Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 January 1917 — Fur Coats and Earrings Again [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Fur Coats and Earrings Again

Combination Once More With Us, and Human Nature Responds to Call. SMOOTH PELTRIES PREFERRED ' " Prevailing Fur Coats Hava Less Flare Than Last Year, Unless They Arq Cut—Three-Quarter Length Muffa Are Small and Simple. New York. —As far back as one can look into the annals of American fashions, the possession of a sealskin coat was accounted supreme happiness. The woman who had such a garment, linked with a pair of diamond earrings, either strutted in her vanity or tried to look unconscious of the envy of her neighbors. Other times, other wishes. Three decades have passed since the sealskin coat was a desirable possession, and the diamond earrings swinging from a long loop that went through a pierced hole in the ear speedily sank into that blackness of barbarism from which it had sprung. The fur coat and the diamond earring are with us again, and again human nature responds to the same old call. They ate not In the shape in which they prevailed for so many decades among our best families. Looking back on the pierced ear with its pendant bauble, we have a shudder of horror to think that enlightened and Christian nations should have really permitted their women, to retain this bit of savagery without bitter protest. Our mothers had their ears pierced as children, and possibly we did, too,

if we were bora before the barbarism was abolished. There are thousands of us now who bear those scars. We cover them up with tabs of hair or, better still, with ornaments that clamp over the ear, just to hide the ravages of an earlier epoch. We have not given up the barbaric baubles; the world is too young to ask that denial of women. The elimination of colored stones, cheap and precious, may come as civic life presses itself more insistently into the social scale and women will do as men have done in giving up all that is ornamental and resisting the lure of the barbaric. Elemental and'Primitive. After all, we are elemental and primitive in our clothes. We may change the symptoms, but the deep-seated disease is there. What woman is there who doesn’t want to wear peltry? Those companions of the Paleolithic men in Europe probhbly received massive peltry as marriage gifts. Men have always been hunters of game, and women have always been wearers of skips. Therefore, how can we expect to change primitive instinct merely because we have changed our behavior? And then, there is nothing else that keeps one so warm as peltry, one may argue. This reasoning, however, has little to do with the fact. There are women as far south as the boundary line of Florida who are buying fur coats that reach to their heels, and there are women in India who stilt gird their loins with the skins of beasts. Logic and reasoning are not behind the wearing of peltry; it is the absolute expression of primordial Instinct. The skins of the animals are not the same; they differ as the world’s epochs differ. It was quite easy for m woman of the stone to invent herself in the skin of a stone age animal, but today it taken many skins from the squirrel, ermine, sable, rabbit or rat to make one garment for one woman.

It was necessary to introduce semiprecious furs, because it was not possible for the masses to pay the prlcO of the precious ones; so this winter we have a vast variety from which to choose. The furriers say there is no one animal that reigns supreme and that the peltry of any animal is worth while if it passes through the right hands. The art of the furrier has become significant. His is the magic quality to make squirrel look like sable, to make graccoon and ’possum reach important heights and to put pony skin on a pedestal, He has learned how to point the common fox and lift the wolf into greatness. He has made beaver almost precious and has made Belgian hare do some service to the world. It IS no wonder, therefore, that a woman pays well for peltry, no mat-ter-from what, animal it was. skinned. Her dollars go to the furrier, and that is where she is far behind the stone age woufan who employed no middleman between the beast and the garment. The Fashion in Furs. There are two or three things that OMSi might say are out of fashion: first, the band of fur on.the hem of a cloth or velvet coat; second, the small an’lmal with head and tails worn snugly around the neck. No one who dresses well is partial to the usage of the en- ■ tire animal this season, which is well, for there is nothing artistic about the head, glassy eyes and feet of a dead animal hanging below a woman’s live, face. Why look like the hunter home from the field? The small neckpiece is in the shape of a half muffler or a whole one If you like, provided that the two ends are fastened In front. Unless a single end thrown over the shoulder is excessively weighted, it is a nuisance to the wearer.

The extra high coachman’s collar of fur remains in fashion for those who do not like to spoil the shapeliness of their shoulders and back by hanging drapery. The fashionable neckpiece is really a shoulderpiece, for in many of the best models it extends to the waistline. There is a snugness about the shoulders that is reminiscent of Victorianism. The prevailing fur coats have less flare than last winter, unless: they are cut three-quarter length. The long ones hang in a straight, medieval line, with sometimes a deep band of another fur at the hem. Their rivals, the velour and velvet coats, have the hem free of peltry, but make up for this omission by lavishness at the 'waist, the neck and the wrists. Immense Slavic belts of fur, ornamented with barbaric designs of jewels in front, are fashionable for gowns and coats. Wristleis of fur that reach almost to the elbow are also In demand. The muff is a small affair, barrel shaped and usually made of two kinds of fur. Its distinguishing feature is simplicity. It has no cordings nor frills nor ornamentation. Evening gowns are trifiuned with fur, and evening coats are heaped with 1L Black and white tails of ermine are used to fringe the edges of velvet evening gowns, and-on one distinguished black velvet dinner frock there are shoulder straps of ermine and a diplomat’s ribbon of the same peltry that is spread across the chest and finished at the waist with a rosette. Among the furs that are offered as first choice this season are ermine, kolinski, flying squirrel, sealskin, Belgian rabbit, sable, skunk, moleskin and beaver. The smooth peltries are preferred to the long-haired ones. Even such furs as kolinski and skunk have a razor passed down them by the furrier to bring them to the softness of sealskin. This Is the first time that It has been possible to make that coarse fur called skunk becoming to the face. (Copyright, 1916, by the McClure Newspaper Syndicate.)

This evening gown of black velvet has shoulder straps of ermine, also a fringe of this expensive peltry at the hem. There is a diplomat’s sash of it that goes across the chest and hangs to the knees.