ROYALTY IN FRANCE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23112, 10 August 1938, Page 6

ROYALTY IN FRANCE

INFLUENCE ON FASHIONS THE VOGUE OF THE ROSE BAROQUE NOTE INTRODUCED BY BARBARA LONDON, July 23 In deference to tho Royal visit to France, Parisiennes will wear the English rose in their buttonholes and elsewhere. Hoses arc the J'arisienne's favourite flowers. Sweet-faced wild roses blow atop miladi's bonnet. Chubhy, headily-perfumed cabbage roses bloom on her picture hat, and turbulent, gay-coloured rambler roses joyfully encircle her throat. It is chic to pin a rose to your black velvet neckband, as the lady does in ray sketch. You can add a cluster to your handbag, too, and share their lovely perfume with your dancing partner. You can wear a rose behind your ear for coquetry, or a rose high on your piled-up curls for charm. You can wear velvet wristbands and pin real roses to them, or wear one on the wrist and another on the opposite upper arm. It is alluring to wear a lei of multi-coloured beauties and an exotic spray of garden roses pinned to one's front corsage adds a truly feminiue glamour to the simplest of plain crepe frocks. Poses blooming in big gay bunches on dark-ground prints, and prim posies of tiny roses on pastel colours, are also tho latest note in fashions. Vogue of Polka Dots From roses the summer spotlight swings to polka dots, and these are not so far removed from tho flowers as one might imagine. Jt is the thing this year to wear spots and flowers, and no one can say that you must not wear them both together. In fact, the best designers encourage it. With a flowerbed hat —a diaphonous affair that perches over one eye and is caught around with spotted tulle veiling —£o os a plain navy blue frock and a pink, blue-spotted, swallow-tail jacket. Spotted foulard is tho most successful of all the spotted silks. Jt is distinctive to look at and it has body enough to allow of good cuttings. It is used for jackets, coats, dresses and even hats. ]t is excellent for mantailored dressing gowns, and I have seen an exquisite house coat of geranium foulard spotted in white and cut with a widely flaring skirt. Polka dots have definitely gone romantic. The United States shows us bevies of beautiful evening dresses with drifting skirts and trailing scarves. Cleverly manipulated so that blue dots on white chiffon contrast with white dots on blue chiffon, one dress has fichu and nanels of the white on the blue. Another' is a flurry of

white dots on black chiffon. The very wide skirt- has flickers of crimson frills at two-feet intervals running horizontally around it. A fitted bodice and an old-world, off-the-shouldcr fichu are excellent foils to the gleaming shoulders of the wearer. Another fichu of ruffles distinguishes /l delightful Romany dress that contrasts on its full waltzing skirt, white dots on black chiffon and white dots on red chiffon, bands of each running in circles around it. The waist seems almost small and neat enough to pass through a wedding ring. Much more tailored, yet still in the romantic vein, is a dinner dress which contrasts pale blue chiffon 'lotted in white with dark blue chiffon also whitedotted. The bodice is cut with wide, draped shoulders inserted into a fitted and bnttoned-iip corselet reaching right up to the bust. The skirt of the darker blue is very full and gathered into the narrowest of waistbands. You will notice from the dresses I have described to you. and from _ the news of a profusion of roses, that most, provocative of blossoms, that the narooue is as important in the sartorial as it is ill the interior decoration world. Jt is not only 1 rimming that, has come under this influence —the silhouette has been undergoing subtle changes, too. No longer do we aim at the unbroken pencil line of a few seasons hack. To-dav it is correct to jut or curve almost anywhere you please. Jl'he mid-season collections reveal jutting tunics, and still more wide-spreading skirts. Xo woman dare look like a slab these days. To emulate the Nelson column is definitely demodce. To-day iL is more the sweeping curves of the Buckingham Palace gateway, or oven the slightly vulgar trimmings of the Albert Memorial, that must be our models. Actually, if we keep our eyes on the true art of the baroque, with its inspired irrelevancies, its swooping paranoias and its instinct for the right touch in dramatic decoration, wo cannot go wrong.