BRILLIANT SEASON

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 131, 7 June 1927, Page 13

BRILLIANT SEASON

TREND OF FASHION

(Written for "The PosF" by Mrs. Malcolm Boss.) LONDON, Ist May. This 1927 season is going. to be the gayest since 1914, and dressmakers are feverishly busy. The three months will be crammed with functions, and no fewer than four Queens—of Norway, Spain, Belgium, and Jugo-Slavia, to say nothing of the French President and King Fuad—will visit England. To-day the Royal Academy opens, and the opera season begins, and then London will be brilliant. The first" Courts are" for 24th and 25th May, and exquisite frocks are being created—made is far too trivial a word. Trains, restricted by the Queen to 18 inches, may be of tissue lined with velvet, but soft and supple, and with this a lace gown is worn, but this is the age of embroideries, and many of the ■ trains are miracles of needlework. Gold and silver shoes are not so popular—the cheaper varieties have caused this—and material of the dress or a plain cloth to tone, is preferred. Instead of the wispy straight frocks girls have been wearing—very short and very scant—the full skirt is now the mode, and very charming it is as it swirls and floats, revealing unexpected colours. Sometimes they are wired at the hips, but generally they depend for their pieturesqueness on the immense width of the finisy material. Wreaths of tiny flowers, gleaming embroideries, dainty pearl or bead work, all decorate these flounces. Often the skirt is draped to hang low in front and behind. The bodice is still a very insignificant item, generally with the botffant skirt, severely plain or closefitting. The tunic—which in day-time we call the jumper—is very popular for evening, generally weighted with lovely embroideries that tone in with the material of the Bkirt. The shops are full of three-piece suits for spring. The most useful are those of silk and wool, and as regards colour, pale leaf green seems to have ousted the long-lived wood shades. -Indeed, one has got a 'little tired of the übiquitous cloche hat and frock of all the uncertain shades of red, brown, and amber. There is a lovely blue—grey-blue— and a pale yellow that- one sees in the new materials. The cloche hat has been put in the shade by the wide-brimmed straws, and very picturesque they ,are, depending for thsiir beauty on their quality, their graceful shape—for their trimming is of the slightest, merely a posy on the brim, or a carelessly tied bow of velvet or petersham. Some of the new. picture hats have a fine veil dropping an inch of two over the brim, and crossed at the back to make a loose scarf. Flowers are most exquisite this season, the very tiniest being most modish and, of course, most expensive. The turban, folds of silk or tissue, is to be worn on State occasions, and very becoming it is, especially in black, the folds showing a bit of brocade or gold tissue. Although it is spring, velvet is much' used for binding and banding the straw hats, and flowers are preferred to feathers. The wide-brimmed hat has sometimes a floating ribbon end, passed round the throat and hanging down the back or secured with a natural rose or carnation on the shoulder. Some of the newest hats are of two materials, brown or black calfskin, and black petersham, silk felt, and georgotte, or ivory straw and grey lizard-skin. A smart wide-brimmed black crinoline had a wide-shaped piece of real ivory guipire set in between tho crown and the brim, and was simply trimmed with a posy of little roses on the edge.