Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 146, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1918 — Standard Dress Idea Received With Disfavor By Women of England" [ARTICLE]

Standard Dress Idea Received With Disfavor By Women of England"

By F. J. HOWARD.

London, England

Now we have the staggering proposal that the harassed British government should enforce a standard dress for women. The greatly daring author of the idea proposes, in short, that the dear sex, whose sartorial eccentricities make men’s hearts heavy and their pockets light, should be uniformed. , Imagination reels at the thought! Can you conjure up a world in which all women are dressed alike? It would be a world robbed of much of its glamor for men —a drab, colorless world, in which a man would find it difficult on occasion to distinguish his aunt from his mother-in-law. This very courageous patriot suggests that the government should issue details of three standard patterns of costumes, or “uniforms,” and allow only a limited number of colored fabrics to be manufactured. He is apparently unaware that owing to difficulties in regard to dyes there is only a limited number of colored fabrics already. A stately and beautiful lady in a large dressmaking establishment told me so, and at the same time volunteered the opinion that any serious interference with ■women in the matter of dress would lead to trouble compared with which the suffragist shindies of a few years ago would seem like harmless effervescences. What the lady said was something like that, but of course she may have been exaggerating. All the same, I am convinced that in a matter of this kind we should look before we standardize. All the women I interviewed on the subject—and I interviewed a good many —declared that women would not stand any standardizing of their dress. They were willing to ’help in any other way to administei the final knockout blow to the Boche, but restricted fashions and dressing to order —No! If the government dared, they said, to dictate to women what they should wear —-well, something unpleasant would happen I