Evening Dress In The

Tropics

Letter to the Editor I IKE many other residents throughout J the Pacific, we be.ong to a stubborn and stiff-necked generation and have never ceased to protest, battle, and storm against the outrage of being forced by our womenfolk to abandon the cool, while, light-weight garments we were accustomed to wear at dinners, dances, and evening parties, and compelled to smother our bodies in the gloomy, stuffy habiliments' of formal evening dress.

In the old days, at Tahiti, no one ever thought of turning our jolly gatherings into nightmares of bodily discomfort to satisfy the requirements of some remote custom. We are rejoiced, however, to dis cover That we are not alone in our con tumacy. A fellow-sufferer in far away England has raised the standard of revolt in no less important a journal than the London Truth.

“There are few more depressing sights,” he writes, “than a large number of persons assembled in full evening dress , for a public dinner. Immaculate evening-dress is a miserable costume for eating dinner in, even if one does not have the misfortune to spill claret over it; for dancing it is catastrophic . . .”

And that is in the cold climate of Eng land. In the tropical night of Tahiti, it is cataclysmic!

In addition to being the nadir of dis comfort, the costume is ugly. A man in a perfectly-fitting tail coat looks like a'beetle; a man in a badly-fitting tail coat looks like the devil. We are aware that many of our male specimens appar ently are insects: but we do not think that sufficient reason to reduce the whole sex to the least common denominator.

As to the devil: in this totalatarian age we are too heavily constrained to make ourselves look like Hitler or Mus solini or whomsoever may be the ruler of the country we inhabit, to make our selves in the image of Satan, until such time as we shall have actually become naturalised citizens of his dominions!

I am, etc.,

Comfort First.

Papeete, Tahiti.

November 26, 1937.