Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 54, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 March 1918 — GOWNS SHOW AN ALGERIAN SKIRT [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

GOWNS SHOW AN ALGERIAN SKIRT

New York. —The persistence shown by France in the dressmaking houses tn continuing a certain trick for several years, deserves more attention than is usually accredited it, writes Aime Rittenhouse. A study of the obstinate way in which Paris designers have held on to a thing they liked might go far toward convincing a vast number of the critics of women’s apparel that are not as flighty as they seem. The weather vane turns, it is true, but it swirls back into the same quarter so frequently that at times there is a feeling that it changes little. The American shops, it is claimed, constantly convince their patrons that an old gown must be replaced by a new one by showing a revolution in silhouette. We have millions of women to dress, where France has thousands, and we have a population that is quite capable of Indulging in its desire for new clothes from the rim of the arctic circle to a line above the tropics. It is- a well-known fact that the American buyers who go to Paris to get new clothes often refuse lovely gowns if they bear a close kinship to those that were sold the year before. They wave such frocks away with the remark that American women must have novelty. This act has always depressed the designers in Paris, who care for beauty and detail rather than for startling changes, and it is the French designers who say that they rack their brains for eccentricities to give to America far more than they would if their clientele ■ were only Rome, Paris and London. It is this underlying trait in the French dressmakers that gives them the desire to persist in a certain line —which is coming back to the original discussion. Now the Zouave Skirt. This line happens to be, at the present moment, that tucked-ln effect at the hem of the skirt, which is suggestive of the trousers, of the Algerian troops. Nobody would remember, probably, the exact date of the beginning of this idea, but it was evolved long before the war. It has been brought out in various kinds of skirts. The house of Callot was probably the first to bring out the idea in a narrow skirt, but it did not take.

The sketch shows a combination of two of the most fashionable fabrics of the spring. The skirt is short and narrow with a white matelasse hem and panel at the side. The bodice is slim in outline, with long sleeves, and shows a slightly low, slender vest of the matelasse held In by two girdles of black satin. Poiret, who has a devotional attitude toward anything that comes out of the East, used the skirt throughout his years of success. Cheruit adopted it In a modified manner half a dozen years ago. Jenny took It up about two winters ago and accentuated it In her popular costumes in such a manner that America grew more weary of it through this channel than any other. Somehow, as jenny made it, it did not savor of the East. It was merely awkward and extremely , girlish. Last autumn the immense bulk of the American public looked with a shrug of the shoulders at the pink and blue taffeta skirts that were tucked up at the. hem and caught here and there with a formal little bouquet of roses. How stale and stupid Paris is! was the comment Can’t she ever get it into her head

that America does not want that loose, overfull skirt with its ungraceful line about the ankles? Debutantes and young girls continued to dance in this kind of skirt wherever the fiddles sounded, but women of more mature years dismissed it as a fashion from the start Now, here it is again, not only here, but very much accentuated and ac-

This dinner frock is of black taffeta and the sturdy black silk tulle which is embroidered In a rose design In colored silks. The skirt Is made of two flounces of this tulle, and It show* again at the girdle. There Is a knotted sash of taffeta that hangs at one side. cepted es the leading silhouette among certain houses that establish fashions. The first French gowns that come over show it; the American dressmakers who are preparing for a brisk spring trade speak of it as a powerfur factor in the shaping of the new fashions. And the interesting part of it is that it entirely changes the silhouette.

This seems to be In contrast with the stated fact that France is persistent in certain things and maintains a certain line for a longer period of time than America. The truth is that France persists with a trick, but changes the silhouette and still uses the trick, and that is what she has done in the new Algerian skirt. It is difficult to say whether the trousers of the French troops in Algiers give the clew to this new skirt or whether it was the entire array of men in baggy trousers which curve in below the knees to fit the legs. Here Is the Silhouette. The waist is normally large, the line down* the hips is either straight or slightly bulging through the fullness of the material, and the hem is exceedingly narrow and tucked under. A woman wearing the most fashionable of these skirts, with high boots added thereunto, will look at a slight distance as though she wore baggy trousers and army boots.

To the majority of women this news may not be welcome. will fancy a far more sensational garment than what actually exists. That mild revolution against the sheath and the hobble skirt may also crop up against this Algerian skirt, but both the other features of fashion were incorporated in our ordinary apparel after a while, without creating disturbance. There is so little fullness in this new skirt that it does not seem to be even a first cousin to the skirt of Jenny with its tucked-up hem. That skirt, which pervaded the continent for two years, had a tendency to flare out, to fling Itself away from the ankles; this skirt goes in so rapidly from knees to hem that it does not need to undergo the same treatment that was accorded the other skirt.

For instance, to be technical — the fullness at its hem is not caught up and gathered to a short, narrow lining. This is not considered necessary. It is merely turned under and run Into the conventional hem, allowing its fullness, slight as it is, to fall against the shoetops and accentuate the trousered effect. This extreme skirt has brought about the narrowest silhouette we have had in years. When the hem la not tucked under, it is only wide enough to provide free movement in walking. The skirts are necessarily short, for their narrowness would greatly impede progress if they werd long.