WOMEN, DRESS AND PUBLIC LIFE.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XLIV, Issue 14726, 29 June 1920, Page 2

WOMEN, DRESS AND PUBLIC LIFE.

(By A. M. Drysdale.)

What are the reactions of dress and public life likely to be upon one another now that women liavo annexed public life to their province of dress ? Shall we see furbelows and gewgaws in Parliament, on the judicial bench, and at the Bar ? Or will women tone down in dress as in speech to the drab average at which men, after a brilliant process of exhaustion, have arrived and encamped? Will dress lose its gaiety and variety? Or will public life take on strainge colors and become more audacious?

When wo say, with patronising tolerance towards the vainer sex, that women are the creations of "art as well as of Nature, we forget the .clothes history, perhaps even the. clothes predispositions, of men. Our public life, ir, ;truth, men-monopolised as.it has been -hitherto, is laced and interlaced all over with the trail of dress. I must not linger npen the alluring topic of-.smart' muffs, with which the, Edinburgh law T ; ;yers;.of, -she eighteenth" century kepttheir V.liaiids .-.m training for their •clients' pockets, and much similar lore I have not space-even to name.

Who was it but men that devised the. party symbolism of clothes, tho ingenious uniforming of the politicians ? The blue coat and tho buff waistcoat of the Whigs have been responsible for Tory riots and broken heads. When Lord ■Grey, in. 1828, .appeared in of his family in a Wellington coat, the outraged Whig women of his household tore the rag of Toryism from his back, and, new >as it was, he never saw it again. The same statesman attended Queen Caroline's trial, in a white toy hat, and, instead of being mobbed as a peer, he had a popular ovation, for Orator Hunt had made the white turner a Radical badge. Tf the public women then, bring in a Coalition toque, a Sinn Fein hatpin.-a Wee Free skirt, or a. Labor frill, they will be, less innovators than imitators." But that is symbolic wear, a serious branch of politics. What of dress for +.he sake of dress There, too, public men .have blazed tlie trail. I do not go back to such notorious Parliamentary idandies as Boem, and Coke and Ralegh; in their silks and brocades and feathers and laces and ruffs and jewels and the rest—Ralegh particularly, bedecked with his. £60.000 worth of pearls and diamonds, still shines in the caverns of: history. like a candelabra or a desperate deed in a timid world. I resist even the temptation of Fox. If Fox occasionally, neglected to wash 'his faco and hands between an all-niarht gambling bout and a, resounding manly speech :in Parliament, it was to him rather than anv other, whenever he visited Paris, that tho macaronis of his own years entrusted their delicate commissions for wa,istroats from the metropolis of taste. But I need not. refer to such a remote period. I take a great party leader almost of our own day, the liero in their .Tinso youth of many Englishmen who -are not vet more than middle aied. Here are just two descriptions of.;the dress of; the orthodox Victorian protagonist of the Conservative cause:—

(1) A waistcoat embroidered with gorgeous golden flowers no doubt,

primroses—patent leather pumps, a quantity of chains about his neck and pockets, and in his hand a white stick with a black tassel.

(2) A black velvet coat lined with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles to tlm tips of his fingers, white gloves with several brilliant rings outside them, and glossy ringlets rippling over his two shoulders.

I suspect that it was the gold in the color of tho primrose that excited the passion of Disraeli for that modest and otherwise innocent floweret of the vale.

All that the dandy asks of the world, says Carlyle, is that it will look at him, and in justice to Disraeli I must add that when he had induced the world to look at him, with all its million eyes, he discarded his peacock plumage for sober black. .JVill the Inns of Court be constrained to revive their severe statutes against the gaudy fashions which used to bewitch the youths of law? Even so, the women lawyers need not be dismayed, for those statutes were safely ignored even before they had bcomc obsolete.

Bad examples never lacked eminence. The radiant costume in the Chancery Court cf the Lord Chancellor, Earl of Shaftesbury, caused the envious to complain, that he looked more like "a rakish young nobleman" than a judge. Worse still, the judge who sentenced llobert Emmett to death appeared at the trial in the fancy dress which he had worn at Lady Oastlc?'cagh's masquerade ball—green and yellow, witn black stripes and mother-of-pearl buttons—not concealed by his judicial robes, for he inadvertently threw these open as he was pronouncing the capital doom. Erskine went into the country to fulfil his special retainers in a dark green Coat, scarlet waistcoat, and silk breeches, and the hands which he , extended towards enchanted juries in -his irresistible, appeals in behalf of political liberty were always decently clothed in lemon-colored kicl gloves. What a jump from Montaigne's disquieting and barbarous contention that if we had been intended to wear clothes we should have come ready-clothed into the world!