THE SLIM GIRL

New Zealand Times, Volume LI, Issue 12003, 4 December 1924, Page 10

THE SLIM GIRL

D. C. BATES. Director. ileteorolozica) Office. Wellington. December 3rd. 1924.

Tbs present phase of ‘‘slinky” fashions and waistlessness, of shingled hair and fiat heels, has raised in many minds the question whether men really like the slim flapper, the ‘‘boy woman,” or whether they prefer the type immortalised by Rubens, Reynolds, and' Winterhalter. It is a (ifficult question for a woman to decide, • hut, taking the world and its history in general, I am inclined to think that the type which is neither thin nor fat has been, and is still, the most admired. Each nation, of course, differs in its ideal of the divine feminine form.- In Spain and Italy beauty is bulkier than it if in northern countries. Frenchmen deplore our British flat-cbestedness, and in Persia broad hips are considered essential to aharm. ‘ ' In various African countries that 1 have visited, young girls are stuffed like Christmas turkeys to qualify them for rich husbands, 'says Dorothy Mills. Once cn the Tripolitan frontier the chief of a tribe made me a proposal of marriage, on the strict understanding that I should partake of a local root guaranteed to fatten me up to the local. standard of beauty. f asked him how fat. he would like me to be, and he stretched out his hands to show u desired circumference that would have tipped the scale at" fourteen stone 1 In England men are not quite so exacting, hut I am inclined to think that they endure ;our willowiness rather than approve of it. Roughly there ore two types of men wlm really Like thih women. One is the oversophisticated blase man who is satiated with conventional beauty and demands ohic, devilry and oddity to. stimulate his interest: the other is what our American cousins call » “he” man, the type who boasts to his loved one that he could crush her between bis finger and thumb, and who revels in his own beefiness.

The normal man usually prefers an armful to a wisp of femininity. She may be less intriguing, but she is certainly more comforting; and she is probably better tempered and lees nervy. She represents, in fact, a more normal and healthy taste, relic of a sound ancestry when men picked their mates less for imaginative and mental thrill than for a capacity for hard work, for good home-making and keeping. The poets of all the ages have sung of the redundancy of their ladies 7 charms. - For the sake of' a dimpled cheek they apparently forgot the double chin that lay beneath it; ahd Samuramis, Cleopatra, Lady Hamilton, Catharine of Russia; and other makers of history all seem to have been on the plump side. In Rose Macaulay's “Dangerous Agee” all the' women characters—the great-grandmother of 84, the grandmother of 63, the mother of 43, the aunt of 33, and the daughter of 21— were fragile, slim people, and a reviewer commented that this was “a very striking phenomenon.” At the moment,it is the fashion to be thin, a fashion mainly fostered by dressmakers, and ■ men, though they will not admit it, are largely; if unconsciously, influenced by fashion. But I am inclined to'think that the phase is but a transitory one, and that in a few years the masseuses and dietista and weigibt-reduping experts will be out of a'job, and that fat women will come into their own again.