WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 289, 6 September 1928, Page 10

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

It is now explained that the recent Butt Road railway crossing deputation that didn’t see the Prime Minister was in complete agreement about everything—except what it wanted.

After it has finished burning its surplus library books at the city destructor, Wellington’s next municipal problem will be to find something to put in its proposed library building.

These delays in the start of the trans-Tasman flight are rather letting the outside world in on things about our climate that we ought to keep to ourselves.

Women are to be women again, Is the latest fashion announcement from London, and it is added that the new season’s fashion show indicates that features, frills, and fripperies are to be the rule. This raises the mysterious question of where the fashions come from. The generally accepted answer is that women’s fashions come from Paris and men’s fashions come from London. America has tried several times to declare its independence of Paris fashions, but the business of copying Paris fashions and forging Parisian dressmakers’ labels is stated to be as extensive in America as ever it was. London also would doubtless like to deprive Paris of the business of dictating the fashions, but whether the dress display’ recorded in the news is a declaration of independence or not is not very clear.

Among the high priests of dress in Paris is M. Paul Poiret, and last year M. Poiret was declaring that it was American influence that had pulled the fashions in their present direction. It was American influence, he asserted, that had caused the young ladies of France to affect a masculine appearance and a mannish swagger—and he even blamed the American ladies for the cult of cigarettes and pyjamas! And yet strangely enough it seemed to be the American soldiers during the war who were most surprised at tlie way the fair sex in the Old World was everlastingly puffing at cigarettes and adopting mannish airs.

M. Poiret. in January, 1927, was confident enough to declare that the female thirst for emancipation was far from quenched, and that for several years more they would strive after the boyish, bachelor type of get-up. ‘■lncreasingly,” he said, “they will go in for tennis and golf, and every manner of outdoor activity, and this, far from expressing elegance, will have the effect of restricting its expression to the limit.” The taste for outlandish American dances was still growing, and everything, declared this arbiter of fashion, portended still more masculine and severe clothes for women. Already women had appeared in dinner jackets, and M. Poiret predicted that trousers for the ladies would shortly be tlie vogue. “And trousers for women.” he added, “will not be a mere short-lived fad; they will become as inevitable as bobbed hair, which is here to stay.”

Can it be that M. Poiret’s ideas about the future of women’s fashions are all wrong? Was this great liberator, who at one stroke of his scissors struck the shackles of whalebone from the tortured form of woman, completely astray in his forecast? If he is off the rails, who is there that will dare to prophesy what the next slant in the fashion books is to be? Ever since women’s skirts started going up we have heard forecasts that next season’s were coming down again, but next season has come and gone and respectable old-fashioned people are still waiting for the dressmakers to start behaving themselves.

Eighteen months ago M. Poiret was very positive about his trousers —or rather the lady’s trousers. At first they would be wide and baggy, excessively plain, and worn by the militant type of woman. We seem to recollect that thirty odd years back the militant type of woman did start wearing trousers, but finding it easier to get a husband when clad in a skirt soon gave it up. About 1940, however, female trousers will really have come into their own, M. Poiret assures us. The severe foreign influences shaping the first female trousers will have vanished, chiffon will be in vogue in fashioning these garments in the purest French taste, and the ladies will don trousers of irridescent crepe with diaphanous scarfs drifting about them, gently beclouding their outlines. Such is the picture presented, and picturised. too, with high-heeled shoes and fantastic hats to complete it.

These interesting ideas were aired by M. Poiret in the New York “Forum.” and it is interesting to note that Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt. the famous American woman suffrage lady, was soon on the Frenchman’s trail. Mrs. Catt flatly declared that women were becoming tired of being bossed by the French Fashion Trust, and that nobody wished the eternal changes in fashion except the greedy people who made clothes and the arch-conspirators of the Fashion Trust. As for trousers, Mrs. Catt sees nothing wrong with them for women so long as they are plain sensible trousers. As late as 1914 more women in the world, she declared, were wearing trousers than skirts, and more men were wearing skirts than trousers. And trousers for women would be far less offensive than the bare knees and garters now seen. But in the fripperies with which JI. Poiret trimmed predicted female trousers. Mrs. Catt was unable to see anything but bunk. And now the news asserts that the fashion is to be all frippery and no trousers. And Jlrs. Carrie Chapman Catt will doubtless be glummer than ever. Waiter (observing patron's dissatisfaction) : “Wasn’t your egg cooked long enough, sir?” •*Yes, but it wasn’t cooked soon enough.” "Where these so-called socialists make a luffable mistake is in thinking they can carry out their notions without a paramount. As soon have au army without a general as do away with the hereditary chiefs. 'Tis when they realise their big mistake and try to replace hereditary paramounts with some pasty, elurkish feller got nothing to him but a fountain pen and a packet of cigarettes, that the melee begins. . . Socialism! . . . What a rumour!”

“Doesn't the dawn come every day calling you to move on? No camp should last forever. And that’s where civilisation makes the mistake of its life, trying to cage the! natural man.

. . Massive silver .. Turkish carpets, and so on. All the luxuries of the haut ton are neither more nor less than neck-irons to a slave.”