Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 232, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 September 1910 — MODE OF GARDEN OF EDEN [ARTICLE]

MODE OF GARDEN OF EDEN

Art Instructor Advises Women to Study Leaves in Designing of Dresses. As all know. Eve, the first lady of the land, made herself a, dress of fig leaves. The gown, was an immense success, extremely fashionable; every woman alive wore it. Now, after all these years, comes Henry Turner Bailey, who would revive the fall mode of the garden of Eden, says the Baltimore Star. At least, Mr. Bailey, head of the art instruction department of the board of education, implores women to study the leaves of plants and trees and model their gowns after them. '“Women need not go to Paris for their gowns,” said Mr. Bailey. “They can find the most exquisite styles by simply studying the weeds that grow In our back yards or the leaves of trees or ferns. If every part of a dress were as consistently harmonized in its relative lines as a leaf, that dress would be well worth wearing.” If Mr. Bailey were not an art instructor he would be a baseball pitcher, for he knows all about curves. He proceeds to advise separately women slender as the lily, women built like a cauliflower and women who are just peaches. Says he: “It will not take any woman of taste very long to decide which leaf represents the style that becomes her figure. If she is stout or inclined to stoutness she will select as her inspiration and model those leaves or flowers that have the sharper angles and thinner curves. Take the white oak leaf, with every one of its curves a reversed curve, and the woman to whom that kind of general design applies will have at once an inspiration. “For the woman of less pronounced type there may be found another inspiration in the bud of the lilac, which has gentle reversed curves all through It. Then again we find that the St. John’s wort has a series of little ellipses all through its foliation. The delicate curves of the wild bean are extremely suggestive to any person who will study them, and it seems to me that the average type of American beauty could find in it an inspiration for a dress, just as the type inclined to stoutness would find an inspiration also in the common rosacea, or member of the rose family ” Wedding gowns will follow the curves of the orange leaf, but widows who marry the second time will build their bridal dresses on the model of the chestnut leaf. Small babies’ long dresses will be curved as is the leaf of the milkweed. yVnd so on.