A FALL IN COLLARS.

Grey River Argus, 29 October 1926, Page 3

A FALL IN COLLARS.

(London Daily Telegraph.) Ladies, if they wished to convict the other sex oi vanity in apparel, would be wise to take man by The throat. The. male leg and figure have suffered much, being at sonic periods 100 tightly imprisoned and at others over exuberantly festooned, but it is the neck has had to encounter most hotly the slings and arrows of outrageous fashion. As a London mercer who has completed fifty years of selling collars has just been remark ing, the younger generation does not know what i[ has escaped. Soft collars may now be seen on all but very formal occasions, and mankind has subsided (into a comfortable uniformity. whereas it used to ride fancy on a snafHe when clothing its nock. There are still, says the veteran mercer, rare orders for “Gladstones” and “eauferds,” but 3|in of starch ar e seldom required, and the demand has died out for perpetually changing shapes. Who to-day feels himself naked unless his chin surmounts a “One String Albert” What actor, even among the most eccentric of up-to-date Thespians “always wants something spectacular and different” round his neck ? The Masher m|ay still look out at us from among the duchesses in the faded pages of a Du Maurier lalbum, we may still sec the vacant youth ■ticking the knob of his cane, and caricatured by some blunt humorist —was it Phil May?—as “a donkey looking out over a white-washed wall,’’ but it is to the sketch-book that we must go for such sights. Bond strecet knows them no more. Col||ars were high in the world one®, and great has been their fall. While they were to be measured in fractions of a foot they could claim to have kept at least |a shadow of their dignity, but even in the starchiest Victorian days they had already lost much of their romance. Who will compare a “Gladstone” with that collar of red and white roses that an English prince once wore, or with the falcons and fetterlocks on the collars of York, or—most splendid of all —the flints, steel, and splarks of the collar of the Golden Fleece? Such state has, indeed, not utterly been eclipsed; the Sheriffs of London are still often presented with collars of gilt and enamel, but many of us, so far from letting our imagination run riot, do not even rise to starch What the Fathers of the City would think—and say —if they could suddenly return to their offices and hold a dress parade of their successors wo dlarc not surmise.