"GLAMOUR GIRLS" DOWN THE AGES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23489, 28 October 1939, Page 5 (Supplement)

"GLAMOUR GIRLS" DOWN THE AGES

BEAUTY means business nowadays. And business demands a change in almost as often as it needs 'a. change in the style of women's clothes. The tempo of that change has reached a speed "• that would have appalled the Greeks, who made their marble Venuses for adoration through the ages. Curves come and go, and come again. ..Hair shifts from platinum pale to the deepest black. The.way a lady walks, i the colour of her lips and f'nger nails, the shape of her eyebrows, the expression of her mouth, and even the amount and disposition of the weight she cai> ries must change man-v times over the course of a short life if she is to keep pace with the standard of beauty reigning at the moment. ;Fascinated Admiration It was not always so. Egyptian slave girls slim in flat "relief, stone Greek goddesses of a superhuman serenity, MsyV.au tino Madonnas with bent necks and almond eyes ruled their worlds for centuries. The Mona Eisa lias held the fascinated admiration of mankind for ' Boine 500 yoars. The Venus of Milo delighted beauty-loving Greeks for more than 200 years before Christ, and has boon the measure of beauty in our very different; age for the century since she was re-discovered. Partly this shift and change is a matter of the tempo of the moment. Over the long course of the' centuries, man's taste in glnmriur girls has covered almost every conceivable type of feminine beauty, and has delighted in many types that we hardly recognise as handsome nowadays. Faces have been long or short, square or oval. Noses have boon straight arid finely chiseled or tip-tilted like j th<f petals of a poet's 'lower. Kyi's have been sulky or candid, mouths wide and generous or small and full. Hair has been closely cropped, curled in mud or cascaded about knees. And as for figures, they have ranged from tilt; short, fat ladies the AlirignaeMns loved to the tall, slim, willowy

girls that Gainsborough painted, with almost every conceivable variant of proportion in between. Goddesses among the Hindus have even had several times the usual complement of arms and legs. But whereas shift and change used to be a slow process, nowadays it takes place from year to \-ear. A new star is born and an old star fades to obscurity in the time it takes get a fashion note from Paris to San Francisco, or a smash hit in the film world from Hollywood to New York. A modern lady's immortality hangs on the way she looks to the candid camera, and she may defy every known rule of beauty if only she is photogenic. Candid. Cameras This matter of the medium is an important factor in the modern beauty race. Bv and large, stone lasts longer than paint, but ladies in either of .them are much more enduring than those preserved on celluloid film or coated paper. The most enduring medium of all is the word, for it permits fashions in visible beauty to change as they will, while it arouses in each new generation an image of the fabled lady which can be put in terms that are the essence of the moment's taste. It is, perhaps, no accident that the most famous beauties of all are ladies

who, like Helen of Troy and Iseult of tho White Hands. Cleopatra and that Lilith who was Eve's pagan predecessor, left no recognisable images to dim their legendary fame. Wo know, for instance, that Helen had a "face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt tho topless towers of I Ilium," because Christopher Marlowe said so some twenty-seven centuries alter Helen's birth. We know that she looked "a daughter of tho gods,

By MILDRED ADAMS

divinely tall and most divinely fair" because Tennyson, 200 years after that, added his homage to Marlowe's. But what she actually did look like we shall never know, and it is probably better that way. Even Homer was talking about her from hearsay. The medium in which beauty is transmitted is important for more reasons than that of the time element it imposes. To a certain extent it prescribes what, in a human being, shall attract the beauty-loving eye. When sculpture held sway, as it did from the Stone Age all down through the gorgeous period of the Greek art, it was chiefly the figure that was emphasised. The length and proportion of. the underlying bones, the modeling of the flesh, over them, the stance of feet, the turn_ of head, the grace of pose were the all-important factors. There has come down to us, for instance, a little Cretan snake goddess made of ivory and gold—with narrow waist and slender hips, hair hanging in a long bob, and arms twined with serpents as snake charmers in the circus twine them still —who would catch the eye in any modern beauty contest. Her face is grave and charming, but it is the delicate figure that holds the eye. Great Exception Queen Nefertiti, who might have been grandmother to Helen of Troy in point of time as well as loveliness, is the great exception, perhaps for the simple reason that her head is the only record we have of her. She mav have been as beautiful in figure as slie was in face. She may have been bow-legged —we do not know. No poet's detailed praises have come down to us; no legend sings her various charms. All we have istne head_ her sculptor carved and painted, poised on the slender column of the throat, a face with which to rule a kingdom and to sway a world. The Greeks, who took their sculpture, their ideals of art and their religion seriously, sought symmetry and perfection in their goddesses by means of mathematics. They made them strong, placid-eyed, a bit too ample, perhaps, for a one-piece bathing suit on a modern beach —women to be worshipped rather than adored, but with an ageless beauty of form that outlasts modes and catches the eye of every artist. As for their faces, many of them have not even heads left, but it does not seem to matter. They are perfect illustrations of the pre-eminence of the figure in a sculptor's world. Blame the Romans Why it was that sculpture went suddenly out of stylo wo do not know. Perhaps tho Romans made too many statues, and too many bad ones. Or perhaps the ladies whose faces wero better than their figures roso suddenly in revolt. All that is certain is that very early in the Christian era paint became tho favourite medium for reproducing beauty and tho centre of interest shifted to the face. For a little while tho illustrator prolonged tho painter's sway, and tho artist who drew the aristocratic shoulders of tho Gibson Girl coinpe'ted with the photographer of Lillian Russell's curves. But the movies soon put an end to the artist as well as to the reign of stage stars. It was not an ago where individual genius could linger long. What tho celluloid film, the roto section and tho telephoto have done to beauty is clear only if you look at the glamour girls of Newport and Hollywood after a long session with the lovely ladies of tho past. Dignity is gone, pomp and aristocracy are no more. Our pictured world is of the

bourgeois and tho proletarian, and if there are Grecian goddesses or slim, high-bred beauties left, they do not make their debut on the silver screen. Instead we have had- Mary Pickford as America's Sweetheart, Gloria Swanson as its favourite glamour girl and Thcda Bara as the siren of its secret dreams. And as tho years and the fashions in glamour change we girls have displayed a fickle taste for sugared prettiness, • for anemic mystery, for adolescent energy and bouncing grace, for big eyes and flying hair, for a kissing mouth and arched eyebrows, for a pair of handsome legs. Some of these are the components of beauty, to be sure, but to find one truly beautiful girl you would have to make a composite of many glamour girls. —Condoascd from tho Now York Times Magazino.