The Curses And Blessings Of Drastic Change In Fashion

Southland Times, Issue 23610, 10 September 1938, Page 16

The Curses And Blessings Of Drastic Change In Fashion

Through all the centuries since the earth was a bit of hot mud, with loathly plasms oozing up to the surface to create life, we have been the slaves of change (alteration, not money). It is the curse, or blessing, of everything naturemade or man-made, good, bad, or indifferent, wrote Madame de Polignac in The Queen. Fashion is but the smallest and most insignificant offspring of this relentless goad—a mean, ridiculous, puny subject to discuss, so let’s get on with it, and be done with it.

Fashion, which was probably put on the map by one of the more alert cavewomen deciding in favour of the skin of some beast which only her man could find, had had its ups and downs, its good moments and its bad ones. It has even been practical now and then, to give the devil his due. In fact, we have been enjoying a particularly pleasant few years of being at the same time healthily, comfortably, and becomingly clothed and hatted.

It was too good to last. We should have ' been expecting the inevitable brick to fall upon the head, and had it been but a brick, we should have accepted it with the usual philosophy. Nobody minds an occasional brick—it adds zest to life. Short, skirts, long skirts; hats tilted forward or backwards; clothes fastened before or behind; swervings iii colour or fabric; straight lines or curves; Princess, Empire, Winterhalter, Victoria, Eugenie, or Claudine; medieval, muscovite, or Hollywood—who cares? Even the momentous decision to cut, or not to cut, the hair gave us more pleasure* than pain, as well as every latitude to find some compromise permitting us to remain as attractive as within us lay, but

now—now we have been stabbed to the quick, perhaps fatally, and, insult added to injury by nothing more prepossessing than hairpins and combs! With the suddenness of thunder clapping in still air, it has been decreed that we must drag our hair, our free hair, upwards and affix it to our skulls in a painful way with those pins and combs. And we must skewer fly-away hats in a precarious position atop the pyramid. Hats which have an absurd, ill-proportioned appearance above shortened skirts; hats which are entirely out of keeping with our busy active life of sport and motor-car driving; the identical hats • which are on the scrapbook women of 1900 to 1910 in my scrapbooks. Can such things be, in this day and age?

In those days waists were small because the poor female torso was crammed into steel props which pushed the intestines downwards and the breasts upwards—the latter' being preferable to the former—and women were suffering creatures, given to “women’s troubles.” In those days, women rushed home to take off their clothes in an agony of haste, gasping with relief as their tortured innards were, released ■from the steel corset. Are we headed to this corset, too? How about the hobble skirt? Would not the fashion-makers efijoy a good laugh to see women of today with their feet strapped together trying to cross a busy thoroughfare to the rhythm of honking motor-cars and the witty adjurations of taxi-drivers? .What about the trailing skirts which fill the pages of the earlier scrapbooks—skirts that swept germ-laden dust half-way up the legs? That was rather a good joke on us, too. This pinning of the hair on top of the head is in the same class of grotesque deformity. We all know it, most of us resent it, and—we shall perhaps all do it.