The column is addressed to "girls" (or young ladies) but the fashions depicted below seem rather matronly. This is the result of the fashionably mature figure of the day, achieved where necessary by a combination of padding and corsetry. The ironic thing was, the "girls" here, dressing like older women, would reach middle age in an era where youth was everything, and matrons tried to dress like girls!
Though it may not be apparent, fashion was becoming more democratic in the early twentieth century. The author of this column does not entirely approve:
The more I watch the dressing of the highest and the humblest, the more I am amazed at the way both classes contrive to have every article in the latest style. Shop-girls and servants, clerks and factory girls, one and all manage somehow to have a cheap imitation of the latest accessories of dress of their wealthy sisters. There are the really poor who, of course, do not think of dress, but let us look just one step higher, and even the flower-sellers on Sundays have the dyed cat-skin round their shoulders made into the latest shape of stole boa. I must say I cannot see the class of girls who wish to dress plainly and suitably according to their positions and incomes. There may be an isolated few, but surely if there were more the fashions given in the penny papers would cater to their tastes. As it is, in the most popular penny papers we see cheap imitations of extravagant elaborate fashions. I suppose no girl wishes to look poorer than she is, or any woman older than she is, and therefore most people dress beyond their means. What a contrast the dressing of to-day is, compared to what it was ten years ago! The same class of girls give to-day twice at least as much for their dresses as they did then. In everything we are growing more and more luxurious in our lives.
The "good old days" are always at least ten years ago, no matter when you start from!
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