ELIZABETH'S DAY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20668, 13 September 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

ELIZABETH'S DAY.

TYRANNIES OF FASHION.

BY ELSIE K. MORTON.

Elizabeth, aged seventeen, had just put up her hair and gono into long frocks. Hair was hair iu those days, and long frocks were long. In the daytime skirts just brushed tho heels of your shoes; in the ovening other people's heels did tho brushing. Ah mo, that sickening tug at tho waist-band, the ripping of pleats, the looks of thunder! The boy friend had to watch his step in good earnest in thoso days! After a really successful sot of lancers, the girls would be led panting like hares to tho dressing room, clutching their falling hair, stumbling over their ripped skirts. And tho scene inside! Women attendants dashing to and fro with mouthfuls of pins, rendering firstaid with torn trains and sundered hems, dishevelled ladies crowding tho mirrors, frantically trying to poke in tho ends of a fuzzy hair-pad that had worked looso in the joyous abandon of the dance. Elizabeth thought it would bo great fun, now she was really grown up. So sho unplaited her shining schoolgirl pigtail, backcombed hor hair until it stood out liko a Papuan head-hunter's, stacked it up over a hidoous hair-pad, looked in tho mirror and thought sho was beautiful. Her dress came down to within an inch of tho ground and up to within half-an-inch of her ears, tho collar portion edged with a stiff, scratchy neck-frilling, and reinforced with three-inch whalebone supports. The bodice was mado with wido leg-of-mutton sleeves, and was fitted on a tight lining, or basque, also heavily reinforced with whalebone. The heavy, cloth skirt was cut in ten gores lined throughout, and finished off at the hem with a heavy brush binding from which cakod mud could be sponged off more easily than from the material itself.

Sho held her chin high in those days, not because she was haughty, but because the whalebone struts in her collar stuck sharply into her chin and ears if she didn't. Sho rarely turned round to look at anything, because it made her feel, sho said, as though her head were being sawn off. The Sports Girls. When Elizabeth played hockey sho wore a stiff white pique blouse, and a skirt that came down well below her ankles. She played right wing, and had a good deal of running to do. She was long-legged and very fond of running, but about that time she began to wonder if modern styles were quite suited to woman in her race for emancipation and independence. There were two rebel girls in an opposition team who always wore their hockey skirts most disgracefully short, fully six inches abovo the ankles. They dashed about all over the field, flourishing their sticks, leaping like panthers, and their team nearly always won, so that presently an edict went forth from a combined body of scandalised losing teams that henceforth no player's skirt must bo more than six inches from the ground. Thus were the proprieties rigidly enforced in Elizabeth's day. There came a day, some years later, when Elizabeth joyfully discarded the whalebone reinforcements and tight linings and stepped into a hobble skirt. The race for emancipation was proceeding apace. Her blouse was now quite daringly low-necked, fully two inches below the little hollow at the base of her throat! The Deadly Hatpin.

She twisted her hair into a quaint " jughandle " at the back of her head, and perched on top of it an enormous Merry Widow hat two feet from east to west. She moored the amazing thing with murderous twelve-inch hatpins that stuck right through the crown and three inches out on the other side. Once again Elizabeth shrank from turning her head, especially in crowded tramcars, not from hauteur, but from a lively fear of having her eyes poked out. Men complained bitterly. The awful things were sometimes used by women as weapons of defence, and burglars trembled in their shoes. Articles appeared in the press, " The Deadly Hatpin," and a by-law was passed making it an offence for a lady to fare forth in public without screwing metal or glass protectors on the ends of her hatpins. But that, after all, was only because tho men made such a fuss. They wore always fussing about women's clothes, decided Elizabeth; first their skirts were too long and their stays too tight, thon their heels were too high and their blouses too low—" pneumonia blouses," they called them. The hobble skirt was too tight and the harem skirt —but what they said about the harem skirt was really too insulting to repeat! Elizabeth had road how a mob of males in a city overseas had actually pelted a lady in a harem skirt with decayed fruit, eggs, and other unsavoury missiles, so that the poor thing had had to liop-skip-and-jump for her life!

The Miracle. So Elizabeth came to the twenties, feeling rather tired of the helterskelter of fashion, still distinctly rebel in the matter of dress length, although improvements had certainly been effected. And then, all at once, the amazing miracle was effected! Skirts, like a summer barometer, began to climb up and up and up; the sound of shearing scissors echoed throughout the whole world, and lo! there was Elizabeth, looking ten years younger, with a frock to her knees and a paper-bag full of shining brown hair!

Oh, the freedom and tho glory of it! "Emancipation at last!" exulted Elizabeth. " Men will have to let us do as wo like now. Long dresses were a relic of days of slavery. Now wo are slaves and chattels no longer." For several years Elizabeth exulted. Then came danger signals. Men had been too preocupied in watching the upward trend of fashion to bo articulate or raise objections. Now their tongues began to function onco more. They began to fill the papers with bitter plaints, press and pulpit both taking a hand. It was no longer Elizabeth's lungs, feet, eyes, or waist they were worried about now, but her immortal soul, her morals, the good of the dress-manufacturing trade, the good of tho race, the slump in tho woollen market, for Elizabeth always wore silk now. It seemed as if tho wholo fabric of society were about to bo shattered because woman had decided that sho was comfortably and becomingly dressed, and the fashions had remained unaltered for quite two years. But Elizabeth was not greatly concerned. ' Women will never, never go back to thoso frumpy old styles again," she said comfortably. " Long skirts are unhygienic and ugly, and every woman knows how ageing they arc! Then the blow fell. Tho secret workers had dono their dark deed, tho foundations of society were restored, the good of the race assured, the dress-manufacturers appeased, tho " trade " triumphant! Almost overnight tho fashion-kings had launched their deadly campaign, and woman, the emancipated, bowed her head, and lengthened her skirts to the ground onco more. . . .

Elizabeth sat glooming over a family portrait album, gazing at her grandmother in a crinoline, her great-aunt in a bustlo. " And now," she said darkly, " it is ordy a matter of time before we shall all wake up some morning and find we have lost our legs! Like grandmother, wo shall only be allowed liuaJsJU*"'