SCIENTIFIC DRESSES

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIV, Issue 94, 4 April 1934, Page 10

SCIENTIFIC DRESSES

FROCKS FROM WOOD-PULP. The costumes of the smart are as artificial as industrial laboratories can make them, and as artificial as the coral enamel on the bright lips and freshly manicured nails, say s “Scientist” in the “Australian Women’s Weekly.” When we see the poetic names of materials in print we hate to think of sulphuric acid, ammonium chloride, sodium acid, sulphide, zinc, salts, glue, formaldehyde, and carbolic acid, but that’s what we have on, me girls. Our gowns are no longer the patient industry of slow-working silkworms, but come off the tree whose l>ulp has been put through a weird conglomeration of acid baths and beaten and pumped and spun into filaments.

Just take tho lovely maiden or chio matron with her chiffon hose, fabric shoes, filmy lace, and gossamer organdies—all from a horrible-looking mass of squelch brought to loveliness through beastly alcohol from the woodheap to the showy outfit.

And we owe the modern synthetic dress to the observation of mouldy old scientists who wouldn’t care a darn whether we wore a flour bag tied in the middle or the gown of Sheba’s Queen — except from a scientific point of view.

They watched the silkworms through months of toil, and then, copied them and sped up the process until they beat the silkworm by a couple of generations.

When the cockroaches and silverfish have their daily banquets from our sheer milanese or our race frocks, we wonder what they can get in food from them.

Wood. Allof it with a stiffening of glass or acid or metal.

The flapper wears her few ounces of acids and pulps and fingers her amber and jade made of formaldehyde and carbolic acid, with the same air as Marie, the wife of Louis the Well Beloved, who gave her a love shawl that cost a hundred women their eyesight and sent them to bed each night with hands wrap|H’d in raw meat to make them sensitive enough to handle next day the almost invisible linen threads of which the love shawl was woven.