A LEAGUE TO BRIGHTEN MEN?

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 143, 18 June 1926, Page 5

A LEAGUE TO BRIGHTEN MEN?

(By LADY ALEXANDER.)

The League of Bright Men is long overdue! Never before have women been brighter, more radiant, optimistic and healthy than they are to-day; men never, perhaps, so long-faced, overweighted with the cares of taxes, so ailing and complaining.

Is there a magic tonic, I wonder, in Eve's cheerful and light dresses, and would Adam be brighter if she chose his clothes';

These were my thoughts when in a city office 1 watched fascinating Pamela Brown, who finds a modest weekly salary sufficient to buy vivacity and eternal smile, roseate health, and the daintiest if simplest of clothes. Dictating correspondence to her employer —rich beyond her wildest dreams of avarice, Hit solemn-faced care-worn, coughing with tbe latest cold despite a heavy woollen suit, which was also as dull as December in colour, as funereal' as its wearer's mood.

In the street this cameo was repeated, with variations, a thousand-fold. The brightest thing in "Brighter London," I could not help thinking, is the modern girl, notwithstanding all the lamentations of her detractors. Tropical Colours. From the flaming tropics she has borrowed her colourings; her silks and satins and scents breathe of lighthearted Paris in its gayest days. Possibly—for she is ever striving to cultivate health and beauty —her short skirts have emerged partly from the teachings of the etigenists, and partly from the feeling of freedom and serviceability they give in an age which must adapt itself to the rush and tear of swift travel and the whirl of jazz. Shingled hair she has adopted not because it may have been associated with the languorous times of Cleopatra, not because it is a wile to ensnare modern Antonys, but because it is a time-saver, makes the mother of forty feel as young as her daughter. The lights of the picture of life in 1020 are nearly all filled in by women, the shades by men, who tern to have become the downcast if not the downtrodden sex. Few men radiate with cheerfulness and laughter as most women and girls do. They are worried by work, taxes and bills—troubles they find it bard to shake off their shoulders. Yet the wife who can turn up smiling at the breakfast table and can take her pleasures gladly is probably nowadays the rule, and not the exception. John in Apricot. What is the secret of this contrast? Women in the past ten years, as a glance at any fashion plate cf the period will show, are dressed more brightly and more lightly. But men's clothes have lost little of the drabness and eumbcrsomeness of the Victorian era, though they are less grotesque. While enterprising Pamela has very decided ideas about what she wants in frocks and hats, plain John is content to leave everything to his tailor. To rouse him from his lethargy, the League ot Bright Men must be started, and its members must have their clothes designed for them by a band of modern Pamelas.

"I think something in apricot would liven up John immensely," Pamela would say, and, without saying more, she would be giving an order that would shatter all the best traditions of Savilerow. With a snap of her fingers she would ignore the dignified advice of the staid gentleman with the inch-tape. No More Plus Fours. Plus Fours would be taboo. Thick woollen socks would give place to others of shimmering silk in the newest sunburn hues. And John's cherished woollen underwear would be sacrificed to Pamelas' slogan, "Silk next to the skin'"—a motto out of her own sartorial i reed, which lays it down that silk is not only pleasant to the touch and invigorating, but keeps the circulatory system at a more equal warmth than wool. No good leaguer, lie he a gallant golfing youth or an anaemic veteran, would coddle himself in cardigans and other Arctic wear, would ever show his face in a frock coat or a topper, and would even have qualms about whether bowlers were not too solemn and uniform to suit a Bright Man's taste. Pamela's choice in ties ( (which all wives are told is as unsteady as their selection of cigars) would be the bitterest pill John would have to swallow, but no doubt in time he would become acclimatised even to that. . . . At present the League of Bright Men is merely clothed in fanciful imagination. But so almost, is the idea of the country being ruled by women, which the Home Secretary says will be the case if the franchise is further extended.