GAY FASHION SEASON

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 August 1939, Page 10

GAY FASHION SEASON

SKIRTS SHORT AND WIDE. HIPLINE CURVES ARE BACK. Anyone who has friends among people who work in fashion knows that designers, stylists, fashion writers, and such people, do not live in the present. They are always in the next season. In summer when anybody would be interested in chiffon dresses, the fashion girls are concentrating on fur coats. But do fur coats interest them in winter, even though icicles may hang from their eyebrows? A thousand times no. They are then starry-eyed over bathing suits.

That is why, when it is our plain duty to talk about spring suits, our minds keep wandering off to the newest culotte dresses, and white sharkskin shorts with printed skirts to wear over them.

But turning grimly back to the present, it's spring and skirts have risen. Don’t speak of them as so many inches from the_ floor. That would be a fashion faux* pas. You must measure them down from the knee now, two or three inches down, and hope for the best. Not only are skirts short, bu. wide—-wide! It is nothing for them to swing out five yards around. Even with our hearts on the raids, of summer, we can still be pretty much intrigued over spring ensembles. A really super one is a straight coat gathered at the shoulders into petalshaped yokes, in a pale grey-green, and worn over a simple black frock. With an orangy-red hat, it was simply thrilling; for that colour red is lovelj with that colour green. Of course, you have been hearing that navy blue has more or less pushed black into the past. When we hear that we smile quietly up our sleeve —it’s one of the new long sleeves, by the way—because although navy is always the favourite in spring, smart women go on wearing black just the same.

\Suddenly all clothes look younger. It is their short skirts, flared skirts, little waistlines, high necklines. The new basque dresses are a part of this soyoung business. Tight little old-fash-ioned bodices, hugging the waistline and running down below it, and wide flaring skirts. We have to keep using that word “little” about everything. Little bodices, little waists, little collars, little hipbone jackets, little-girl frocks. It may sound kittenish, but it’s really just young and springlike.

Even if we haven’t the world’s most youthful figure, the corset makers have seen to it that we are not left out of the fun. The most revolutionary uplifts you’ve ever seen outside the movies come to us in the latest brassieres of Hollywood design. Many of the absolutely ultra styles are pointed rather than rounded. Emphatically they give that new youthful look, particularly with the high young emphasis of the sculptured waist for contrast. With the necessity for a small accentuated waist, hipline curves come back again —not too exuberant, and certainly not pronounced at the back; but curves all the same. More and larger elastic gussets at the bottom of the corset are a comforting innovation. They allow absolute freedom of movement and room for the thigh spread. So there is no more excuse for that ugly displacement of flesh that causes so many unwanted bulges. We cannot stop here without making a slight bow to spring suits. Suits are so taken for granted that it seems old stuff to say “suits are new.” But they are always new. This spring with the full skirts and the short jackets, they look very different. The jackets are somewhat softer, usually collarless, anyway less mannish, and they look as though they really belong to us, and not to our brothers and husbands. Anyway you look at it, it is a twojacket suit spring. One jacket for town, one in contrast for the country. Shall you have a beige suit, with < beige crepe blouse, and a magenta hat? It sounds lovely. Then have also an extra jacket of beige-and-magenta plaid. Something else looks very new and very different —the shirtfrocks. They have changed their skimpy skirts for the new wide ones, their elbow sleeves for long soft ones, their shirt collars for youthful collarless necks. And they have taken to stripes, crosswise or otherwise. It’s a nice change. We approve.