt easily be effected. Grace Hutchins, costume designer at Columbia University, asserted that American women's clothes were mad. Nowhere in the world was there sueh over-dressing as in the United States. The -hobble skirt was tlie supreme effort of French manufacturers to secure the silk trade, in French hands. Narrow dresses had cost German manufacturers the product of ten thousand looms annually. The speaker declared that every woman who wore immoral clothes was not necessarily immoral, rather she was thought!, m in im abnormal degree.