WHEEL OF FASHION

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21906, 15 September 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

WHEEL OF FASHION

BY QCEXTtN POPE

THE MODERN GIRL

The modern girl has been a favourite theme with the English penny press for a generation, and nowadays she receives the hard words which the saints of old applied to the whole sex. Her daring, ber neglect of manners (that is to say, her imposition of a new standard of manners), her absorption in the new, her lack of standards of taste, her immodesty (short-skirt days, stockingless days, shorts-for-tennis days)

—we hear of them all in turn. But no side of her attracts more criticism than her slavery to fashion, her acceptance of the new at the expense of tho sensible, her determination to change, outwardly at least, just as she seemed to have been settling down. Let doctors praise her wisdom in adopting short skirts and silken clothes and she switches back to long frocks and talks of returning to wool. Let artists admire tho lines of her mode and she changes to one of bunches and flounces. There is, we are told, no reason in her. And if one examines some of the modes which have been favoured by the really smart people in the last year or so ono feels inclined to agree. Hero is a picture of the Lady Angela Protheroe having miniatures painted upon each of her dainty fingernails so that she may keep abreast of the times. Last year she wore those same dainty nails a blood red. In 1932 she caused quite a stir when she was among tho first to appear in a ballroom —no, not a ballroom, a cabaret—stockingless, with 'silver sandals and silvered toenails to match. That same year she visited Deauville, and came back to England in a very brief space of time with a complete sun tan. It was a tan, anyhow, though innocent of the sun. Bronze skin was tho only wear, and she paid a visit to a beauty shop which provided the bronze by use of a special oil.

That same season she was seen with demountable eyelashes, sprayed hair, which crystallised after the operation and was tinted with metallic powder the same gold colour as her lame frock. That season her fingernails were demountable, too, shaped and filed like real fingernails, but in a variety of colours, forming perfect matches with her gowns. She first saw the tiny pictures and letters for fingernail decoration that year, but thought them " too extreme." As so often happens, the extreme of 1032 became the unremarked of 1934.

Not So Foolish

She is a real beauty, Lady Angela. Her skin has that freshness which seldom endures; her eyes are bright and clear; her face has that vacant repose of the Englishwoman educated but not cultured; and her figure is slim and straight. She has more than prettiness; within a few years her beauty will be of the type that reminds poets of blossomed roses. Why, then, does she resort to these aids to appearance, so trivial and unnecessary? The answer is simple—because they are the vogue. Everyone does it. Her friends have been through much the same stages, with some modifications, and she will not be behind them.

Besides, some of these changes in appearance appeal to her as witty, and she esteems wit above all things. She is bright, intelligent and active, and to her there is nothing so horrifying as the idea of being old-fashioned. The old live in a different world, a world of early nights, lack of mobility and a distressing restraint about such things as eating and drinking. But she is a nice girl, and there is not an atom of harm in anything she does. Her wildness may appear merely as a pose if we grow to know her well, and there are times when, after a week of hectic living, she curls up near her mother and is just a little girl again. It is this side of the modern girl which her unsympathetic critics never see. They see her bright and hard and full of the energy which she has through not rising before noon, not as she becomes when her egotism is low and her energy gone. For them elie never becomes a person; she is simply that abstraction, " the modern girl." And they will not realise that for all her fads and her exaggerated fashions she is not nearly as foolish as her several times great-grandmothers were. She does not confine herself within an iron frame, though the last few years have brought a hint of even this foolishness; she does not feel expected to faint at times of emotional crisis, and to her healthy extraverted mind the languors of the eighteenth century, no less than the heroines of Charles Dickens, seem stilted and silly. Other Days If you think that she is the prisoner of fashion, read what Addison wrote of the women of two hundred years ago. If you think the permanent-waving machine of the twentieth century is an odd tribute to female freedom, look on one of the old French prints which shows the lady' of 1735 seated at her dressing table while her barber, arranging her coiffure, has mounted three of the rungs of a step-ladder. If you are of opinion that the frocks of to-day are not what they might be, turn up the Punch drawing which shows three women in crinolines standing before a hansom cab and wondering how they are to get inside. If you think that the present fashion in hats might be bettered, turn back your mind to the " picture " hats of a generation ago which were worn b3' the mothers of the modern miss.

If this does no more than point the fact that women in the past have been foolish, it at least reminds us that the present-day woman has not been able to carry her foibles to the same point of absurdity. There is little doubt that the revolt against clothing, both in the case of men and of women, was largely the result of the world war. The men, tired of being in uniform, took a course which led to motoring, golf, and the dressing for both as if the man were a modern brigand. The women, asserting a greater degree of independence, reached a modicum of clothing, and marked every portion of that clothing with the spirit of release. Skirts were short, sleeves were plain, necks were low and lines were straight. Dresses depended largely on richness of design or lustre of materials for their smartness. But the rebellion faded. Another generation grew up, and one which knew nothing of Franco and Flanders. They had a different background, they craved a different spirit in clothes. The Superior Present Thus the fashions of to-day, influenced as they may be for a time by the Persian art exhibition (just as the fashions of yesterday were influenced by the opening of the tomb of King Tut-ankh-amen)), are fundamentally more feminine and more decorative. The new spirit, in fact, is a return to the old spirit, to the fashions of the day before yesterday. It is a curious world, this world of fashion. It is the one place where the present is always superior to the past, save in the minds of the prejudiced. For the past is dead, and the present, however exaggerated in style, however offensive in assertion, has the enormous and unassailable advantage of being alive before our eyes.