Women Dress to Break One Another's Hearts in Vienna.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18496, 23 June 1928, Page 19 (Supplement)

Women Dress to Break One Another's Hearts in Vienna.

Fashion Mart in the Cafes.

VIENNA. << ' I 'HE glass of fashion and A the mould of form,” the exchange and mart of die Mode. You would not think it of the Vienna city cafe if you looked in at ten in the morning when it fulfils the offices of stock exchange, bank, debating society, public reading-room, international espionage exchange, novelists’ study, proof-readers’ office, artists’ studio, boardroom, gentleman criminals’ G.H.Q.,, New Scotland Yard, physicians’ consulting-room, with here and there the merely thirsty. You would form quite another opinion of it after three o’clock when in more expansive mood it offers hospitality to the women of Vienna engaged on their life-task —the pursuit of fashThe manner of that absorbing chase is really peculiar to Vienna. The women of Paris may dress to please their own or other women’s menfolk, the women of London to please themselves, the women of New York to advertise their husbands’ bank balances, but the women of Vienna dress to break one another's hearts. There are precisely one million and one women in Vienna, and to hold the place of the one* if only by a neck, and to leave the million panting in one’s tracks is the ambition of every one under fifty. You will see the favourites in the Fashion Stakes taking a preliminar} canter in the mornings, between 113 v and 12.30. The course is fixed by cus tom. Starting from the Opera House it runs down the sunny side of the Karntqerstrasse. The best take all the fences in their stride, though many fall at the dressmakers’ and vanity bag dealers’ obstacles with which the course is studded. Then the course runs tc the slender spire of the Stefansdom—the cathedral. The course finishes at the lower ena

of the Kohlmarkt, where the great gates of the Hapsburg palace of the 11 of burg invite the world to walk in and see that monarchy has departed. Not merely the favourites—all the runners are out now, and the course is the cafe—any cafe, every cafe of the thousands that miraculously live and prosper" all over \ ienna, some of them, surely, by taking in one another’s waiters. "I kiss your hand, my most gracious one”—“Kuss die Hand, meine Gnadigste”—murmurs the old head waiter, who knows more of the ways of a feudal aristocracy than any living Viennese will ever learn of the manners >f a republic as he bows her to her Slowly the cafe fills up with rival .ashion-hunters. Each new arrival is .scrutinised from head to foot. By six or seven the fashion market has dissolved, the fashion journals have been returned to their places in the racks, and the cafe, with its shruboedecked terraces on the pavement, has burned to another of the many phases of its varied daily usefulness. These phases are another story.