THE QUEEN AND COURT DRESS.

New Zealand Times, Volume LI, Issue 8687, 23 May 1889, Page 7

THE QUEEN AND COURT DRESS.

The Standard says -.—The authoritative -announcement of the Queen’s pleasure with -reference to the wearing of Court dress -at the Royal Drawing-Rooms will be a dia--appointment to many. An idea has somehow ; got abroad that the rigour of the regulations on the subject was to be relaxed, and that in •future ladies who were satisfied in their own -minds that compliance with the present ■ standard of coatumo was unbecoming or ■ dangerous should be free to adopt at their -discretion a safer and staider alternative. ‘ This it turns ont was a mistake. The rules stand in all their original severity. Delicacy smay be fashionable, and youth, as everyone .knows, passes away ; but no woman of ton ■has ever yet consented to pray for conaideration in the matter of the toilette on the score ■of ill-health or old age. - Yet that is what • courtly dames are called upon to do if they -desire to escape from the obligations of the present mode. Not only must they write 'themselves down in the applications through the Lord Chamberlain as persons incapacitated by illness, or, as the case may be, by 'lnfirmity or by advancing years, but they most, so to speak, carry a proclamation of the distressing truth with them when they ■approach the throne; They will each and nit be labelled —by the very fact that their 'dress is continuous from the waist to the neck—qs weakly or elderly persons. Most frequenters of drawing-rooms, we imagine, will hardly have the moral courage to qualify for what the Lord Chancellor halls the high Court dress.