ROMAN'S REVOLT

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 5, 7 January 1928, Page 10

ROMAN'S REVOLT

LONGER SKIRTS? NEVER) \ A REPLY TO AGED CRITICS One wishes always to respect the aged, but that does not prevent oue from wishing too that the dear old ladies who attain 'the age of a hundred or thereabouts would iind some other way of celebrating the event than announcing that they think knee-length skirts dreadful, and that modern girls who wear them ought to be smacked. Any skirt is stupid, bceau^ .t attempts to join together what Nature has put asunder, but if skirts are to be worn at all, there are only two possible lengths— knee or ground (writes Minnie Pallister in the "Evening Standard"). The kneelength shows a complete limb, the groundlength no limb, and any other length cuts the limb in two. Could anything be more ungraceful? Why do humorists always pick out plus fours as the article of men's clothing most suitable to make jokes about? Why does a man, who is adorable in knee-breeches, and irresistible in a dress suit, look a fool in plus-fours? Because plus-fours are the only garments in a man's wardrobe which cut his legs in. half. As a plump Bister said mournfully to me, in the days when women wore half-and-halfs: "My legs are quite shapely when you see all of them; it's only when they are cut in half that they look so awful." Now she wears short skirts, looks bonny, and feels happy. Of course, when we come to crinolines and bustles and things it is another matter. In the days of crinolines women were not supposed to look like human beings- It was the height of indelicacy to do so. They might look like flowers, or powder puffs, or anything else they liked, bo, long as they suggested no resemblance to the human form. So in their liny bodices and enormous skirts they looked, like frilly fuchsias, or inverted full-blown roses. If they showed no leg, they showed the whole lovely line of the shoulder, and the whole arm except the ugly little bit where it joins on, which they were ■\rise enough to cover with a tiny puff. The Victorian silhouette was pretty in its own way—even the bunched skirts of Dv Haulier's Punch ladies were not unpleasing. Certainly both crinoline and trailing skirt charitably hid many deficiencies, but obviously they cannot return. The modern woman is a real person, not an artificial flower. She knowsjtoo much about microbes to want her skirt to trail on the ground. She could not golf or drive a car, or even get into a port-war house—to say nothing of a bus—in a wide crinoline. The ground-length, therefore, being out of the question, there remains only the knee-length, until such time as'woman becomes wise enough to wear knee breeches for other things than riding. The fight for sensible dress has been long and hard. Freedom of limb ig as important as freedom of mind—indeed, it is doubtful whether it is possible to have full freedom of mind without freedom of limb. Physical stuffiness has a dreadful way of spreading to the mind and ipirit. If women are wise they will disregard the opinions of their great-grandmothers, and of anyone else who grumbles at the simple, healthy fashions of to-day. Shorter skirts by all means. Shorter and shorter and shorter till they disappear altogether, the sooner the better, but longer—no, not if a million women reach the age of a hundred!