COLOUR’S CONQUEST.

Otago Witness, Issue 3972, 29 April 1930, Page 59

COLOUR’S CONQUEST.

Colour in the country—gorgeous splashes of it all “over the trees and hedges, yellow and orange, ripe brown and warming crimson. Colour, too, in the city where the shop windows have copied Nature’s hues, bringing brightness and courage to the dull, grey streets. Without that colour, just imagine what a dull, depressing season autumn would be! So many are the things it would remind us of that we would gladly forget: all the little hopes that started into life in the spring-time and slowly fluttered out again into oblivion—how their ghosts would rise up to haunt us, even to pinch us with no mere ghostly fingers! How we should despair of ever hoping again!

It would be—l need all three adjectives —so dreary, dismal, and depressing. We know that well enough, since days appear when all the colour goes out with the sunlight; and the rain comes, and the wind, and we wonder whether the grey picture or the rich-toned one is the truer representation of life as it really is. Then the colours flash before us again, and hope comes flaming along.

More and more are we coming to realise the value of surrounding ourselves with colour. Go into the drab room of the past, with its horsehair and its rows of family portraits and its whatnots covered with an indiscriminate mass of indefinable monstrosities—oh, yes, some of them still exist! Then pass into the room where the pictures are few, but chosen for their beauty, and the vases hold clusters of hips or trails of autumn leaves instead of artificial roses mixed with stuffy poppies and geraniums; and where there are bright-patterned cretonnes, and soft-coloured, satiny cushions, and—well, if you don’t realise colour’s beneficent healing value, no words of mine can explain to you what it means!

Seldom at any season do the shops present a brighter aspect than in these shortening days. On the counters waves of gorgeous hues and wonderful textures are unrolling themselves—they may call themselves brocades and cheniiles, ninons and georgettes, but we prefer to see in them the elusive drapery that the fairies wear. They arc much too beautiful for mere humans—one begins to despair of oneself as merely human!

Ihe blue and green of summer have mingled to make a printed ninon, and autumn has lent of her browns and oranges to give to another its warmer hue. Most of the materials—one deprecates while using the designation! — are printed this year. Printed velvets have strewn their dark glossy grounds with pansies, or, more daring still, copied upon them sprays of many-hued irises. Printed chenilles, of a rich crimson, tumble in rosy folds next to cascades of golden lame—these for the dowagers. For the debutantes, soft, flowery crepe-de-chines —blue, with a tiny spray of pink sweet peas, pink scattered with violets. Contemplating their beauty, one begins to realise that, after all, winter may not be so cruelly restrictive and prohibitive as, in the sunny, careless days of summer, one had pictured her.

In .the windows the dignified velvets and cobwebby silks have consented to take shape and drape themselves about the waxen figures. This winter the frocks for evening and afternoon wear tend to greater length, which insinuates itself—we have, indeed, been informed of it so often—whether we desire it or not, a skirt longer at the back, a drooping panel here or there, eking it out. Ihe frocks show designs even more daring than we dreamed could be possible from the patterned materials. Their bodices tend towards wallpaper effects—gay nosegays looking almost realistic when poised upon a rich dark ground. Ihe patterned part ceases only to give way to a width of filmy lace, which forms the lower part of the frock.

One dress depicted, on its bodice part, a colour scheme in which pink and heliotrope struggled for supremacy, but in the end the helio proved the weaker, and the pink alone completed the lacey flares. As symbolic of the dreams of youth, rose is a colour most suitable for the young girl. I saw a frock that had been specially made for her, starting, at the neck, with palest pink, and blushing deeper and deeper until, at the wide, circular hem, it had attained to a foam of the deepest rose. The coats and hats for winter wear are more restrained in their feelings—only in our. frocks are we really permitted to welter in moods to our hearts’ content. A new blue is alluring and conspicuous. “ Blue is too cold for winter ” we used to be told. Should you choosj a blue coat or hat, be sure to ask how it now justifies its existence!

Hats are large or small, as you please. Only the matrons’ hats incline to trimming that is recognisable as such—l wonder at what age one regards onself as a potential wearer thereof! By young girls the helmet hats, almost of bathing cap tightness, are much favoured. Only in wearing such, one needs must pay particular regard to one’s features—even the schoolgirl complexion may scarcely justify their adoption above an inadequate nose or a more than adequate mouth! The scarlet hat has much to be said for it as a bolsterer-up of hopes on a dismal winter’s day. But many of us are still rather afraid of making colour mistakes, and take refuge among the neutral shades, which are, in consequence, notoriously overworked. Big fur collars and muff-like fur cuffs are favoured by most of the coats.

Bridge-coats, which arc not to be adopted solely, I imagine, by partisans of the game, have robbed the garden for decorations to work out in brocaded effects. Their designs are the most fairylike imaginable. In black velvet, they may be strewed about with cornflowers and poppies; in pale silk with shadowy sweet peas, or they may strive after an Eastern effect and scintillate in gold or silver.

Nor does colour cease her ministrations when we turn aside from “things to wear.” She has seized an opportunity to drop her flowers all around —you find them adhering to guest towels and tea cosies, and tray cloths. She permits you to wear, as in the past, not a single string of coloured glass, but allows you to reveal, almost childishly, in hanging about your neck some 30 or 40 strings of tiny coloured beads that fall about vou with cascaded effect. She offers you coloured shoes, coloured umbrellas, coloured pochettes—so gradual and insidious has been her attack, that her overwhelming conquest has scarcely been realised. She has painted every article of pottery in use in the home with heartening sprays of festoons of multicoloured flowerets, with loud splashes of colour. And every living creature—npt merely of the feminine sex!—should rise up and call her blessed in consequence!

In one of the shops I noticed the other day a selection of the fragrant little lavender sachets as purchased bv the Queen at the British Industries'Fair. They are daintily dressed in their own colour and finished off with a posv of violets or lilac or flowers in a colour to tone. Little lavender-coloured boxes lav beside them to secure a safe and appropriate, transit. They fitted most charmingly into Madame Colour’s schemes for our mental and physical well-being.—A Scottish exchange.