DANGERS OF DRESS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXV, Issue 33, 8 February 1908, Page 11

DANGERS OF DRESS.

War against the hat-pin point is now being waged in Moscow. It was provoked by two accidents which recently occurred in consequence of the abuso of this formidable^. 1 article of toilet, and now (writes a St. Petersburg coricspondcnt lo the Daily '.Mail) the habit ot carrying such dangerous weapons unsheathed is ioudly resented by the general puolic. A few days ago. after a concert directed by Nxkiscli, the- audience was. as usual, miking a hurried exit. The robins-room was thronged, the enthusiastic votaries of rauiie. male and female, elbowed each other fortissimo. One of the ladies putting on her hat inadvertently ran. a superfluous length of pin into her neighbour's eye. A scream, a congestion of the crowd, a short, sharp war of tongues, and the incident was over. A few days previously a similar mishap had occurred In a tramcar. A lady having dropped her reticule, a student quickly and courteously stooped down to secure it for her. As always happens in such cases, the lady also stooped down The youth, unaware of this, raised his head swiftly, and, her hatpin stretching out an inch or two beyond the brim, struck out his eye. For a time the other eye also was in danger. Now the editor of a Moscow newspaper makes a strong appeal to the good sense of the fair sex to discontinue such a dang-erous and unnecessary piactice. In St. Petersburg University circles, also, mnch irritation and discussion have been aroused by undue extravagance in ladies' toilet. It is only quite recently that women have been admitted within the precincts of the tempi© of wisdom, and only as "outside auditors, ' not as students. Most of the privileged ladies, it appears, devote themselves by preference to a stucy of the aesthetics of dress, and appear in the lecturerooms and in picture-hats of marvellous shapes, in dainty gowns that rivet attention as they sweep the dusty corridors, and in blouses that are poems in silk or crepe de chine. And as for the ribbons, the brooches, the latest things in belts, and the artistic designs of buckles, th<> unfortunate male student, especially of the bachelor persuasion, is literally spell-bound. He is not in a fit frame of mind to pore over musty old volumes ; he resembles Hercules in the power of Omphale. Things aesthetical have thus encroached upon matters scientific to such a degree that a remedy of some kind must be speedily found and applied. A group of really studious ladies, of whom there is a "fair" contingent desirous of having the matter settled quietly, have put up a notice on the black-boards beseeching their aesthetic sisters to reserve the man-killing gowns and the heart-stealing hats for other places than the university, and assuring them that by turning the lecture-halls into fashionable at-homes they are damaging the cause of Russian women generally