"OUIDA'S" VIEWS ON LAPSES' DRESS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6090, 29 January 1898, Page 3

"OUIDA'S" VIEWS ON LAPSES' DRESS.

" Ouicla " has been giving her views on ladies' dress in the Now York Cosmopolitan. Of evening dress she says : — " The decollete gown is unbecoming to every woman, however perfect of form and fair of face. The nudity of the shoulders and bust is out of keeping with. the extreme tightness of the rest of the bodice. No grace is possible to it, and its general acceptance is a forcible proof of how tisage and example warp the i tasto and deaden the susceptibilities. Corsets are, unhappily, nearly universal, but not absolutely so. The terrible mistake which women have made is in imagining that for the female form to be nipped in to nothing in the middle, like an horn* glass, has any beauty in it. It can have none, because, as artists have said until they are tired, it is a deformity, and can only form a prototype in the imbecility which crops dogs' ears and horses' tails." Of masculine dress; affected by women she says : — " Nothing is more significant of the bad taste and mistaken views of a large and, unluckily, often prominent portion of the female sex, especially in Great Britain and America, than their apeing of men's appearance. The cropped hair, the stiff collar, the cutaway coat, the general • harsh and sharp physiognomy of the ad- ■ vanced female, are all intended to obliterate the difference of sex. I have often amused myself with cutting out these i portraits of 'new women' from illusi trated papers (without their names) ! and mixing them together with ' equally nameless portraits of men, and ' asking my friends to guess which were • the men and which the women; and seldom I has anyone guessed aright. A large numL ber of women utterly neglect any physical , charms of their sex ; they are ignorant of T repose, of grace, of charm ; they have the restless iidgettiness of the blood mare with--3 out her beauty or productiveness, and - their sole idea is to copy and worry out of its r existence the male sex, which they detest, - while they servilely imitate it in all its t ugliest lines and all its silliest features. No 1 one can be charming without the leisure - to become so. The woman who rushes ;. through her first toilette, puts on her walkb ing clothes, and tears off in the chill of the I morning to boardroom or grievance meoto ing, or horseshoe shaped committee talk, is t of necessity an unlovely object, even if c Nature originally made her good-looking, t Sho appears at luncheon in jacket and i, bonnet, and gives a little pat to her hair i- before the dining-room mirror; she eats hastily; talks volubly, then jumps up and ', rashes off again. "What can she know, or s diffusH, of the charm of life ?" i- The athletic girl finds no favour with s "Ouida": — "There is a very unwise tena dency in young women of the present day s to bo so reckless in their eagerness for disi- tinction in sportsthat they forgot that sport d is not embellishing ; that Venus herself, '„ scratched and splashed by a long spin over a hunting country, heated and blown by a g lawn tennis struggle, dishovellcd and dusty s and disarranged after a fifty-mile bicycle y race, ie not a lovely or lovable object, d If they are 'fit,' and can 'break a record,' s they do r\tt caro, nor do they realise that they aro voluntarily giving away their ". potent charmof aex for-the sake of seeing y- ;th.eu? ioaanos^prixrtedi^injiflpprjtb^. papers^.

The sporting woman is a hybrid animal; she is an exaggeration and a caricature ot the sporting man; her mania for neltt • sports and games is much more injurious to.her maternity than the drawing-room gown condemned as hostile to her natural functions. I will not speak of her cruelty, since concerning this my opinions are so well known that I need not repeat them ; but I entreat her, when next she has done a scorcher, or won a brush, or beaten a record, or hung a bleeding otter's head to her belt, to take a hand mirror out of her pocket and look at herself."