GRECIAN GRACEFULNESS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXII, Issue I, 7 January 1899, Page 14

GRECIAN GRACEFULNESS.

That is a goal towards which fashion seems to be setting. Greek inodes are noticeable in all the new tea gowns, lounging robes, etc., and in the new coiffures. Many effectively pretty evening gowns of the simpler sort are east on long flowing lines, falling straight from hip and shoulder, while the length of the front breadths, of gowns of ceremony, is quite astonishing. Gowns to be worn exclusively in the drawing-room fall an inch on the floor in front, are smooth fitting at the hip, but flow full from the knees down. To wear such, says the ‘Philadelphia Times,’ a woman must needs walk with the stately dignity of a goddess, since nothing is more difficult to carry about pleasingly than these statuesque robes. Stout women frankly rejoice in this leaning towards the classic mode, for with the flowing skirts they gain height, while with the draped sleeve, fastened at the shoulder and falling to the knee, and the slight definition of line at bust and waist, a clumsily stout woman is transferred into a very fair adaptation of the modern Juno. When to this is allied the new method of hair decoration, a very severity is arrived at. Distinctly the coiffure a la Grec is a clever French idea. It has been introduced, they say, in order to have a style in readiness against the vanishing of the long regnant pompadour. Although the hair dressers now have their tiring rooms decorated with busts of the Venus of the Louvre and her fair Majesty of Medici, with other Olympian belles, and a customer is asked to ehoose the model after which her own coiffure shall be compiled, there is only an adaptation made from the heads of these Greek beauties. The hair is carefully waved on a new shape of iron and treated with a colourless liquid, to give the tresses a glitter and a certain solidity of quality that the sculptured locks show. Pins are so put in as to be almost invisible, and absolutely no ornaments are used. There are in all at least half a dozen decided styles of Greek coiffure, adapted from statuary, and there are few women, wonderful to say, whom the simplicity of head decoration does not distinctly become.