THE QUEEN AND COURT DRESS.

Western Star, Issue 1353, 11 May 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE QUEEN AND COURT DRESS.

The Standard says:—The authoritative announcement of the Queen's pleasure with reference to the wearing 1 of Court dress at the Royal Drawing-Rooms will be a disappointment to many. An idea had somehow got abroad that the rigour of the regulations on the subject was to be relaxed, and that in future ladies who were satisfied in their own minds that compliance with the present standard of costume was unbecoming or dangerous should be to adopt at their discretion a safer and staider alernative. This it turns out was a mistake. The rules stand m all their original severity. Delicacy may be fashionable, and youth, as everyone knows, passes away; but no woman of « ton " has ever yet consented to pray for consideration in the matter of the toilette on the score of ill health or old age. Yet that. is what courtly dames are called upon to do if they desire to escape from the obligations of the present mode. Not only must they write themselves down in the applications through the Lord Chamberlain as persons incapacitated by illness, or, as the case may be, by infirmity or by advancing years, but they must, so to speak, carry a proclamation of the distressing truth with them when they approach the throne. They will each and all be labelled—by the very fact that their dress is continuous from the waist to the neck—as weakly or elderly persons Most frequenters of drawingrooms, we imagine, will hardly have the moral courage to qualify for what the Lnrd Chancellor calls the high Court dress. - „