FRILLS OF FASHION.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 9214, 18 April 1908, Page 3

FRILLS OF FASHION.

An umbrella handle is usually looked upon as a very ordinary and uninteresting article, but the resourceful American woman has discovered numerous ways in which it can be made beautiful and given fresh uses. Jewelled handles were popular gifts in New York last Christmas, and the American girl, instead of carrying her watch in a leather bracelet on her wrist, now has it mounted on the handle of her umbrella or on the outside of her purse. Other umbrella handles are made to open at the top and disclose a miniature portrait, a powder puff or a little game of chance to amuse its possessor during long drives. One of the very latest ideas of the fashionable woman is to have her coat-buttons, hat-pine and umbrella -handle all to match.

This is oertainly a tiresome time of the year. The return of the warmer days after the cold spell makes us realise the folly of true winter garments just yet, and the need of autumn gowns to take the place of cottons and muslins, which are beginning to look too light for the time of the year. A between-seasons costume is a really very necessary addition to the wardrobe of every woman. If bought now it can be worn on occasional warm days rieht into June, and will then, if carefully packed away, come out quite fresh for the first warm da^s of early spring.

Accounts of the sufferings endured by the wearers of the new sheath skirts are (says the "Sydney Morning Herald ") so ridiculous that it is hard to believe that any woman of ordinary intelligence will patronise them. According to European fashion papers it is necessary to acquire an absolutely new style of walking to be able to wear the sheath gowns, and in Paris it is rumoured women go to a professional coach for instruction in the - correct method. Tight-lacing— which, shame in the saying, is with us again — is but a detail compared with the knowledge of how to walk, sit, and stand in th© new gowns ; and the Frenchwoman w|k> has not mastered the knowledge spends

hours before her cheval glass going through a systematic series of evolutions before she dares go to her modiste for a final try-on. If the memory of the emu walk adopted by all our girls in the days just passed were not still fresh, it would be almost impossible to credit such folly in these enlightened daye; but looking back on the absurdity of that monstrous gait, nothing seems too ridiculous for some women in their pursuit of fashion's fads. It is to be hoped that the 6heath gown, when it arrives in this part of the world, will have adopted a more modified form, for the signt of women agonisingly trying to adopt a_ style of locomotion quite foreign to their nature is neither beautiful nor edifying.