The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1919-01-16
WITH UNIFORMS
 IN THE DISCARD

It is time to change a few things in women's appearl. Women are leaping from uniforms into medieval gowns of gold, and crystal, and tulle in brilliant colors, and into smashing furs and red street apparel. Signi- hcant changes are working.
 There is the new decolletage which was prophesied weeks ago." says the New York Sun. Half a dozen new ways of cutting the neck line have leaped into existence, and a dozen new collars claim the blue ribbon. No matter whether we dress differently about the hips and the feet, we are dressing decidedly differently about the neck and even the wrists.
 Tt is in these significant changes that the great mass of women are tn- terested, but many do not feel that they can afford new gowns for the mid-season.
 '"The artist who said that all chang es in fashions COZ sisted III cne placc- ment of the bulge, or the absence of 1t, should have added that open sapc- es were second in importance. There Is no doubt that he was right. The contour is the thing. It is where a garment goes in or out that determine Its fashion. Few women there are who are brave enough to go against the contour of the hour, even though it may not suggest the best there is in their figures.
 If the designers of clothes were to reduce their work through the cen- turies to its component parts, realiz- ing that they merely play the changes on curves, or lack of them, they might lose hope and interest They might feel that after all their efforts in ap- parel were like a ehild's efforts to blow out a balloon; to partly fill it, to blow it into a perfect curve, and then to watch it collapse.
 "It is not an inspiring thought Neither is 1t Inspiring to remember that all our life is governed by the number of times We breathe each minute. If one stopped to count the cost of living by that mathematical process one would feel like dying. The artist who told the dressmakers that all their work was determined by the bulge was discouraging with malice aforethought The dressmakers might have retorted that all the work of his class was merely mixing pigment, It is the diversions from the fundamen- tai work of making clothes and paint ing pictures that lift the two into in- spirational heights.
 NO doubt the dressmakers realize that for the sake of trade and their own comfortable living they must pull the fabric out here and suppress 1t there in building gowns. They realize that they carry the public with them and that a woman who knows that the curve in a fashionable gown Is on the hips and the flare absent on the hem will, not reverse the situation in her new apparel. She would prefer to stay in the house and wear a ki- mono.
 This preface will make the re- formers cry loud; that is, if reformers read fashion stories. To judge from the attacks made on the work of fashion writers it is not only probable that they read everything published but they seem to digest and memorize 1t so that they may be better able to criticise 1t.
 Tt does not seem to enter the minds of these reformers that if they were consistent in considering dress too unimportant to pay any public attention to it they would refrain from reading the written word about 1t. It would also be we'll for them to real ize that human nature. singly and in mass, would resent the absence of all beauty, coauetry and trivialtty in dress and that if law could be pass ed that would compel, it, would be- come uninspifed and drab of mind. Even a convict might regard his prison with more eheerfulness if he could change his garb.
 The very interest that the world takes in clothes and which the dress Pefefmers pretend to ignore, or wish to eliminate, is evidence of the fact that they knew so much about it that they can constantly contend against 1t by the quoted word. Their interest is merely expressed in a different taH- gent. The other women express theirs through the purchase and exploitation of new apparel
 s@rheFs are thousands of men who resist that the mania for uniforms amsag the women who are doing war work Is the top notch Of vanity, It is ,,ea1Ae-, for tsa]> --s>, p->~-s A1>-~s