Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 June 1888 — FOR THE LADIES. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

FOR THE LADIES.

A Palatable (Mia Podrida Prepared Specially for Our Fair Readers. Paddons ia Drees, Notes on Housekeeping Affairs, and Other Topics of Interest [SPECIAL NEW YORK CORRESPONDENCE.] It is timely to consider the summer girl. She knows pretty well now what she is going to wear. Here is a portrait of a June specimen found on the Broadway promenade. She is presented here as a type of current elegance, quite devoid of exaggeration, and yet exemplifying several new ideas in fashions. • Her bonnet is one of the approved shapes, and her manner of filling its high, pointed front with a fluff of her own hair is an innovation. She also expresses neatly a new notion of using a single material for a whole dress. This is a small fact as compared with the greater one, that of employing different and often incongruous colors and embodying them in one toilet. She belongs to the few who dislike to be in accord with the many, and who are, therefore, ahead of the majority. The dotted fabric of her gown is wool of a very light gray speckled with black. The black lace around her neck and down her front is in accordance with the newest use of lace as an embellishment. She is a type of the neat and quiet summer girl for 1888. If she were not pretty, she would easily pass unnoticed among many more gaudy creatures in the throng. No more than a rod behind her sauntered a young woman in a sombrero hat, made of very fine light felt, and with its brim rolled up coquettishly in front. Her hair was cut off squarely at the ends, and was left hanging loose to a point a trifle below her neck. Thus her whole head ■ lacked only a moustache to be an idealization of Buffalo Bill. Such hats are likely to be worn considerably during the hot weather at the resorts, and they will be serviceable as shades as well as admirable for picturesqueness; but in

the city they are decidedly too extravagant, and one is apt to rate the wearer as a social scout of too daring a character. The number and variety of wide-brimmed hats is as great as the many strange ways in which the brims are bent. They are turned up in front, at the back, or at the sides; some have wide wing-like side brims, others have the front excessively wide and straight, and many of the Tuscan straw capelines have the brim held down by the strings. Masses of trimming, generally •consisting of ribbon and flowers, are heaped on these. It is in a jacket that Mrs. James Brown Potter, who quit our highest society circles to become an actress, is more ridiculous than sublime at a city theater. She is enacting Pauline in ‘‘The Lady of Lyons,” and she has undertaken to introduce originality into the Directoire costumes of the period of the play. Mrs.” Potter is a long-limbed, angular beauty, well enough adapted to the short-waisted dresses in question, but in her efforts at variation from the usual thing, she has in one instance run into the grotesque. The waists of all these gowns, as you know, stop short within two or three inches of the arm-pit, and from that point to the feet stretches a length of drapery unbroken, save when the wearer introduces rectangles by sitting down. These rigs are graceful enough in pose, but motion is pretty certain to render them awkward. We have become so accustomed to hanging our skirts at the waist, and our ideas of graceful locomotion are so associated with that division of the feminine anatomy, that it strikes us as absurd to see a skirt hang from the breast line and not to be agitated at all until a point a third of the way down is reached when the wearer begins to walk. Now, Mrs. Potter, or the designer of her wardrobe, seems to have been struck by the idea that miniature coat-tails attached to a very abbreviated jacket would impart interest to one of her costumes. The result is not a success. When she faces the audience in this particular robe, the outlines are acceptable to artistic judgment, but when she turns around and shows her back, the incipient coat-tails hanging over her shoulder blades—for all the world like the comic short coat of a negro minstrel, so familiar in burnt cork fun—the spectators are inclined to titter, not-

withstanding that the fair Pauline is at that moment listening to Claude Melnotte’s poetic description of the Lake of Como. If Mrs. Potter is wise, she will take a pair of shears and cut those tails off her jacket; and if any feminine observer is at all inclined to copy that costume for summer wear, let me assure het that she will excite more laughter than admiration. Lawn tennis is a diversion in which the summer girl usually allows herself wide latitude. This season she will pretty generally take to the blouse waists. These are an importation from England, not from Paris or Berlin, and our belles have been slow to put them on for ordinary occasions of dress; but a round of the more fashionable dressmaking establishments convinces me that they will be adopted generally for lawn tennis playing, in place of the bygone jersey waists. They are equally

conducive to an expression of pliability, and their seeming looseness conveys an impression of even greater suppleness than the jersey imparted. Sad to say, however, they are likely to induce tight-lacing, instead of the ease of stays which their appearance suggests. The girl who cannot comfortably wear an eighteen-inch belt or less with a blouse, manages to do so by means of violent compression, and so the lawn tennis player may not be what she seems as to untrammeled condition of clothes.

Paper fabric will actually take the place of genuine cloth to some extent in the forthcoming summer toilets. A modification of wliat we used to call Fedora fronts is herewith sketched. But the rather startling novelty about it is that the chemisette, or at least a portion of it disclosed between the front edges of the j acket, is composed of paper stamped and cut in imitation of lace and embroidery. lam told that this innovation was premeditated to the extent that an order was sent to China more than a year ago for the manufacture of the stuff in the fibrous sort of paper produced only in that country. Thus it is that the masculine example of paper collars and cuffs has been followed, in an idealized manner, by a feminine acceptance of paper chemisettes. The paper looks exactly like soft, unlaundried linen, and is quite tough enough, it is well to say, to prevent easy accidents in the way of rents. Patterns are ingenious imitations, not only of plain fine muslin, but of lace. That is timely, because there is a tendency to use lace more generously with demi-toilets for the afternoon. Some ladies are returning to the handsome real laces so long laid aside, while the merchants still find their best profit in the fine hand-woven imitation laces so long popular. Gauzes, net, blonde, and silk muslins, together with ribbons, are combined with frills and jabots of lace in plastrons, vests, and fichus of various kinds. Even for full-dress toilets, the senorita jackets, like the one seen in the picture, are worn with a full

blouse of cream-white China crape.— Chicago Ledger. Low neck-cut bodices are not fashionable at theater, concert, or dinners, or evening parties without dancing. Black or dark toilets are open a little at the neck, but good taste demands light dresses, as it is a compliment to the hostess to brighten up the scene by wearing light and bright colors as a relief to the somber effect of gentlemen’s full-dress attire. Anyone who does not care to go to the expense of china crape can avail herself of a cheaper sort or combine muslin with a summer silk and trim it with dull silver gimp with very pretty effect. Three and four-button cutawavs are proper for morning wear and halfdress.

A JUNE TOILET.

A COSTUME FOR TENNIS.

A PAPER CHEMISETTE.