MEN'S FASHIONS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 20, 25 January 1939, Page 5

MEN'S FASHIONS.

CHANGELESS ? HA-HA ! WOMAN'S HEARTY LAUGH. HOW SHE TURNS THE "CHOKE.' Since Eve donned her fig leaf men have been laughing at feminine stvleH. Now a woman turn 9 the tables—and the laughs—on the men. If our men would only stop laughing at us long enough to take an inventory in the mirror, and a good look in their mamas' photograph albums, they'd begin to understand why we smile indulgently when they make pointed observations about the Little Woman's new hats and coiffures. For men'* fashions are not only erratic and changeable—they're just plain cuckoo all the time. By cuckoo, I mean uncomfortable and unbecoming. Our heroes stick manfully to certain preposterous fundamentals, making their butterfly innovations within the constricted limits of collars, vests, garters and neckties, all designed to stop the circulation. Seasons don't matter, either. When the thermometer shoots up to 109 they et'll poultice their poor wilting necks with well-lined ties and monstrous collars. Take the old three-inch-high collar, for example. Xot that it's so old either. Some men are still addicted to its uncompromising stature and its narrow fissure front, though to-day's coxcombs would consider it outmoded. It does look funny, there's no'getting around that, and it did even in the height of its glory. Already On The Way Back. So did the peg tops and the Oxford bags and the bell-bottom trousers of just a few years ago. Remember how obnoxious the city jazz boys used to look, switching about in their pantaloons, so tight as to posterior, and so flouncy as to cuff? And when you want an extra hearty laugh, give a thought to the pinch-back suit popular some fifteen " years ago. Unfortunately men's-wear stylists tell us that it is already on the way back. Will there also be a return of its high belt, with a long vent running all the way up to it? That was pretty hot stuff, and so were the multitudinous buttons and pockets of that same foppish era. which saw the rise and fall of the coloured silk shirt—its hasty conquest of the beau monde and its loss of standing after it became the shipping clerk's dream. Women Miserable Counterfeits. One thing we must say for the men, they do take their fashions with a straight face, and a wholeheartedness, which self-conscious womanhood lacks. Xo grain of salt for them! There is an abandon about their moustaches, an originality in their high or low derbies, their flowing or stunted neckwear, that puts us women to shame. Men are the real peacocks. We females are but miserable counterfeits, forever aping Dietrich's slacks and Garbo's hair, or breaking out with shocking splotches after Schiaparelli, or stomach fullness a la Alix, or riotous hips that show a marked Molyneux "Zouave" influence. But the men! Oh, boy! Oh. man! Always they begin with the ridiculous and end with the sublime.. Starting out with the premise that they are born to be strangled, they let themselves go and wind up in a blaze of glory. All Sheer Soul. Just take a look, sisters, at their colour schemes, their boutonnieres. Consider the more emancipated of their kind —those great creative geniuses who cleave to the current length and cut of the conventional dinner jackej, only tp have their tailors make it up in midnight-blue velveteen, or canary yellow* Get out the old family album. You'll find the pictures of your husband and your brothers have changed uproariously in the last few years, and look even sillier than your own photographic gems do. Disarming though they are, swaggering about in their various conceptions of sartorial elegance, men have a mosshung, slapstick look in their aging photographs that makes each exposure suggest a New Year's Eve /masquerade costume. Why they should have an edge on the deadlier sex I cannot say, unless it's because we women trankly borrow from Paris and Hollywood, whereas their plumage is all sheer soul.—Margaret Fishback in the "New York Herald Tribune."