KNOWN BY ONE'S GARB

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 30, 5 February 1935, Page 15

KNOWN BY ONE'S GARB

THE SWIM SUIT PROCLAIMS

Commenting on the New South' Wales girl's action in prescribing the style and limits of bathing " clothes for. women and men, the "Sydney Morning Herald" writes:—

It is undeniable that many of the costumes now worn at popular beach resorts approach the point of indecency if in that term there is still left any definite meaning. It might be pleaded that, while actually in the water, compelling bathers to wear superfluous clothing would hinder their enjoyment of surfing exercise. No reasonable person wishes that, but the argument does not apply to those who defy the conventions of ordinary society by parading the public streets in.bathing costume. Here the law has a decided right to exercise its restraining influence in the interests of public propriety. Those who jeer at the conventional interpretation of public propriety are not the judges of it. Even were it no more than a matter o£ taste, they who preferred the costume of barbarism to that of civilisation would have no right to depree that the dress standard for men and women in Sydney suburbs should be that of natives in a South Sea Island village. Many people, rightly or. wrongly, think they can see much more in it than that. There is some truth in the dictum that "the apparel oft proclaims the man," and still more perhaps when applied to the woman. It can hardly be questioned that by promenading the streets in bathing costume, and the scantiest kind at that, women tend to cheapen themselves and deteriorate that respect for their sex, the forfeiture of which would, mean society's ruin. Many undesirable developments in latter-day life are attributed to the changes that our lowering conventional standards of social conduct are bringing in their train, and as long as "salus populi" remains the supreme law, this is an aspect of the question that must receive its due share of attention.