FASHION REPEATS ITSELF

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22201, 18 September 1937, Page 19

FASHION REPEATS ITSELF

Women's Dress Through Th#| Ages

The latest fashions, heralded as something absolutely new, often turn out to be merely repetitions or adaptations of ideas that were used in dress styles in the days of the ancient Greeks or in the Middle Ages. Periods of freedom in dress have been followed by styles in which everything was rigid and stiff, and then again there has been a change to freedom. Artificiality has been followed by natural styles, but always another period of artificiality has followed. Will the modern style continue to develop on lines of freedom, or will there be a return even to such things as the crinoline and the farthingale? Sometimes national leaders have thought that women were wearing too much clothing, and sometimes that they wore too little. Solon, the famous law-giver of ancient Greece, tried to check unseemly display by forbidding the women of Athens to appear in public wearing more than three garments at a time. Modern law-givers, however, often seem to think that this is not enough. Women's copying or adaptation of masculine styles has always been a source of worry tb moralists. Women have lately achieved a victory for shorts and close-fitting pants for games and exercises, but the battle had already been won more than 3500 years ago, when the girl athletes of Crete took off their long flounced skirts and little coatees, , and went into the public arena to do their highly skilled acrobatics and bull-vaulting turns, dressed exactly like the men performers, in close-fitting shorts or pants, and sometimes—though not always—a thin white chemise. Hawking in a Farthingale In between times, women have gone back to doing their exercises in voluminous and unsuitable clothes, as can be seen from fourteenth century illuminations of women rabbiting, shooting, and hunting—riding astride, it is true, but in long gowns tucked up. Queen Elizabeth went hawking in a farthingale and a plumed hat, and later there were the bustled and befrilled tennis players of 1850. Modern women are lucky to have returned to ancient Cretan and Greek ideas of sports kit. But it is not always practical considerations that lead women towards masculine items of clothing. Sometimes they take to them just for fun, which has always shocked the clothes moralist most of all. In the twelfth century Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and her ladies dressed up as Crusaders, and rode about the tiltyard, causing the king great shame. »

The fascination to' imported clothes and ornaments has always proved quite irresistible. Greek ladies of the fifth century B.C. had a fancy for Persian and other Oriental styles, which was discouraged by politicians as being immoral and unworthy of Greek civilisation. The Persian note was brought over to England in the twelfth century, when the Crusaders brought back souvenirs for their sweethearts, and

again in the early eighteenth century fashionable beauties were painted in Eastern costume or wearing English gowns made out of Eastern fabrics. This revival- was partly due to Queen Anne's desire to encourage the East India Company, which imported such goods, and partly because popular romantic writers made Persia a regular setting for passionate stories. In the days of Roman occupation, the British women took to doing up their flowing hair in tight plaits and curls in imitation of their Roman governor's wife, and just as women to-day have a fancy for the peasant work of Middle Europe, the Roman ladies took to wearing British rings and necklaces of red amber and glass, and soon these native British ornaments became so fashionable in Rome itself that manufacture and export of them became one of Britain's chief industries.