Foreign News: The Fair Ladies

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Sir, as one who has reached the respectable state of a grandfather and who therefore is supposed by some not to take any notice of or interest in such things, I approach you with diffidence. I have, Sir, however, of recent months received the impression that a remarkable transformation has overtaken our womanhood, both young and not so young. To my eyes, watching them going about their daily tasks, they appear to have flowered in an extraordinary fashion . . .

So Grandfather Patrick Graham memorialized the London Times last summer. Ever since, passing tourists and fellow fanciers have been hastening to reassure him that he was right as rain. Something of a momentous nature has indeed happened to British women. Softly, silently, in the beneficent climate of Britain's postwar affluence, they have burst forth into startling bloom. The transformation should end, hopefully forever, the long winter of discontent when British women stood armored in well-tailored tweeds and wool stockings, their feet sensibly shod against all weather. Only touch of blight: the slowness of British males to notice the change. Snapped one young belle: "It's a pity that the improvement needs to be drawn to their attention through the columns of the Times."

Massive Uplift. Britain has always had its share of great beauties, who perhaps by their very rarity moved poets to rhapsodies and courtiers to either folly or matrimony. Endowed with broad brow, straight nose (admired by Englishmen in both their hounds and their women) and what 17th Century Poet Robert Herrick termed a "swan straining, faire, rare stately neck," isolated beauties from Charles II's Nell Gwyn to Lady Hamilton have shared with Edwardian Actress Lily Langtry the brow, the neck, a mass of lovely hair, and skin like an English rose.

But beauty was long considered a privilege of the upper classes, to be observed chiefly in the form of ball-gowned aristocrats gliding serenely through the pages of the Tatler and Queen. The British girl of average station wore cotton stockings and shapeless dresses, had the general air of somebody who couldn't care less—and couldn't afford it if she did. Misty climate produced the famed peaches-and-cream complexion. But for a poorly fed city girl, the result was merely chapped skin. The working girl, raised on a poor diet and less dentistry, aged early and not well.

The transformation came with the slow growth of British prosperity since 1950. With their new affluence, British girls suddenly became aware that the graceful clothes that once went only with gracious living had come within their reach. With new money to spend, they flocked to Europe, saw French and Italian girls making the most of fewer assets. Today, the average English girl ranks among the best-coifed, best-dressed women on earth.

Competing for the new market, dress manufacturers have adapted dresses designed by smart French and Italian couturiers and put them into mass production at off-the-peg prices ($35 for a suit, $9 for a dress). Glossy women's magazines filled with how-to-do-it beauty articles have proliferated and prospered. Any hairdresser styling himself "René of Paris" or "André of Mayfair" does a roaring business.