FIFTY-NINE DIFFERENT ANGLES ON THE FIGURES THAT CURVE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 33, 9 February 1940, Page 43

FIFTY-NINE DIFFERENT ANGLES ON THE FIGURES THAT CURVE

(By a

Mere Man

LTHOUGH they dress the same and A paint the same and cut their hair the same and generally act the same in everything that doesn’t matter, women

are just not made the same. Like whorls on finger tips, their forms are an infinite variety of vivacious variations, or something like that. This annoys dressmakers. They turn out a million popular models on the basis that skirts, for example, are getting shorter, or should get shorter, and find that a million women want a million different waist or bust sizes. Not only does this annoy mass-production dressmakers; it annoys’ the women too, for so much attention must be given to their varying sizes, half a yard or so of gravel grey something-with-a-new-name, tucked, folded, stitched, and decorated, can cost up to anything a worried husband cares to dream about. ' United States manufacturers estimate that this costs them annually an extra ten million dollars;

or, in plain English, about two million pounds, whatever Wall Street and the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street may decide to arrange.

They wanted sympathy. Burdened by this appalling thought, they needed a round shoulder to weep on as well as hang things onBut no one would play, until Mr. Roosevelt

came along with his bright and shining New Deal and a load of loving kindness for manufacturers in.- distress. He created the WPA, which is sometimes like the NLRB, and the RFC, and the GOP, and the A.F., of L., and all the other abbreviations Americans use instead of our Household Words. And the WPA _ co-operated with the D of A (Department of Agriculture-that one’s easy) and set about taping off women’s figures. It is possible to understand this being a Works Project but we'd hate to think of a good reason for involving Agriculture unless somebody wants to make a pun about waistlands. In December they started to measure a representative group of 100,000 women. Later this research will be continued from New Jersey -into five other states. Each subject, from show girls to heavyweight spinsters, will be measured in 59 different places (now, does that surprise you?)’ and the results will be recorded in all sorts of strange

and different ways to check what women’s figures are and what happens to them. The result: will be used to create. a uniform-sys-tem of sizing dress. models,