Must Dress Spanish To Be in Style Now

1916

Last Season The Fashion Trend was To Chinese — Now It's Changed
By Margaret Mason.

NEW YORK. Feb. 11. — Sing ho! for the Spanish main, for anything Spanish is the main thing in the new trend of Fashion. Last season we were all to the Chinese and goodness knows where we will be season after next. At the pace they are going it looks as if the designers would soon be sitting around on their haunches and weeping a la Alexander the Great for more worlds to copy.

Personally it strikes me Borneo fashions might be smart for the summer season, but the designers are probably holding them in reserve for the winter months. But to return to Spain; even as a Spanish omelet the fashion designers are undoubtedly being egged on to the Spanish mode by the recent production of that much-heralded Spanish opera, "Goyesca," at the Metropolitan opera house. Incidents in the life of Goya and his paintings inspired the opera, the opera inspired our present fashions and so Mr. Goya is really the responsible party.

Goya was the father of twenty children, one of the most favored lovers of the duchess of Alba and a great artist. Not for these achievements, however, is he now known to fame, but as the designer of these feminine frocks and frills for 1916.

Quantities of Spanish lace, both white and black, are used in flounces on the new old Spanish gowns which are copied outright from old portraits by Goya and Vesasquez. One of the French houses offers a gown which is a replica of that worn by the infants in Velasquez's most famous portrait. The gown is dubbed Velasquez, and it is wired out over the hips in the same exaggerated manner as the portrait. In fact, almost all of the frocks with Hispanic tendencies show this wiring over the hips, and the bodices are tight-boned and pointed.

Crude, strong tones of yellow, red, green and orange are used to get the true Spanish effects and mantillas, scarves and sashes of gay hues, high back combs and gaudy fans are accessories after the fact. Stunning evening wraps and negligees are fashioned out of the gorgeously embroidered Spanish shawls, and in some instants they are even made into evening gowns verily reeking of Carmen and bull fights.

Indeed all the Spanish fashions are bully.

Considering the shortage of dyes and the fact that all the real blue-blooded senoritas are raven-tressed, this is bound to be a closed season for blondes, and peroxide peaches will all stop trying to conceal their dark pasts.

With our characteristic whole-souled manner of entering entirely into the spirit and atmosphere of a new mode I have no doubt that even our diet will now smack of the Spanish tendency toward onions, omelettes, mackerel and sweet peppers. Our fox-trots and one-steps will give way to the fandango, our national sport become throwing the bull and our Irene Castle go around looking like a castle in Spain.

—Fort Wayne News, Fort Wayne, IN, Feb. 11, 1916, p. 4.