LONDON IN MASKS

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 100, 24 October 1925, Page 16

LONDON IN MASKS

GAME OF. TREASURE HUNTING

ABANDONED,

The young people of London's smart society give much thoughtful attention to new forms of amusement. Conventional things such as bridge and dancing will not do for them. They must have something original. They invented treasure hunting, which reached across the Atlantic to New York. At the moment the best minds of the bright young people are concerned with "personality parties," states an English correspondent of the "New York Times." Freak supper parties, at which all the guests wear masks designed to accentuate their personalities, are given in Mayfair and Belgravia. The end of what is called the gayest season since the war has been "made even more gay by these midnight affairs. Midnight has boon chosen as the proper hour to arrive, the theory being that the personality is going strong •■i.t that hour.

"Women who imagine themselves possessed .of poetic souls are ushered in, wearing masks of ivory white, with heavy lids and thin green lips, while those who . think themselves simple and ingenuous appear with rosy, pouting lips and wide eyes of the baby-stare variety, heavily lashed in the manner of a doll. "Women who have a reputation for humour appear in laughing masks, with tho mouth spread in iin immovable smile.

The men, who arc usually young and not so very long out of the universities, arc equally particular that their masks shall explain their souls, so to speak. Young men keen to bo known as roues have worn dissipated masks, heavily pouched under the eyes and marked in blue and black on a background of sickly yellowish green.

Chelsea, the Greenwich Village of London, is responsible for the making of the masks. Choosing .a mask is almost as much trouble as sitting for a picture, and almost as expensive. Fantastic prices are paid for the.really "'soulful" ones. One society woman, who has revealed some of these absorbing details, explained to her mask maker: "I have a reputation for sympathy and sweetness. In reality, I am pitiless, as hard as a diamond, with a, completely cynical outlook on life. Make me 'a mask that will tell the world the truth." And he did, if reports are truthful. She paid £50 for the papier-mache mask, coloured t<r match'tho tints of her "aura."

One of the effects of the personality parties is said to be that under cover of the masks men and women behave in a' manner totally unlike their normal selves. Hitherto retiring women assume a more confident pose, debutantes act with the assurance of women of the world, and men and women whom nobody would have accused ot romance develop flowery phrases and act like medieval troubadours.