VIRTUE OF THE SHINGLE

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 4, Issue 5, 2 November 1925, Page 47

VIRTUE OF THE SHINGLE

WHY MODERN GIRLS TAKE MORE PRIDE IN THEIR APPEARANCE TPHE hairdressers are getting ready to speed the shingle on its parting way. At least, they sav so, but, perhaps, it is only the love of change which is inherent in all who order our fashions, whether in figures, skirts, or hair. Before we all begin struggling through the hairgrowing stage I should like to put in a few words in favour of the shingle and the bob, —which the most zealous advocates of short hair have somehow overlooked. In the pre-bob days you could never encounter a traveller just returned from a holiday overseas who did not sing the praises of the neat-ly-coiffed heads of the midinettes. He would compare them with the tousle-headed waitresses who served him in the tea-shops or the chambermaids he saw in our hotels, and ask why girls of the working classes took so little trouble with their personal appearance. Since short hair became general these unpatriotic comparisons have entirely ceased.

T CONFESS I had not noticed their absence until a woman hairdresser with a big business pointed it out to me. “The shingle,’ she said, is making the business girl and the shop girl pay more attention to her personal appearance than she has ever done. Nearly all my customers are business girls, who come to me regularly every fortnight or three weeks for a trim and once a week for a wave. The appreciation of neatness works slowly all the way from the head to the feet, and you never find a neat shingled head accompanied by a costume in need of a brush or down-at-heel, shoes.” IN other words, the feeling that 1 she has not got a hair out of place has the psychological effect of making a girl want her clothes to look as well groomed as her head, with the result that our girls who work in offices and shops are gradually developing that habit of dressing neatly which has always been the particular mark of the Englishwoman of the upper classes. If this is so, then let us keep the shingle.