What Well-Dressed Women Are Wearing, Spring 1923

What Well Dresses Women Will Wear

By Anne Rittenhouse

Fashion Stamps Approval on the New Combination Costumes

Fashion is usually a little skeptical of the ingenious.

When a woman equips her kitchen she may look with favor on a motor that will mix cake, beat eggs, buff silver, knead bread and peel the potatoes. She may even view with tolerance, born of necessity, a device that makes an impromptu guest room out of the erstwhile drawing room. But if she is one of the discriminating, she has no such toleration for presto-chango costumery.

The new three or four-piece costumes, so called—for sometimes the words are misnomers and the three-piece costume has but two pieces and the four-piece only three—managed to pass muster. They do verge on the ingenious. They do provide two or three dress possibilities in a single costume. They do simplify the problems of dressing for possible changes of weather, and for the requirements of different occasions. But their cleverness and ingeniousness are not obtrusive; they are merely incidental. And fashion has marked them with a big unmistakable O.K.

They conform to no one definite type.

Your three-piece costume may be one thing and that of your companion at tea may be made up of an entirely different sort of combination. Yours may be a three-tier brown plaited crepe de chine skirt, worn with a tan organdie blouse with plaited ruffles at the hips, elbows and neck, topped by a short cape of plaited brown crepe de chine tied at the neck with two-inch brown ribbon.

And that of your companion over the tea-cups may begin with a straight line printed silk frock, over-topped by a detachable tunic of beige crepe. The wrap she has just let slip over the back of her chair—really an integral part of the costume—is, let us say, a three-quarter length coat wrap of beige marocain heavily embellished with narrow tucks at shoulders, at hem and midway between.

Navy Blue Is Gaining

Then you look up at the striking young woman passing your table, and if your eye is keen for such matters you realize that she wears one of these new three-piece costumes, but hers is of a still different type. It is of blue crepe—marocain—and don’t forget that dark blue is gradually gaining back some of the territory lost to black within recent years. It begins with a skirt of the dark blue crepe drawn over toward the left side and showing what your dressmaker probably calls a “jabot drape”—the long end of the “jabot” falling in a point nearly to the floor. The blouse, no doubt attached to the skirt though this detail you cannot see, is of beige georgette and there is a belted in sort of over-blouse with a little short peplum that terminates in the back in a square cape.

These three-piece costumes as presented this spring are in some cases evolved from the suit. In as many cases they are the out-growth of the street frock.

Sometimes you may look upon this new combination as the old-time suit coat and skirt with the third piece—the blouse—usually attached to the skirt. Again you may merely thing of it as a street frock, with a wrap thrown in to complete the picture—and increase the dressmaker’s profit.

It has distinct advantages, however you look at it.

It gives you insurance against your own possible bad judgement in selecting a suitable blouse to wear with your suit; or wrap to wear with your street frock. There is a sort of economy about it, though the three-piece costume will always remain listed among the more expensive offerings of the dressmaker. But in these costumes one has something suitable for vagaries in temperature and the demands of different hours of the day.

Some of them do come very near to the ideal of the busy women who a few years ago sought to work out the formula that would do 24-hours-a-day duty—starting you out quite appropriately attired for war work of golf course and, with the skillful adjustment of a snapper here and there, as the hands of the clock went round, keeping you suitably attired for luncheon, for shopping, motoring, tea drinking, informal dining and more formal dancing. These gowns that never quite reached perfection might possibly have done so and would perhaps have solved the problem beautifully, had the problem not faded off into thin air like will o’ the wisps in the sunlight. Nobody really wanted that sort of dress. The woman who didn’t have time to stop for a change of attire once from the hour of rising to the hour or retiring usually solved her problem by getting into something that would do and then avoiding afternoon and evening diversions that would make this something inappropriate.

But those three-piece, or four-piece costumes, without making any pretense at solving any problem or lifting burdens of dressing off women’s shoulders or satisfying the hopes of a single dress reformer—do in a measure offer the advantage of one costume with two or three possibilities.

Silk Materials Chosen

Silk, both crepe and satin finish, is the material chosen for the wrap of the three or four-piece costume this spring far oftener than the woolen materials that we once associated with the making of spring suits. This is not difficult to explain. The wrap itself is apt to be more voluminous. It needs a more pliant medium and a less weighty one if it is to be worn with any sort of comfort after spring air has lost the tang of winter. The regulation woolen suitings are remaining in favor for the strictly tailored two-piece suit, but that is an entirely different proposition. The line of distinction drawn between what the French conveniently dismiss as a tailleur and the suit costume is wide and definite this spring.

These suits that we choose to call “mannish” have by no means suffered eclipse. Patou in Paris has been sponsoring them and has set the vogue for the straight, simply tailored suit worn with a matching cape for early spring sport wear. But fashion no longer permits us to match our tailored sport suits with the verdant lettuce leaf, canned salmon or lavender hyacinth, as some of us did last spring. Any left over of this sort that we may have on hand from last spring had been remain a left-over—or take a trip to the dying establishment. For the mannish suit of the spring is mannish in coloring as well. It is gray of the sort that we associate with well-bred English tweeds, if is fallow brown, it is beige, it is occasionally, not often, navy blue, and it is white.

Tucks Are Used

Tucking must be taken into consideration. Perhaps it is a natural outcome of plaiting—and much of the new tucking really gives the effect of a plaited surface with the advantage that the tucks stay in place. Marocain and other crepes lend themselves well to this sort of device and not infrequently the wrap section of a three-piece costume will show the tucking by way of making a more elaborate and heavier surface than that of the frock or tunic or blouse beneath.

Crepe de chine is the medium of the tucks in the grey costume, and no fabric less pliant that crepe de chine could possibly be used for tucks of such circuitous construction.

The more pronounced types of these new tucked frocks show straight all-over tucking form shoulder to hem.

There is a type of French three-piece suit that shows horizontal tucking on the skirt and jacket—producing the effect of breadth of silhouette which seems to hold less terror to the French woman of fashion than to the American.

These tucks are placed three or four inches apart—so that the straight plain skirt might have room for 10 of them. The straight hip length jacket also shows the tucks in a front panel and three horizonal tucks appear at the end of the wide, long sleeves. It is not a suit that would appeal to the American who had not gone through a definite conversion to the distinctively French in clothes, but it shows which way the wind is blowing.

First cousin to tucking comes cording, dear to the heart of the French dressmaker. These cordings are fine and are placed close, sometimes fashioning an entire shawl collar, wide cuffs to the open sleeves, and sometimes on a cape or wrap a wide band around the hem.

Much Color in Clothes

Frocks, hats, accessories worn outdoors at many of the resorts have been qualified by many an observer by the stock expression of theirs, “a riot of color.” Perhaps it is easier to let it go at that than to try to trace any definite color trend in the motley of shades worn by women of varying taste and type. Then, too, when there are women in the picture wearing scarlet or bright blue or even green shoes to match scarlet, blue or green accessories, perhaps one is entitled to speak of the color scheme as riotous.

But there are still well dressed women who cling to their beiges, and browns, their grays and navy blues and even an occasional exemplar of the truism that black is always good. To be sure, navy blue has regained much of its old-time favor in Paris. And it has regained this rather at the expense of black and the darker shades of brown than of beige. There is still something undeniably smart about gray, which for some reason or other never seems in any danger of being tricked into over popularity.

One hears much of the greens of the season, and often the most striking frock or suit you see in a group of expensively dressed women is green. Almond green is still good. Ans so is Lavin green. Jade and emerald greens are not regarded as so suitable for day time wear as for evening. There is a new green—there always is a new green when the spring clothes show themselves, isn’t there?—and this green is hard to describe. Sometimes it is spoken of as a mustard green, but that all depends on what color your associate with mustard. At any rate, it is as crude and difficult as a mustard green. But for all that, it carries an air of smartness about it.

Then there is the “whole gamut of color” –that is another way the situation is described—and clothes are spoken of as having run this—whatever it may be. This, too, is because in the favored hotels at tea hour you see less black and more warm browns than a season or two ago, because where you do see black you see it combined with terra cotta reds or greens and other combinations that we glibly call Egyptian—because there are a few purples—one well-known actress has set the fashion for flame color combined with a vivid violet—because there are Egyptian or Cleopatra blues and greens that you cannot name; and because there are hats here and there with a perky trio of American beauty roses fashioned at the very edge of the brim.

From page 8 of the Durham Morning Herald, April 22, 1923