Very narrow skirts, [1] and very large hats. The material saved on the skirt goes into the chapeau."
"Nothing could be more beautiful," Angelo-Phyllis, the most effeminate of the hermaphroditoi, opined softly and sweetly, "than a feminine face framed in a picture hat set sidewise, with rim reaching below the shoulders. How I do like to stalk Fourteenth Street myself with such a chapeau![2] How the young fellows stare and throw remarks after me! I am glad the petite turbans are going into the rag-bag. And what low necks and short arms the new evening dresses are showing! And the material hardly more than cobweb! One could almost hide an up-to-date corsage in the fist."
"You seem, Phyllis, to be an expert on lingerie."
"My woman friends tell me I have the best eye for color effects they ever heard of. Millinery happens to be my business. A star actress whom I happen to know always asks me to accompany her to the modiste's. I must practically pick out all her robes, as well as hats—including the way they are to be made up. Just the sight of the artistic fabrics, as they are unrolled by the saleswoman, is an exquisite delight. My mind becomes crowded with emotions, and on the spur of the moment I could pen a lyric sur les etoffes jolies that any ladies' magazine would publish .... The
- ↑ In the last decade of the nineteenth century also, there existed a feminine craze for skirts as narrow as a pant-leg. "Merry Widow" hats also had their day then. But in 1921 for the first time in Christendom, respectable women have been crazy to display their bare breasts, bare arms, and next-to-nude legs in the crowded streets. Respectable women have to-day adopted for street wear the garb, for exclusive brothel wear, of filles de joie of a quarter of a century ago.
- ↑ See "French Doll Baby" in Part VIII.
