HOW LITTLE TO WEAR.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3352, 20 December 1926, Page 3

HOW LITTLE TO WEAR.

(London Dpily Telegraph.) It is school-children who this time have been censured hy a medical man for not wearing the hygienic quantity of clothes. They, or perhaps it would .be more accurate to say their parents, are convicted of the heresy of believing that a heavy weight on the body keeps colds away. If they walked abroad more exposed to the elements they would,, we are told, suffer less from the minor ills to which the flesh is heir. An attack over the same ground, hut t/om tho opposite direction is frequently launched against young ladies who prefer modishness to warmth and silk stockings and bare backs- to flannel next to tile skip. Not only doctors, but also laymen disagree on this vital question. One may meet people who proudly assert that the thin cotton garments they adopt during the .summer serve them equally effectively in mid-winter. They laugh at wool in all its varieties, scorn overcoats, and shudder at goloshes. Others on the old principle once very widely accepted, at least in some parts of rural England, that “what keeps the cold out keeps the heat out.” remjyn thickly muffled through the dog-days. Individual taste is given a better run hy.inale faddists than hy those of the other sex. Men ride their fancy on a snaffle, while women arc, so to speak, guided by the hearing-reins of fashion ; but all of us inevitably change our habits quite drastically in the course of our lives. No doubt over-fondness for either extreme saddles us occasionally with a temperature. What is. however. more surprising is the immunity with whirl* we discard from and add to our wardrobes without, ill-effect. Would thc ladies of Queen Victoria's Court all die of pneumonia if they spent a post-war winter in the evening modes of this year? Would, on the other hand, a modern debutante perish of suffocation if she attended in a hallfroek of that day a dance of her grandmother’s? Either of these sad possibilities is so plausible that we are surely entitled to take off our hats to our .powers of adaptation.