SCHOOLGIRLS AS PROPHETS OF FASHION

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 36, 11 August 1934, Page 25

SCHOOLGIRLS AS PROPHETS OF FASHION

A "scientific"' experiment is being carried out in London to predict what kind of clothes the coming generation of Englishwomen will wear, says the "Daily Mail." \ . .

The experimenting scientist is Dr. Q. Willett Cunnington, psychologist-in-chief on tho women's clothing question. Ho is tha .doctor who has assembled the vast private collection of women's nineteenth-century clothing now on exhibition in Portman Square, and is preparing an equally vast volume on why women wear what they do. The material for the experiment is London schoolgirls under eighteen and the several hundred dresses in tho exhibition.

The experiment is bribing the schoolgirls with a prize of five guineas to write a short essay saying which dress they consider the most beautiful and why; and then applying the probe of expert psychology to tho girls' efforts to analyse which way tho fashion wind will bo blowing during the next ten years.

"Women's dross reflects so accurately the whole tempor and feeling of a generation,"1, said Dr. Onnnington, "that ib would be very valuable if wo could know beforehand approximately how

the nest generation of women was going to dress. .

"I believo it will bo possible I^> get a psychological forecast from these girls' reactions to the drosses of the four or fivo generations in this show.

"It will ainuso the schoolgirls (besides making one of them five guineas richer) and will,bo exceedingly interesting to tho exports.

"I shall be surprised if tno girls do no chooso as the most beautiful tho dresses of the 1830's, with their small waists, long pointed Gothic bodice, and air of slightly angular demureuess. "If they do, we can oxpert a return to Gothic architecture and serious religious feeling; a Gothic- fooling in dress means a roturn of Gothic fooling in other things.

"And wo arc, after all, a Gothic nation aud our fashions in dress, building, nnu lifo only swing away to tho severely classical aftor a groat national disaster, liko tho last war which temporarily paralyses national taste.

"If tho girls show no feeling for this period, then I think we can safely predict they will branch out into some com* pletely now line, oven more interesting to watch than a revival."