FROM THE ARCHIVES:A fashion for long skirts in the mid-1920s fell foul of the mud on Dublin's streets, and of the patience of this columnist who went under the initials MBP. - JOE JOYCE
WENDING MY damp way through Grafton street the other day, I was struck forcibly by two unpleasant facts – on the one hand, the extreme muddiness of the streets and, on the other, the extreme foolishness of women.
The link between these two far removed ideas was the latest product of Fashion’s crass stupidity – the lengthened skirt.
Womenfolk passed to and fro, literally “wading” through mud and slush, long, bedraggled skirts clinging like limpets to sodden ankles hampering their movement, so that walking became a burden instead of the pleasure it should be and the negotiating of a tramcar an impossibility or, at best, a danger to life and limb.
One unhappy mortal, clad in a long black coat – the dernier cri beloved of the fashion books – presented a particularly sorry spectacle; the coat was edged with grey squirrel, but the soft fur caressed the muddy street at every step whilst silken stockings, once a shimmering white, were soaked and mud-splashed.
The whole picture, on a bright and frosty morning, would have been that which it was intended to be – a thing of beauty and a joy forever – but now was nothing but a study in drab tawdriness on a pedestal of unconscious foolishness.
I am the last in the world to add one more item to the long list of women’s shortcomings, real or imaginary, about which so much has been said; but one cannot help deprecating the strange kink in the feminine mind which leads womenfolk to endure needless miseries for no more useful purpose than to satisfy the exactions of foolish fashion.
Surely there already exists enough in this world to hamper their movements without adding further nuisances, such as that of the long and clinging skirt!
What fascination can it hold to outweigh its many disadvantages? It is unhygienic in the extreme – the very antithesis to cleanliness; and women like to be considered fastidious, even ultra-fastidious, in all matters of personal detail.
Its only recommendation is its undoubted gracefulness – but it is only graceful when worn at the proper time and in the proper place, which certainly is not a muddy street; for the most alluring creation of the genius of Worth [founder of haute couture] is robbed of all its grace when adorned with a three-inch margin of Dublin mud.
The long, trailing skirt may have been perfectly suited to the early Victorian period, but our conception of the graceful needs change with the times. The stagecoach has gone and may the long skirt go with it, for both are equally unsuited to the pace at which the world moves nowadays.
The twentieth century finds women up and doing – sheltered no longer, unless by a shelter of their very own making . . .
To claim freedom in the larger things, while yielding to petty tyrannies in the smaller things of life, is to try to swallow a camel while straining at a gnat.