IN DEFENCE OF DRESS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18625, 5 August 1922, Page 16

IN DEFENCE OF DRESS.

THE CAUSE OF WOMEN CHAMPIONED. By Constant Rbadeb. There is always the other side to every question, and each denunciation sooner or liter calls forth a defence. Denunciations of the present mode of women’s dress are to be heard on every hand, and charges of immodesty and immorality are frequently made. In a lively brochure, entitled “The Eternal Masquerade,” Mr H. Dennis Bradle'y enters a spirited defence of women’s dress and generally champions the cause of women. Viewing the situation from an entirely different standpoint Mr Bradley practically occupies (he same position as that taken up by Benjamin Kidd in “The Science of Power,” and looks to woman as the redeemer of the human rajee and its deliverer from the awful scourge of war. The keynote of Mr Bradley’s book is sounded in the headings attached to itsi thtge divisions—viz., “Sartor Sardonicus,” “Sartor Historicus,” and “Sartor Modornus.’ Although these headings are reminiscent of “Sartor Resartus,” Mr Bradley is at the Antipodes from Thomas Carlyle. The crux of Mr Bradley’s quarrel with Carlyle is tliat ,in “Sartor Resartus,’ - ho does not deal with woman. This gives him ground for the following comment: — Carlyle’s sexless, drab, and sterile philosophy (published in 1858) suited the mood of the early . Victorians. It heralded the age of ugliness. It is an acceptance of the gospel of eternal gloom. Its philosophy is adolescent and meekly evasive, meandering on indefinitely and shrieking timidity. The atmosphere is that of the sick room, where the end is approaching of one from whom there are no expectations.

Mr Bradley further declares that “Sartor Resartus” “reeks of the religion of subjection.” He complains that- “the book takes at least a fortnight to read if one is auigeiu,’ 1 and that “after two long weeks of Carlyle’s few 9* eternity the only fear one is left with in life is another fortnight of Carlyle. He then leaps from Carlyle to woman who possesses the superior subtlety ot her own philosophy.” This loads Mr Bradley to dogmatise in the following fashion: It is absurd to imagine that the clothes we wear or the clothes other people wear in contrast with us have no effect on out moods. Their effect is colossal, and sometimes devastating. W,omen know this. Men know nothing but are subconsciously affected,. Man accepts destiny, woman accepts design.

Mr Bradley has acquired the' habit'of the epigram—it was admirably displayed in a previous volume from his pen called “Not For Fools”—and the present book exhibits both the strength and weakness of the epigrammatic style. Not once, but many times, Mr Bradley overstates his case for the sake of achieving an epigram, and occasionally he sacrifices sense to smartness. All this and more may be seen in the following extract; —

Tliis is woman’s century. Only the few of us will have the power to control her. To imagine that she will be concerned because she omitted to pay the fees of legality to an unsanitary registrar would lie sheer stupidity.' LqVe does not celebrate under the presidency of a tlurd party clothed in dirty linen. Woman laughs at labels and discards Victorianism for victory. Confident in herself she would rather accept a, bust, than a bustle. She has watched a ghastly mess organised by man’s shamcfulness, and when men talk of woman’s shame,' she will retort by birth control. Her position is beyond anything thought of in history. She is acknowledging her virility and strength, and without yearning it she has tile card? of tjie urpyorse in her hands. Man’s structure of civilisation has reached the breaking point. He has decayed from his aristocracy and sunk to a universal vulgarity of government. But there is always a saviour, and women are the mothers of men. If men do riot see the folly of the ruthless destruction of their sex. Women may take up the weapons of sex-war and cease to produce. They have the power, for are they not the producers of mankind? Why should they submit to the pains of labour for the splendid fruits thereof to be left as manure on battlefields? It is a man speaking. If he were a woman he would refuse to bear another chil"i until men had arrived at a new orientation. The twentieth century will see an amazing adjustment of the balance of power between the sexes.

Mr Bradley has a special edge on Victorianism. It is of interest to compare the attitude he takes up with the picture painted so brilliantly by Mr Lytton Strachey in hig much discussed book on “Queen Victoria.” Mr Strachey cleverly traces the gradually growing influence of the Prince Consort, not only his a'seendancy over the Queen herself, but the extraordinary sway ho exercised over the entire English nation. “Every hour that could bo snatched from Windsor and London” was spent by the Royal family at their newlyacquired estate of Osborne, in the Isle of Wight, “delightful hours of deep retirement and peaceful work.” The following passage is one of the .most brilliant and suggestive in the whole of Mr Strachey’s brilliant book: — The public looked on with approval. A few aristocrats might sniff or titter; but with the nation at large the Queen was now once more extremely popular. The middle-classes in particular were pleased. They liked a love match; they liked a household which combined the advantages of royalty and virtue, and in which they seemed to see, reflected as in some resplendent looking glass, the ideal image of the very lives they led themselves. Their own existences, less exalted, but oh! so soothingly similar, acquired an added excellence, an added succulence, from the early hours, the regularity, the plain tuckers, the round games, the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding of Osborne. It was indeed a model Court. Not only were its central personages the patterns of propriety, but no breath of scandal, no shadow of indecorum, " ight approach its utmost boundaries. Fc Victoria, with • all the zeal of a convc upheld now' the standard of moral p rity with, an inflexibility surpassing, if that were possible, Albert’s own. She blushed to think how she had once believed—-how she had once actually told him— that one might be too strict and particular in such matters and that one ought to be indulgent towards other people’s dreadful sins. But she was no longer. Lord Melbourne's pupil: she was Albert’s wife. She was more—the embodiment, < the _ living apex of a new era in the generations of mankind. The last vestige of the eighteenth century had disappeared; cynicism and subtlety were shrivelled into powder; and duty, Industry, morality, and domesticity triumphed over them. Even the chairs and tables had assumed with a singular responsiveness the forms of prim solidity. The Victorian Age was in full swing. It is this Victorian Age which 'Mr Bradley seizes upon and places in contrast with the present day, citing especially the change which has taken place in the dress of the women of the two periods as illustrative of their altered altitude towards life in' general and towards men in particular. The second edition of the book, headed “Sartor Historicus,” covers b£ comprehensive review of the costumes of the people, starting with the woad-stained Piets and the Norman , Conquest rnd on through history, reign by reign, right up to the time of Edward \ll. It makes a fascinating panorama, and stress is laid on the relation between the manners and morals of each period and the fashion of the dress of the people. The contrast between the Cromwellian era and the restoration under Charles II is strikingly pictured: - All dross became plain and miserable, in sympathy with Cromwell’s policy. Man clothed himself like the tyrannical fool ho was. Picture him in’ his broadbrimmed hat with the tall, narrowing crown of the down and in his deplorable loose doublet. Black, brown, and grey were his giddy, popular colours. His breeches were beastly and shapeless, hanging straight and loose to below the knee. His large wide-topped boots created a vacuum in company with Ids mind. His plain linen Eton collar proved that the battle of Drogheda was won by the linen factories of Belfast. His sloppy cloak was capacious, but not capacious enough to cover the multitude of his hypocrisies. Woman? How- she must have "laughed in her contempt for these men and pandered to their transient whims. Purity is the vogue! Then, says woman, let us pose in the picture. With splendid laughter and a magnificent pose of studied carelessness, the thirty-veur-okl Charles makes his way through the cheering throngs (o Whitehall. . • Never in history was there such a sudden and sweeping change of fashion in dress. The clothes of yesterday were impossible to-clay. To appear in them damned on© us of a bygone ago. With a cry of joy at relief from her bondage of

sobriety my lady tore the Puritan garb from her back, and one is amazed to, find that silken under-garments with pointed lace and dainty embroidery had remained hidden beneath so severe a mask. Imperiously she demanded the harassed costumier to drape her in a gown of gay colours post haste. My lord threw his shapeless doublet to his servant and donned a little coat cut short to the waist and wide open to the front to display his fine loose-pleated shirt. Over his breeches he wore a short petticoat, from the waist to above the knees, or petticoat breeches sewn with bunches of ribbon. His cravat was knotted tightly at the neck, with wide lace ends and his broad-brimmed hat groaned under its groat cluster of feathers, and his magnificent periwig fell gracefullv over his shoulders.. He was ribboned” all over, even to his high-heeled shoes.

Mr Bradley makes a point of the fact that “lavishly as they dressed, the women of Charles's time were not nearly so extravagant as the men, nor, as a matter of fact, were they through history until the 20th century.” In this fact ho sees the significance of the present century. He v.'rites: —

Jan in the past conquered the field of ion, grew careless, and found, the spoils annexed by women. Woman is an instinctive adapter, and keenly perceptive ot values. She has disarmed man, and commandeered his weapons for herself. Until the end of the Georgian era men reigned supremo in dress. Then came the long Victorian revolution against all ex prossion of art in dress, and in the sue ceediug chaos humanity was submerged in ugliness. The indomitable spirit of woman enabled her to survive. In the twentieth century woman awakened to the realisation that before her lay a world that could be dominated by a gesture. And the world of fashion which she now rules is a world of more powerful illusion than the drab-coated dullard conceives. In fact, the drab-ooat is symbolic of the drab mind to which conception of any kind is almost impossible. 'Beyond,his servitude as provider and his periodical summons as fertiliser, in the modern world man has no ideal.

After the Victorian debacle man’s spirit for experiment was broken, so he clung to the fibrous weed of materialism Woman, thirsting for the emotion of ad venture, carelessly drifted with the torrents into safety, and casting aside her hedrenched garments left herself free to seduce art to clothe her afresh. To-day she appears beautiful, even thoucrh .the comment is clothed in an eter-

rial platitude. Mr Bradley declares that woman to-day is nearer to tho superlative in dress than ever before. “She has studied grace, caressed art, considered hygiene, and employed utility.” He believes that she will develop still further in the culture of beauty. That she has been able to build so securely on the ruins of the nineteenth century is regarded by him as a triumph, all the more so since man is still struggling in the mirel In contrast to the “more Victorian absurdities in the form of outer-clothes and under-clothes than were conducive to her health,” Mr Bradley describes the modern woman us “beautiful because her adornment is controlled in, outline by nature." Her gowns are “designed to define and not to distort her figure.” Each line and curve ami limb is studied. “Her gown is a mere sheath; in the evening her complete apparel is so light that it could be tossed in the air and carried to the clouds on a summer breeze.” T^soeruling to details, Mr Bradley paints a fascinating picture of *he woman of today:— 1 ! Her gown is slipped over her head and donned in the twinkling of an appreciative eye. Comfort has been studied and grace has been attained. The neck is invitingly open and the arms are spelndidly free. The waist is defined, and tho skirt is cut short enough to display beyond conjecture the elegance of her legs. High necks, trains, fastenings at the back, and all superfluous battenings have been thrown on the Victorian dust heap. Beneath her gown .a pair of knickers of the finest silk or crepe de Chine, delicately abbreviated apd chosen from a

dozen different designs; and florally decorated in a hundred I different ways; a silken ; vest or camisole: no corsets at all. or. if any, a tiny pair so intimately elastic that they escape observance; a , .pair of silk stockings to match her daintv ’ dancing shoes Tho ensemble is a triumph of diaphonio lightness, beneath which is concealed a thousand moods and purposes Butr if she has aimed at the irreducible minimum of garments, the infinite variety of her changes is staegering. For her snorts her loose woollen jumpers and skirts are tinted with each colour of the rainbow. And her regard for attraction is no handican to her efficiency, for in nearly all sports she h"s become brilliantly exnert. Compare the clean, virile slim-built beautv of to-dav with the obese or anaemic woman of the last century, who. tnkinor .little exercise, found pleasure, in the discussion of her consequent and made a fashion of newlv-invented diseases.

Mr Bradley follows with a fling at the Victorian woman with her “three petticoats, one of heavy moire, one of flannel, and one of rustling silk,” and next the skin “an encasement of woollen oorphinations, the body part of which was oonwressed 'by long and strong whale-boned oorslts, vice-lik© in their ferocious grip and imprinting an unattractive tattoo mark on the rebellious flesh.” The full force of a scathing satire is levelled against such, Victorian absurdities as the 19-inoh waist, the long-trainedi gown, the bustle, the idiotic lag of mutton sleeve, the crinoline, the poke bonnet, the artificial bust, and the “huge plaits of false hair, which hung from the back of the neok in a chignon, a netted excrescence longer than her head.” Ho also mentions in passing the fact that “there were few ba.ths in private houses until the mid-Victorian ora, and that even when sea-bathing came into fashion the bathing costumes were made with capes and flounces whioh completely covering the wearers from tip to toe “would have afforded adequate protection for an expedition to the Arctic regions.” Mr Bradley concludes with a “Futuristic Vision” of the world, in which Woman and Henry Ford are to play an equal part. It is Woman’s mission to make war impossible; a new spirit of commerce is to be instituted by emulating Henry Ford: The magnificent spirit of Henry Ford is the forerunner of the new spirit of ■ commerce, which will lead the worid. It hoists the essential banner of production and prophetically calls for the surrender of the lying colours of Destruction. The worid is plunging ahead. Progress surmounts all obstafcles and the decadent old minds soon found their graves. The material advancement of commerce during this twentieth century is certain. In the phenomenal development which will take place when the force of the new generation exhibits itself, art, in its modern subtlety and contemptuous of antics, will ally itself with progress and decorate commercial materialism. Woman, in her newlyiocquired freedom, will proclaim her face in a new and potent guise. She will cultivate and inspire original arts and in their usage she will stimulate a fresh illusion. The dominoes cf the masquerade of politics will be torn aside in the near future and the ugly form revealed, but illusion will persist throughout all time in the alluring form of woman, with her more cleverly designed and eternal masquerade.