The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-03-15

I And
 Whoever thought, anyway, at the time that any fashion was anything but perfectly lovely when worn by any of the fruit basket sisters" "Pippin," 1" Peach" or "Nectarine?" Women demand change in fashions. They live in it, bask in it's variety and plan for 1t from season to sea- son.
 Consequently
 Mere man." who designs the fash ions tfor nearly all of the designers, Parisienne and Viennesse, are mem does it with a celerity and swiftness that Is only exceeded by the manner in which the women adopt them. In fact
 There's nothing that changes quite so often as women's fashions except Nat Goodwin's or DeWolff Hopper's wives.
 Think how hard it must have been upon poor mother Eve to have so lit- tie to work with in fashions-and no fashion books with gaily colored ladies on them to tell her how to make up her fig leaf for the coming season.
 Somehow you picture her as silently "of Monday morning" looking upon the simple unadorned lingerie fig leaf
 (for it's all the material she had for clothes, in utter despair
 Suddenly thought strikes her and her woman's ingenuity begins to work.
 She wants to look pretty for her husband"
 She adds to the simple fig leaf dra- pery a po1anaise effect of fern leaves. trailing arbutu3 and a lot of similar junk and then she starts des' gning a Basque effect and soon down to a sunny pool she goes and gazes at her image in the water and To! the birth of "fashions'' is at hand.
 When the serpent (who I've always believed was travelling salesman with women samples of dresses and hats in his suitcase) came along the work was done, and from that time forth fashions have been changing season after season-more or less.
 This season they are--LESSl Decidedly
 It all seems to agree withs "woman, lovely woman,' though. and she thriyes on the change as a baby does or a new diet.
 And it's alwaye change, too; just as probable it is that one season the hats will be so large that you can't see her face under them, and her skirts so bouff- nate that one will look like a figure out of Godey's Lady's Book, decades ago, and a collar nine inches tall, held up under
 her ears by whale bone spikes. and the next season you'll see her tripping down the thoroughfare in skirt so tight she
 can hardly walk. a hat that looks like a billiard ball, and gown cut as low as the statute of limitations, and yet look perfectly happy and contented. So varied are thy wiles that in the lan- guage of our cryptic. friend MT. G. B. Shaw, we exclaim: Now really, Fashion. really" What next?
 The funniest part of the whole story is that women have less to do with the malS- ing of fashions than anybody else, for as raid previously most of the designers and great coutouriereS are men. There isn't a woman, however. alive who would dare to disobey fashions de- crees. I know I wouldn't, and I know you wouldn't!
 Fat and slim. round and angular, home l ly and pretty young and old, every wom- an you see is trying to be Fin the style" and many are caf'ed but few get up to it! | We never see the people who make the l fashions and yet they rule our dress just as completely as another mysterious in- stittition termed 'The .Tarifr' rules our pocketbooks.
 We read the literature that .s sent out from star chamber proceedings and ocme- 1 times mutiny, but quietly we regain our composure and we all fall sn line some sooner. some later. l We may declare we are free and that we won't allow these arbiters to rule us
 Lut they do in the end just the rame. l I love the story that a woman of my iacquaintance tells
 Sfe's a newspaper worrYan, by the way,
 and is rather old-fashioned.