The Warner weekly sun. (Warner, Brown Co., Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1885, 1885-06-05
The Old Hoop Skirt.

The Old Hoop Skirt.
An item is going the rounds of the
papers to the effect that the old fash
toned hoop skirts are coming into style
again, and that within a year the hoop
skirt factories that have been lying
idle for years will be running full
blast, and the ladies will grow larger
around as the fashion is recognized as
the thing. Who that was on earth
twenty-five years ago, does not remem-
Der the first hoCpskirt craze? Hoops
came into fashion suddenly, and all
women, whatever their condition.
adopted the fashion at once. There
were few regular manufactured hoop
skirts at first, and only those who were
very tony had elaborate hoops, but as
hoops were the fashion everybody had
to have something that would make
the dress stick out. Merchants sold
wire and rattan, and whalebone, and
strips of brass, and ladies made them
into skirts, and some of them were
too ridiculous for anything. A lady
would get her hoops made and find
that the skirt of her dress was so small
that she would have to use a shoe horn
! W 2CU tUG ShilU ONCI LlC HOOpS, VI
grease the hoops, and then the dress
was so tight over the hoops that every
hoop showed as plainly as though it
had been on the outside. some queer
scenes were witnessed when hoops
first came in. Ladies were not accus.
toned to walking in a barrel, and the
hoops would act awfully contrary, and
show themselves on slight pr~ovication.
Modest ladies were frequently made
to blush by some act of the hoops,
which seemed to be endowed with as
much cussedneSs as Il mule. The
wearer of a hoop could never be en-
tirely certain what an hour would
bring forth. The hoop was liable to
60 along all right, and appear to un-
derstand its business, and to have de-
cided to be decent, and when the
a attempted to go into a door,
the hoops would get on a strike, and
the lady couldn't drive it in with a
club. Men were constantly laughing
at some eccentricity they discovered
in the hoops. Train conductors en-
joyea a constant picnic in helping
stranded females who got cast in try
ing TO enter a car. or a a seat. Ladies
who could not afford to buy the expen-
sive brass hoops would utilize the
hoops of barrels, and many a lady has
so ingeniously pressed a barrel hoop
into the service as to pass for a lead
er of the fashion, until some day she
attempted TO sit down in a pew at
church, when the hoop would flop up
and strike her on the nose two or three
times, and leave her in a situation so
uncomfortable as to BRING tears to her
eyes. 1t is a mean hoop that will
strike a lady, and a meaner hoop that
will strike her on the nose, ami a con-
founded sight meaner hoop that will
repeat. the blow two or three times,
but there are ladies living to-day with
scars on their noses made from these
hoops. Schoolgirls would wear bar
rel hoops, and it was an lmpossibility
to keep them anywhere except where
men living to-day, who were boys
twenty-five years ago, who could re-
late a good deal that they ought not
to about the way the girls were made'
ashamed of the fashions. Later, hoop
skirts were reduced to a science, like
making watches, and the ladies be-
came so accustomed to wearing them
that nothing ever happened worth
mentioning, but when two lady friends
Of the first hoop year get together to
talk over old times, and they get on
the subject of those old fashioned
hoop skirts and their experiences, they
can keep the children Of the present
day laughing until their sides ache.
Ladies who are leaders of fashion, and
eminent in the affairs of the world to.
day, can remember when they took the
first hoop off a flour barrel and basted
it into the bottom hem of a calico
dress, and felt as proud as queens, as
they sailed down the village streets,
with everybody looking at them.
Tragedies were enacted in the early
days of heep-skirts A lady wwhe -
now the wife of a senator, carries a
scar on the calf of her leg which
causes her to often wonder, as she sits
in the. senate gallery, whether il was
the dog, which got into her hoop-skirt
one day, 10 hide away from cruel boys,
that had bit her, or whether a corner
of a barrel-hoop stuck through her
stocking. If she was sure it was the
hoop she wouldn't be half as nervous
about herself as she Is when she sees a
dog near her. And so hoops are COM
ing into style again. Well, let them
come. In the language of the lamentcd
Patrick Henry, "We repeat it, sir, let
them come and be darned to 'em.-
Reck's Sun.