OVER-DRESSED CHILDREN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IX, Issue 453, 16 December 1881, Page 7

OVER-DRESSED CHILDREN.

" Silvee Pen," the accomplished fashion editor of tbe Examiner,' asserts that in no place in the world, including Parie and London, are women so passionately devoted to dress as they are in San FranCisco and Oakland. This tendency is especially remarkable in the over-decoration of children. From babyhood they ar« taught to be richly and gaudily dresaed is the most important business of a woman's life. Little tots of things, scarcely able to walk, are decked out in velvet dresses, silken scarves, lit'le pyramids ol costly lace on their small heads, little chains around their slender throats, rings on their little fingers, and only wanting bells on their toes to complete a caricature of a little old woman. This precocious trickery, the writer more than intimates, would be laughed at in the old-fashioned Capitols of Europe, and is probably the result of a provincial situation and the newness of society. When she was a girl, she happened to see Queen Victoria at Brighton with her children. They were dressed in simple white dresses with blue sashes, and very coarse white straw hats, tied down with white ribbons. The Queen herself had on an equally simple garb of organdie muslin, a -white Swiss mantle, and a bonnet like the children's of plain straw, with only a simple twist of ribbon round the crown. The poor little spectator was much disgusted at the simplicity of the royal party, having expected to see crowns and jewels, silks ami satins, and complacently viewing her own gipsy finery, considered herself far better dressed than the princesses. But now, being, a woman, arid having seen much of the big world, she recognised the beautiful simplicity which made those children appear as sweet and purs as the daises beneath their feet.