MORALS AND DRESS.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 154, 5 August 1914, Page 4

MORALS AND DRESS.

j. Three thousand delegates to the National Convention of Women's Clubs, |in Chicago, have passed a resolution declaring that present-day fashions are immodest, uncomfortable, and unattractive, and calling on American women to boycott French designers and encourage American styles. Speeches were made declaring that French styles were intended primarily for loose women, and were corrupting to all female modesty, and that all the coloured ribbons in underwear were designed for the underworld, and adopted there. Mrs Burdette, of California, said:— '' As the fashions are to-day, a woman must design nearly everything herself if she does not want to wear immoral clothes. The reason is because French fashions are not designed for good women; they do not spend money enough to suit the merchants, that is the reason why every new fashion is designed primarily for the Parisian demi-mondaine. The hobble skirt was the supreme effort of French designers on behalf of the great French silk manufacturers, who are their masters, for less material is required to make a greater number of women wear silk instead of cotton. The following of fashion's dictation causes women to eat their hearts out with longings that they cannot afford to gratify, and leads to uuhappiness, the ruination of homes, and the bartering of virtue. Nothing in woman's life more saps her strength, time, means, and nervous vitality than the triple-headed lion that guards every event of her daily life in the form of the questions —'What shall I wear? How shall it be made? How shall it be paid for?" Let us hope that American women will now initiate practical dress reform by designing and wearing clothes that are simple, hygienic, inexpensive, and beautiful. There are numbers of Australian womeii who chafe under the fact that women have not yet reformed their clothing as they have reformed many other things that affect their lives, and who will echo the sentiments expressed at the Chicago convention.