Show by PROEHL HALLER JAKLON skirts are no longer news and worn SHORT ans apparel what there Is of it halt the topic of beatea conversation that it waa a few years ago of course now and then yon read a news item announcing that next season s skirts are to be shorter or perhaps you may encounter a wheezy old joke involving some peculiarity of comans womans dress but in general critical comment on feml nine attire occupies less and less space in conr news columns of fashions and modes we have aplenty and the space devoted to style informs alon steidley dlly increases for as a nation we have become dress conscious short skirts are no longer news merely because news Is supposed to concern itself with the unusual and short skirts are no longer un usual toda long skirts are almost ag rare as the bustle you see short skirts everywhere shorter than they ever were and the world goes along and for all that has been prom ased and threatened seemingly unharmed women s clothes are lighter now than they avei have been with the exception of the period directly following the french revolution when the girls of marseilles wore simple tunics mod aled after the fashion of the ancient greeks ane clothes of miss weigh sixteen ounces to list them here would add scarcely one line and it seems that america by no means li unique in this matter of dress france england germany in fact most of the civilized world has declared for the new freedom in dress and la away with it in paris the skirts are so short that an american woman who bad lived there tor several years found upon returning to our shores that it would be necessary to remodel her clothes in berlin and london it la the same the lower picture above a troup of berlin mannequin with their numbers waiting to be called from the standpoint of health fashions have the endorsement of physicians except where fashion demands dieling dieting and self starvation in order to attain that which americans have come to recognize as beauty medical science many years ago warned the ladles that if hey persisted in en casing themselves in long tight fitting corsets they were likely to injure themselves permanently they laughed at this advice at first but gradually they loosened the strings then the world war came and the younger generation finding it could play better without harness discarded the corset entirely borne of the abbreviated dresses of today would have caused a panic in the streets of twenty years ago does that mean that women have become depraved Is it immoral to wear skirts that reach only to the knee no daughter of mine will make such a spectacle of herself 1 bald parent with nineteenth century standards of modes and manners now these earne parents bit in the gallery a little puzzled and bewildered patiently hatching secretly relieved that worn ana attractiveness tar from being impaired has been greatly enhanced by her nen liberation one observer argues that the idea of immorality Is closely allied to the idea of shame and that having got rid of a good deal of shame we have attained to a higher degree of moral health than prevailed in jane austen s day when woman had only one preoccupation sex this Is the opinion of hugh A kennedy former london correspondent of the christian science monitor and brother of the rev G A kennedy writing in the forum mr kennedy recalls a june day in I 1 ondon twelve s ears ago passing the admiralty arch he was shocked to behold a woman obviously of grace and refinement beautifully gowned in the mode of the day save for the outrageous fact tha the sleeves of her dress completely transparent aiom the to hie shoulders sonn a crowd started to follow her some you I 1 s IM gan to hotle cpr and before I 1 kaw ni ut I 1 was doing I 1 biad pushed my way alia crotta enlisted the services of a policeman and between the two of us we got the halt faint ang girl into a taxi by tho time I 1 had deposited her at queen annes mansions where bhe was staying with her father and mother she had tearfully explained to me that they had just ar rived from new york that every woman in new york was wearing that kind of dress that she never dreamed that such a thing would happen and that she would never get over it ten years including war years passed mr kennedy again passed under admiralty arch into st james park everywhere one looked dotted about the lawns were girls not in cowna with transparent sleeves but in gowns with no sleeves at all in gowns that did not come one inch below the buee in gowns devoid of necks and only very transparently supplied with backs ten years before one lone girl clad after a fashion which now would be regarded as almost in its modesty had created something bordering on a panic in this place women open ly dubbed her a hussy men and boys openly followed her and passers by bad wondered what the world was coming to and this was what the world was coming to bare arms bare knees bare necks and yes bare backs too and yet I 1 could not help but note how unconcerned everybody seemed about it it seemed to me that the air was cleaner and purer than it had been ten years before as it an unholy pressure had been relieved and impudent hocus shorn of its imaginary power legs were everywhere arms were everywhere and yet the noeo and boys passing hick and forth were about their dally walk and conversa alon just as it nothing were happening just as it the world around them were not coming to anything out of the ordinary after all A great artist once told me on interesting story e were talking about dress and bow entirely it was a matter of the point of view lie recalled one day when he was a young art student that a curious thing happened at the life class he was attending the model was a young girt of refinement and beauty of form and the class was drawing her undraped figure she was a good model and had been sitting motionless for halt an hour when suddenly glancing upwards she baw the face of a man peering at her the window of the skylight she had been posing for half an hour before a class of fifty men yet when she saw this face at the sky light with an outraged rry she threw a wrapper around her shoulders jumped from the platform and withdrew in doirs to her dressing room now the artist has algava apen regarded as necessarily a man of looser morals than the man who follows other it Is an absurd as of course but it arises from the fact that the average human being dragooned into a respect for the mysteries of dress cannot conceive of anyone who does not give a rap for it us anything but immoral artists are not less moral than other men but have on the contrary gained a certain measure of freedom from that incubus of mystery which makes for as nature intended it to make tor the excitation of desire and the average human mind resents the acquisition of this freedom A hundred years ago tho womanly woman had perhaps reached her most womanly expression the women of jane akstens Au day were almost completely preoccupied with questions of bar they had it for their every thought they sewed a little cooked and placed the harpsichord but when they did these bilings it was always with some very gallant gentleman in view and as to the very gallant gentlemen they were BO gallant that la chance view of my ladys ankle was sufficient to put them into a cold sweat 1 I begin to see this younger generation today as some holy thing with unc rang if ancon wisdom the modern woman Is doing the first things first ehe Is getting rid of the mystery of the flesh and the man who twenty years ago was fired by the suggestion of mystery of the clothed form finds himself unmoved in the pros ence of so much nakedness because it Is nn ashamed the lack of morality Is not in the nakedness but in the shame and the shame grows less day by day the question of sex Is really occupying thought far less today than at any time in history and so when a prince of the church declares as he did recently that he Is shocked at the unparalleled depravity of comans womans dress and declares that he Is at a loss to explain the universal decadence which has swept the world the woman of today Is apt to answer him shortly enough 10 lo period Is desirable for its own sake and as tar as the relation of the sexes Is concerned we are pissing through a period of transition a period in which license la more oft en than not mistaken for albert ll bert and old time ideas vanish in a peal of laughter and tho laughter Is the most wholesome thing about it the surest way for the orld to rid itself of th hocus of sec se c Is to laugh at it A lady with a lamp shall stand in the great history of the land well the lady has come and she li and her skirts are short and her standee nimg are As to her back I 1 cannot see it for her face bare I 1 towards roe but on her face upturned light era of her lamp Is shining the glory of to a new the T inai rift |