Letter to Kitty

Southland Times, Issue 25309, 12 June 1935, Page 5

Letter to Kitty

My dear, “Shall 1 tell you how a woman who is 40 years old can look 40 years young?” If we owned a dress-shop you and 1 would attempt to make a handsome fortune for ourselves by setting out to rescue women who now seem irretrievably lost somewhere in the forties; women who rightly avoid youth’s pink fripperies but wrongly confine themselves to styles a little antique. We’d have them looking as young as Miss Forty-two, we’d tell them that dark colours are safe; and so is the grave; that grey stockings should be worn only on very rare occasions, like the year when our dud stocks give us dividends; that if forty years old is not forty years young in this spun-glass age, then we are an old woman aged 95!

There are people who think that pre-sent-day fashions are suitable only for pink little blondes. We know better don’t we. We submit that a swagger suit, certainly a swagger cape, and many members of the printed silk family gain dignity when worn by a woman in her forties instead of by one of the jeunesse doree. There is no tonic like a new frock, when one is weary of years and work and the climate and all those things. A three-in-one frock would give a feeling of vitality, almost of renascence. You will feel it whether you wear the three-in-one as a dress, a jacket-dress or a suit. This feeling of elation should be greater yet when you wear the whole outfit, dress, jacket and button-up overskirt. The colours are safe as houses were when roofs stayed up and taxes down: navy, black, brown, or a harmless sort of blue; with white. The material is printed marocain. We think that in a suit like this you would not be liable to be described in words of sound and sorrow signifying next-to-nothing: “an older woman.” If you will promise to wear a coloured dress with it, we’ll tell you about a coat in which a little girl would look a little girl, but a woman of 40 would look a lady. This coat is in black crinkled crepe, with cape sleeves and centre fastening. Time, while it may bring charm, judgment and discretion, often has us on the hip. A coat with cape sleeves, or a three-quarter coat, will slim you sooner than a diet. You may have a dress and three-quarter coat in uncrushable crepe. Flower patterns on grounds of: black, green, lido, navy; also black on white.

Of course, not all women in their forties have antimacasser ideas on dress, and it may well be that you are in the habit of spending guineas on the newest summer styles. If you still have the habit but no longer the guineas, you may be interested in a wool crepe-de-ehene coat with centre opening; threequarter length pleated sleeves; navy, black, beige, brown. It is not often that chic goes to our head, but about the new hats we are a trifle crazy. We think they look particularly well on women not particularly young, and recommend them, in soft felts with feather mounts.

They hide wrinkles, flatter features, aiid are, we think, more attractive than any hats since the days when Mrs Siddons asked the draper, on his salvation, if the muslin washed.

I think we’d do rather well don’t you Kit? And I think we agree that there is no doubt that you women of 40 can look equally as smart as your young and lissom daughters, for fashion today is just as considerate to you as to the young. Write to me soon Kit. Love, JANE.