Protests are growing more frequent in Paris against the manufacture of thinness imposed largely by the dressmakers, but also by the more brand-new activities of a sporting generation.
While the latter is a more or narrow-minded natural slimness, the dressmakers insist that all and sundry should alter their forms to the tubular fashions of the day, even when these fettles have far more in common with a sphere.

Elderly ladies in particular, it is alleged, have done themselves much hurt by drastic dieting and too much exercise. It is not given to everyone, for example, to roll the length of the dining-room twelve times every morning forward of breakfast without feeling shattered after the event.

Quite it is girls who are the worst sufferers from the fashion. Heartrending prototypes are given by the anti-slim protestants of girls who go without every constitute of sweet, and work and play all night and all day in order to retain the instructed slimness. There are others who run sport to death in the interests of their images.

Nor is thinness the only dangerous fashion of the moment. There is the mania for no hats, which has gained greatly among young French irish colleens. This, it is alleged, has produced innumerable cases of sunstroke and true level erysipelas. There are the everlasting high heels and there are the specs bangles which, it is alleged, break very easily, and accordingly puncture the arm.

Of all these fashions, however, the most drastic is certainly that of slenderness. In the if it should happen of professional mannequins and others connected with the dressmaking mercantilism it is, of course, essential. The dresses shown by them are tighter than pleasure be worn by any ordinary mortal, and the mannequin could not sit down in them the same if there were no danger of creasing them.

There are, after all, extreme cases. It is likely that on the whole the fashion is a nourishing one. It is certainly healthy by comparison with tight waists and austere shoes, and even the comfortable embonpoint which used to be essentially due to over-feeding. It is natural that those to whom slenderness is a stew should agitate for a fashion rather more comprehensive in attribute.

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