FASHION.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21022, 10 May 1930, Page 2

FASHION.

By R. J. Hats a yard wide, reminiscent of the seasons 1912 and 1913, are planned by milliners. London women were astounded at seeing in a Bond strtet salon mannequins wearing creations stretching beyond the shoulders, fully a yard across, made of organdie muslin and trimmed with ostrich feathers, which drooped over the side in cavalier fashion. The purpose of the new models seems to be' to banish the skull cap, which, dressmakers urge, is not suited to the English style of beauty. . —Cable message. When we apply ourselves soberly to reflect on the fitness of things in general and their several tendencies towards the great end, of what a whirligig of vanity and inutility—of waste and glitter—the wide world seems to consist 1 All these/ flounces and furbelows, all this silk and satin and muslin and voile and other such, these short skirts and long frocks, millinery and lingerie, paste and jewellery, all the tagi. and fripperies and embroideries—what are they good for?— what end do they serve? And what of these datterings about the streets, these bowings and reverences, these bandyings pieces of printed pasteboard, these grinnings at your fellow-worm of five feet across a glass of grape juice or something worse, these posturings and jumpings and agonies of etiquette; and turning night into day and day into! night; and eating when we are not hungry, drinking when we are not thirsty —all these, the manifold littleness of life, what useful purpose do they serve? Who commanded them? Who promulgated the statutes that regulate them?

If fashion were a graven image with a frontal proturberance and a golden head, squatting on his hams in a pagoda like Juggernaut, we should not wonder at her votaries wearing absurd attire and passing their lives in the observance of more absurd ceremonies. We might, conceding the dresses and ceremony to be the offspring of a sincere but mistaken superstition, regard the worship as a delusion, typical or symbolic of something. But that is impossible. The Queen of Fasition is intangible and impalpable. No one ever saw her, nor has anyone ever known her. No creed has ever been formulated in her behalf, and there has been no one to teach us what is orthodox and what is heterodox, unless it be some of those perennial pretenders who seek to do so by means of handbooks on etiquette, which for any authority they are grounded upon might well be guides to spiritualism or anything else. What are the laws of Fashion, and who made them? Who regulates their absurdities and their proprieties. Who says that hats a yard wide must be worn? Who ia it that has dared to malign the comely little tight-fitting skull cap? It was the height of fashion at one time to display at least four inches of white shirt front between the waist band and the vest. To-day, if I were to enter Tudor Hall with my shirt bulging from the bottom of my waistcoat I should probably be bowed down the stairs or put in charge. Why should Fashion in 1700 be beauty and in 1900 impropriety? Can anything be more absurd than some of the fashion plates of a decade ago? And yet, if you or I, or our respective wives, had appeared §n the street in the habiliments of the present day, would anyone have spoken to us? I doubt it. Why should tbe bishop have refused to ordain Oliver Goldsmith because he wore scarlet breeches?

What are clothes, colours, styles, fashionable virtues, fashionable vices, bon ton, and ceremony worth after all? Will they save “ the sprightliness of youth, the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood, the vigorous and strong flexure of the joints of 26” from the “ hollowness and deadly paleness, the loathsomeness and horror, of a three days’ burial ”? Will they avail us one jot in the day when you and I and the whole world, “ nobles and learned, kings, and priests, the wise and the foolish, th« rich and the poor, will all appear to receive their symbol”? Will Fashion “ keep the storm from the ship, a wrinkle from - the brow, or the plague from the King's house ” t Is the world any the better for Fashion? Could it not move on towards its end without Fashion?

How pharp one might be on the miserable vanity of superfluities and the uselessness of luxuries! , How easy it is to say how easily we could do without them!

“Give but to Nature that, which Nature needs,

•Man’s life is cheap as beast's.” You and I and the King could live on a shilling a day and never go really hungry. But, after all, right in the middle, of such a homily, while our disdainful criticism of life and manners and , customs is at its height, there comes this thought to give us pause before we go unwashed to live in a tub'like Diogenes, or hide ourselves in a cave with skins for a covering as Jean Jacques Rousseau threatened to do, or to dig up nuts for food, and shovel gold away as if it were mud, as Timoh did in the play—how many people in this little country, and how. many millions more throughout the world, get their daily bread by making and vending Fashion’s elegant trumpery? Ships and men, countries and commerce, are all inextricably mixed up in a curious yet not incongruous elaboration with these fal-de-lals. One end of the chain may be milady’s boudoir and its knicknacks while the other is a sloppy ship deck in some far-away dock. The immensities of the world, its workshops and marts and chambers of commerce, are after all only an accumulation of littlenesses of Fashion in bulk. Packed into huge bales and cases, registered in ledgers and day books, and sent and resent in great ships with bills of lading and who knows what else to the utterfmost parts of the earth. Pause before you condemn altogether Vanity Fair. The crumbs from its tables feed millions of mouths. Its profits build great edifices and cities and countries, and everyone, if only indirectly, partakes of its beneficence. Fashions makes fortunes m every land and showers her favours on trade of all countries. She is born, is married, and dies every year, and is buried. She is so much like a prince or a great man that while she lives we dress her up in purple and fine linen and fall down and worship her. But no sooner is the demi-god dead than' wc desert her and utterly forget her. But where she is unlike the prince and the great man, wo do not condescend to wrap up her rottenness in crimson and gold velvet, or raise to her memory monuments sculptured all over with lies. No, we allow the corpse of Fashion to putrefy in the gutter or waste away in the dingy, darkness of the secondhand shop. It ia abandoned entirely to whosoever may care to waste attention over its discarded and faded glory. There have been kings treated as cavalierly. When the splendid Louis Quihze lay dying the noise of the courtiers deserting their monarch to pay their respects to the new king echoed through the galleries of Versailles like thunder. the king was dead they crammed his miserable body (ho died of the most horrible form of smallpox) into a box and jolted him off in a post-chaise by night to St. Denis, where they flung him rather than buried him in the sepulchre of hia ancestors. So do we act for our dead sovereign Fashion—adding insult to injury, for after she has gone we laugh and ridicule her preposterous decrees and ludicrous forms.

Fashion is greater than king or emperbr when she is alive, but dead she is of no more account than the humblest pauper. “Le roi est mort—vive le roi.” Tight-fitting skull hats arc dead! Long live organdie muslin and ostrich feathers on hats a yard widel .