COME, LISTEN AND LEARN

Radio Record, Volume I, Issue 12, 7 October 1927, Page 6

COME, LISTEN AND LEARN

The Young Woman of Yesterday. "When I look back to my boyhood days and remember the fashionable youny women dressed "light," she dispensed with her short flannel petticoat, her quilted pads and cashmeres.’"’ So said Mr Wood from 3¥A in an entertaining talk on fashions. ‘‘She wore only a long cotton chemise, her whalebone corset, a pair of long stiffly starched pants, one corset covering, one cotton short petticoat, one lony full petticoat about five yards wide with a duster ruffle, high shoes and livle stockings. Ordinarily she would wear two long petticoats. And she wasn’t at all warm im this outfit even when the mercury danced around 90. "At least, she claimed she wasn’t as warm as the modern young woman who wears nothing but one sheer garinent beneath a sleeveless, decolette one-piece crepe de chine dress that ends at her knees. "The girl of to-day goes to her work carrying about 24ozs, of clothing at a maximum. Even a bathing suit weighs more in actual ozs. than the approved hot weather outfit of the girl of 1927. Corsetting. . ‘‘Whalebones, why she doesn’t know what.they are all about... And ‘lac-ing’--well, she couldn‘t if she tried. The average girl of 1897 measured about 18 inches round the waist. The average waist measurement of the girl of 1927 is 28 inches. "In 1920 quite an interesting effort was made by large corset manufacturets of America to combine with those of England in an endeavour to bribe the foremost dress designers of Paris to line up their frocks which would demand the continuance of corsets, but happily without success. Heavily boned articles gradually went into the melting pot and notwithstanding the immense expenditure of money in order to stem the tide, they have reached a time when they are now almost extinct. Ont of the confusion over the past six years some stability has been reached for encasing the figure which takes in all of the figure from bust to well below the hip line in one garment. — Shoes. Dealing with shoes, Mr. Wood said, "The search is on in the Seven Seas for new materials. Shoe material makers have exhausted the possibilities of new grains in domesticated land animals. In the jungles of Asia and Africa lizards, snakes and small reptiles have been canght, tanned and turned into leather for fashionable shoes. The reptilian vogue still continues, for the tanner has learned to put all the colours of the rainbow into his tannings. Already we are seeing ‘iridescent orchid lizard made up into | evening footwear. "In the China seas a vicious little shark has been discovered owning a skin as hard as flint. After all sorts of treatments, the finished piece of leather can be buffed down on an emery wheel so that its surface has all the brilliancy of diamond cuttings. This new leather absorbs colouring matter ‘to perfection. As a covering for a _. 2 -_

a heel in a soft pastel colouring, it has all of the shine and brilliancy of a coloured jewel. Now the attempt is ‘to be made to put this leather-called Galuchat-into the upper, All the iaventive ingenuity of the chemist and factory engineer 1s endeavouring to discover a way of stitching the material so that neither needle nor thread will break in the first stitch. Galuchat is now being cemented on in little patches used as insets or underlays in all of the colours harmonious with fine footwear, but the next move forward is to tame this China shark into a -material as docile as kid or calf. | Stockings, Paul Porret, who is known in Paris as the "Enfaut Terrible,’’? is becoming very dissatisfied with the monotony of hundreds of feminine legs all sauntering in harmonious pairs. ‘Why,’ he says, "should two legs look alike??? The answer is, of course, frequently and sadly, ‘They don’t," but M.. Paul is thinking less of the filling than of the stockings. He seeks variety, to be gained by splitting pairs and parading a black and a white, or whatever colour combination suits feminine fancy, side by side. A sensible idea is now practised in Paris, that of purchasing three silk stockings at a time. Gloves, The newest glove is the slip'on. It has a straight wrist resembling those of three or four years ago, only without the strap and dome. The tops are scalloped or finished with gold or metal clips. Then there is the long Mousquatierre, which we shall see as the season advances. ‘These are allowed to drop concertina fashion at the wrists.