EVENING DRESS ARGUMENT

New Zealand Herald, Volume 82, Issue 25344, 27 October 1945, Page 10

EVENING DRESS ARGUMENT

Evening dress at social gatherings has become a controversial topic in London, "writes a Sydney Morning Herald staff correspondent. It started when the Merchant Taylors, meeting for their annual Conference, were exhorted to wear white ties and tails at evening functions, "as it is in the interests of the trade to restore the wearing of formal dress." , The first of London's West End hotels to return to pre-war dress formality is the Berkeley in Piccadilly, which this week refused to admit to its restaurant

anyone not in evening clothes. Other hotels hesitate at present to follow this precedent. Even the most exacting hostesses shrink from having "evening 1 dress" printed on their invitation | cards. They sense the irritation aroused by precipitate attempts to enforce dress formality on a population firmly manacled to the coupon system and austerity clothing regulations. The fear is current, too, that a return to dress exclusiveness will bear most hardly on the demobilised exserviceman who was too young to have acquired a dress suit when he went to the war, and cannot now get the coupons to purchase one, and also on people whose wardrobes were destroyed in the blitz. As against these considerations, hostesses are being obliged to take into account the growing impatience of young people to shed their uniforms and get back into their "glad rags." At a charity dance at Grosvenor House a few nights ago all but two of |

600 men guests wore evening clothes (dinner jackets or tails), although none line] been asked to do so. They were a shabby lot —old-fashioned, ill-fitting suits dug up after six years in mothhalls. The women guests looked smarter. They had not been so dependent upon the laundries, which take months to press a suit and a fortnight to starch .1 shirt. Even so, six years is a long time in the life of an evening dress, and the most envied women in tl» room were those whose friends in America had sent them exclusive Fifth Avenue creations. Outfitters in Piccadilly and the Burlington Arcade (only part of which disappeared in the early blitzes) are featuring sumptuous window displays of top hats, white ties and tails—the first seen in London since 1939, and all of pre-war vintage. There are white silk scarves and kid gloves, Inverness capes and black ebony canes. Awed crowds gape at them all day long, but no one goes in to buy, because to acquire a complete outfit requires 38 coupons, two more than a man gets in a whole year. The real business is heing clone at Covent Garden, where the old firm of Moss Brothers is enjoying an unprecedented boom in the suit-hiring trade. Customers consist largely of young exservicemen who cannot afford to throw away their coupons on formal clothes, yet hanker for that feeling of benign content that is said to be tasted to tin l full only through the medium of a resplendent dress suit.