THE LAW OF THE SKIRT

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 85, 10 April 1926, Page 20

THE LAW OF THE SKIRT

DECREE OF CHANGING FASHION.

Gone is the time when our poets sang the praises of the tempestuous petticoat. The place thereof knows it no more. With anxious yet embarrassed eyes the waning fortunes of the skirt are watched. Daily it grows smaller by degrees, though not always beautifully less, says the '' Daily Telegraph." In the days of Good Queen Anne, Steele and Addison kept the town agog with rumours of cabals among the fair to ,make dresses lower and lower yet. But to that modest age the possibilities of the ascension of the skirt had not been revealed. It is doubtless the working of that mysterious force, Nature's law of compensation, which keeps the modern frock up to the neck. Here in the West men have learnt to take with decent meekness what they are given. But the Greek taste is offended. To the women of Hellas the law has just slid, "Thus far and no farther." Exactly how far we find ourselves with infinite regret unable to say, for one telegram tells of skirts 13J inches long and an.other tells of skirts 7i inches .below the knee, which, by all the principles of anatomy, cannot be the same thing. What is certain is that any married woman and any girl over fourteen whose skirt is shorter than the law provides is an offender. Women inspectors will walk the streets of Athens with roving eyes. At first the scanty skirt will be warned, then the-law is to put forth its red right hand; and the police give notice to all.the other sex that fathers are responsible. for their children and husbands for their ;wives. The application of this always dubious principle to a matter of skirts is the crowning injustice to men. There must surely be some knowledge" of human nature in Greek police.; Some of them are probably husbands, some fathers. They must bo aware that it is very rarely the father or the husband who incites to the shortening of skirts. Not from parental or conjugal lips comes the cry "Excelsior!" What the need for such a penal measure is in Greece, what peculiar causes there may be there making a longer fjkirt necessary to the welfare of the State, we are not informed. In the old days there used to be a good deal of feeling about the scanty clothes of the Spartan women as compared with the flowing robes of the secluded women of Athens. But the modern woman, though not of Spartan austerity, has decided that in this matter Sparta chose the better way.