New Ulm Weekly Review

How French Women Dress.

The chief point to note about the dress of a Parisian woman, observes the fashionable Philadelphia Telegraph, no matter what her station in life may be, is its appropriateness. She does not wear as costly garments usually as the American of the same social class, but they are always thoroughly suitable to her position and to the occasion on which they are to be worn. A French elegante, for instance, will neither go shopping in a velvet costume nor to a wedding or official reception in a cloth jacket and cashmere gown. She never goes out on foot in superb and showy apparel, or appears at a ball in a dark silk made high in the neck and with long sleeves. Etiquette forbids her receiving even the most intimate of her gentlemen friends in her morning dress though this rule has been relaxed of late in favor of the very superb morning toilets of brocade and satin and lace which have been concocted for morning wear by the leading Parisian dressmakers. These, however, are simply reception toilets for morning instead of for afternoon wear. If she desires to go out on foot she dons the simplest of costumes in dark cloth or cashmere. Her visiting costume may be as magnificent as her purse or her desires may make it, and the same may be said of the dress in which she receives callers on her "at home" day. Her theater bonnet is much more showy and dressy than her visiting one. For street wear she dons a bonnet in very dark velvet or felt. In the matter of gloves and chaussure she is always irreproachable. For evening dress the satin slippers and silk stockings precisely match the toilet with which they are to be worn. There was an attempt made at one time to introduce the wearing of scarlet hose and black slippers with white evening dresses, but it proved a total failure. Neither were black slippers and stockings ever worn in Paris with white or pale tinted ball dresses. That fashion was not French, it was possibly English, and unfortunately it was American.