Flapper Ousts Grecian Maid Type in Arles

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 38, 7 May 1927, Page 7

Flapper Ousts Grecian Maid Type in Arles

Features of the Hellenic Founders of French City Pass On

The world-famous beauties of Arles are no more. Those slender Grecian women, with their dark eyes and hair, their stately walk, their simple black robes, about which poets have written their songs and troubadours sung their lays, have given way to ordinary modernly-dressed young Frenchwomen who bob their hair, wear felt hats, have short skirts and smoke cigarettes. The last vestige of glory of the once powerful City of Arles has been wiped out. ARLES WAS METROPOLIS OF GALLIC FRANCE

Time was when Arles was the metropolis of Gallic France, a city built by the Greeks, occupied by the Romans, enjoying the prosperity of a mercantile city on the edge of the Elysian Fields, burial grounds of the ancients. In those days the beautiful Greco-Gallic women of Arles were just like other women of the neighbourhood, but as the decline set in these other women lost their straight Greek brows, theifr olive skins, their majestic carriage. Intermingling with the new races that came victorious into Gaul, bit by bit the ancient Greco-Gallic type disappeared except in Arles. PURE GREEK TYPE GRADUALLY VANISHED

There, as compensation for lost power, the women retained their beauty. For a thousand years after the pure Greek type had vanished from Southern France, Arlesian women bore the stamp of that physical perfection that Olympian goddesses had given them. It was so obvious that it engaged the attention of numerous writers and scientists for hundreds of years, and has been perpetuated in the work of Alphonse Daudet and the poet Mistral. A freak of nature? A deliberate avoidance of intermarriage with other races? The isolation of the city, formerly entirely surrounded by water and swamp lands? NO LONGER SEE QUEENLIKE BEAUTIES

Strangely enough, this purity of descent has been visible only in Arlesian women and not at all in the men. It was purposely enhanced by rigid adherence to the attractive municipal costume of long flowing black jfkirts and heavily fringed shawls, surmounted by a small triangular white and black cap bound into luxuriously arranged hair. But the men of Arles were clumsy, small, rugged featured, like the men of Nimes, Marseilles, Aix and Avignon, the surrounding cities. People still come to Arles for the June festivals, but they no longer see the queen-like beauties for which the city was famous. Instead “flappers,” wearing le dernier cri from Pari3, parade the streets, the parks, the arena, and these women, in one generation have lost the pure profile of their Grecian mothers and have the ruddy cheeks and amber eyes of the natives of southern France. STARTED THE CHANGE WITH BOBBED HAIR “They have bobbed their hair and lost their beauty,” explained the curator of the Arlesian museum, as he contemplated the life-sized wax figure of an old-time Arlesian woman who sits behind a glass case there so that all visitors might see what the city has lost. “How can women wear the Arlesian chapeau without the long, silky braids of their own hair in which to pin the cap? What one of these modern maidens could walk gracefully down the boulevard in a short narrow skirt? The garments of Arles do not conform to the current fashion and so the women have scorned them. But they will be sorry. “A wise Providence that gave the Arlesian women their strange unparalleled beauty has taken it away. In one generation the women of Arles have become commonplace!”