MUSEUM OF FASHIONS.

Auckland Star, Volume 55, Issue 63, 14 March 1924, Page 3

MUSEUM OF FASHIONS.

A XEW YORK ENTERPRISE. The picture of a bathing suit of the '70's falls under your eyes. 'How funny!" you 'comment. The reaction to the linen duster and the big yellow goggles of motoring's early days, when they were considered not only indispensable, but the "latest agony in swaggerishness, is the same. "How funny!"' each succeeding generation finds the foibles of its predecessors. Who knows but that the miss of 1974 will have a wild time with her picture album when she turns to the page that shows her bobbed-haired, bare-kneed great grandmother? Because these foibles and fadsfoolish as they may bi—entered into the lives of Xew Yorkers of the past, they are to be preserved, along with the more serious contributions, to present-day civilisation, in the museum of the city of Xew York, which is to be opened soon in tiie old Archibald Gracie mansion at the foot of East Eighty-eighth street. It is not to be a. highbrow museum any more than it is to he a lowbrow museum. It is designed to catch up the past and mirror it to tin' present, even when the present will have been in the distant past. Henry Collins Brown, its director, and the board of trustees, headed by Supreme Court •Justice Phoenix Ingraliam, intend simply that the loose ends of Xew York's other days—crude and cultured, elegant and inelegant, alike — may be caught up not only to amuse, but so that thi' stamp of other days may not be erased.