The Wheelwoman and Society Cycling News from London, Greater London, England • Page 9

Saturday, May 23rd, 1896. THE WHEELWOMAN." of wom3n have dictated the desirability of a monochlamydeous envelopment. And we must not leave out of account the influence that various considerations of decorum, and of sexual safe-guard, have exercised in devising and preserving the feminine skirt. Just as it has been considered necessary that certain Eastern women should be covered up completely with the small exception of their eyes, with which they were obliged to purposes of what might be expressed as sexual safeguards, for want of a better term, so astandard of decorum of sexual non attractiveness has been set by the skirt envelopment of the lower limbs. We have to take all circumstances as these into account, in tracing the influences that have operated in dress evolution.

Man did not don the dichotomous dress that he wears now, and has worn jfor a considerable time. He has passed through a more or less skirty period himself. What is the we see in parts of Great Britain to-day but a short skirt The kilt is merely a more finished form of the dress that almost universally obtained in Scotland at one time -f a dress that was sufficiently skirted to come down to the knees, with a divided under covering, leaving the knees quite 4- Dar while hose covered the rest of the leg and foot. This shortness in both over and underclothing enabled the wearer to move about a mountainous country with greater facility than would be possible with trousers or any other covering that enclosed the knee-joint. The Swiss mountaineer also wears a short above-knee garment, leaving the region about the joint quite bare; but he has not the outer-kilt covering.

The Scotsman's outer covering was a survival of the fashion of an upper garment that descended nearly down to the knees, like the coat of the old foresters, and was originally of the skins of animals; the Swiss mountaineer's dress did not pursue the same lines of development. In looking for early signs of a departure from the conventional skirt in the dress of women, we may mention the original bloomer costume to dismiss it as an anomaly that never meant much. It looked vastly more like madness in those days, than the same would to-day, because of the suddenness, the causelessness, of the innovation as it appeared then. The novelty never took root; it was as transient as the song, Daisy it helped as it is to do in this it was sown on stony We must pass on to an age of higher age of hygienic and other notions, to find the subject sown on soil of any futility. We come then to a period when women began to think, and to assert themselves.

They thought of a divided skirt. Now there is always some chance for a really good and beneficial innovation if the steps towards it be gradual. The real and simple knickerbockers of to-day are not considered so outre as divided skirts once were, yet what a difference there is in advancement! The lady who had the audacity to mount a platform and give an address on rational dress, and actually appear in a skirt under which she knew herself to wear, and openly avowed she wore a divided skirt, was a lady in a million. The ladies who now appear in the streets of London in simple, plain, obvious knickerbockers, are they not nearly as Wmerous and familiar to the eye as policemen Such is the work of Evolution, even in dress. The "higher woman" epoch, coming as it did at a time when such things as hygiene and rational dress were beginning to show themselves to be worthy of some attention, gives the first important departure from the conventional, which came to stay Higher women meant and they happened to be backed up by the advancement of the times in other respects.

But nothing could possibly have given such an immense force to this evolution, and have propelled it along in this particular line at such an astonishing rate, as the development of cycles. The advancement of the bicycle, and the bringing of it to that pitch of excellency and appropriateness that enabled the gentler sex to gain a mastery over is the force that sent the evolution of nether dress flying with it, and almost in an instant turned the scorn levelled at the advanced attire to appreciation. Evolution in everything proceeds by slow and sure stages; a certain time must be occupied in growing accustomed to change, however small. If by any chance there should be any powerful intercurrent influence, then rapidity of development may be enhanced or checked as the case may be. The cycle happened to be developing into a machine fit for a woman at the same time that woman herself was developing higher" notions of various kinds, hence the comparatively quick jump into the knickerbockers.

Had it not been for cycles, skirts would probably have remained: unchallenged for centuries; for even mountain climbing, shooting, and other exercises would never have evolved nether dress much beyond a rather higher skirt with leggings, and various devices, supposed to have always- under the skirt. True it is that gymnastic and bathing costumes would have come into existence without the influences of wheeldom, but such departures or developments are really for appearance in private rather than in public. The observant will have noticed how, in so short a time, the designs for knickerbockers have come to be vastly improved. The wide, loose, artistically hanging ones, of not too thick a texture, seem now to represent the penultimate of perfection..