THE WAIST QUESTION.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVII, Issue XVIII, 31 October 1896, Page 574

THE WAIST QUESTION.

As the waist question seems likely to fill up a vacant corner in the ever-green season of silliness it may (says the Pall Mall Gazette), without culpable loss of time, be justly regarded from other standpoints than those most frequently brought into prominence, especially as it is improbable that even the youngest member of our present generation will live to welcome the day when it will be freely recognised that the vast majority of women care not at all for the supposed dictates of Hygeia, and that no widely accepted innovation in the matter of dress can be quickened by the orderings of science, however reasonable these may be. In times past, as in times present, women selected their daily raiment solely and entirely from an aesthetic point of view, and it hardly seems likely that—in the near future at any rate—a radical change may be looked for ; the days of miracles are no longer with us, and we shall accomplish most in the long run by being satisfied to make use of existing possibilities instead of seeking after strange goddesses claiming relationship to the daughter of -Esculapius. It seems a trifle cruel and unfair that Hygeia should nowadays find her astral body almost invariably mixed up with fads in connection with waists, for surely the beneficent goddess who superintends the well-being of our internal organs recognises the fact that not in the matter of waists alone do we women interfere with the intentions of nature. It is all very well for exceptionally perfectlyformed girls to cast aside corsets and to allow a free course to natural outlines, but, unhappily, Nature is as capricious as her most spoiled daughters, and few and far between are the figures that can cast aside the invisible armour of satin and whalebone, tempered with steel, without giving cause of offence to unoffending onlookers. Men of science have delivered themselves of high-sounding and irrefutable lectures on the exceeding impropriety of creating within our physical frames an olla podrida of displaced organs, and have exhibited to countless students of physiology ghastly drawings of the female form of the demon corsetiere in contradistinction to that ofnature. Butstill the world has continued peacefully to revolve, and small waisted-women—with hopelessly mixed up organs—have danced their way through life, and even successfully assisted in keeping up thepopulation to theaccepted average. It cannot be wise or salutary to subject our internal arrangements to the torments of the Black Hole of Calcutta, but the fact remains that very many apparently healthy women have worn waists measuring from sixteen to eighteen inches all their lives— night and day— and that in the majority of cases not even a red nose has resulted. Looking at this

matter from a common-sense point of view, it seems best to allow Hygeia a well-deserved rest and endeavour to impress upon the sex the exceeding advisableness of adopting the waist most in accord with the physical * points,’ pleasing or otherwise, bestowed upon them at the moment of their involuntary arrival into this sphere of sorrow. If the gospel of individuality were placed—as it surely ought to be—side by side with the revelation of ourduty to our neighbours, the waist question,in common with very many like matters, would early receive a personal answer ; and while the woman of tailor-made tendencies would probably continue to exemplify the extraordinary internal as well as external adaptability of her species her sister of curves and undulations would unhesitatingly arrange her draperies over a cunningly devised support, guiltless of whalebone and steel, which would permit Nature’s best finger-prints to exercise their compelling qualities to the fullest extent.