When You Put Your Habit On
First, hair: Never mind if you look like Mme. Recamier with your hair fluffed and like a skinned rabbit with it tight back, tight, flat back it must go. Brush it smooth as you can, braid it or coil it about level with the top of your ears and wind it in a door mat, not a knob in the back.
If you have a great quantity of hair, you should take all the inner part of it, coil it on top of your head so it will go under your hat out of the way. Then take the outer edge of it and braid or wind it as flat as possible. A large bun at the back of the head is almost as bad as hair drawn over the ears at the side. If you have short hairs likely to blow, you must wear a hunting hair net. And if it is bobbed, it must be drawn back into a silk riding net and made to look trim.
Correct riding clothes are not fashion but form! Whether coat skirts are long or short, full or plain, and waists wasp-like or square, the above admonitions have held for many decades, and are likely to hold for many more.
Gloves must be of heavy leather and at least two sizes bigger than those ordinarily worn.
A hat must fit the head and its shape must be conventional. Never wear a hat that would be incorrect on a man, and don't wear it on the back of your head or over your nose.
Wear your stock as tight as you comfortably can, not too tight! Tie it smartly so as to make it flat and neat, and anchor whatever you wear so securely that nothing can possibly come loose.
And if you want to see a living example of perfection in riding clothes, go to the next horse-show where Miss Belle Beach is riding and look at her!
What Clothes To Take For A Week-End
Unless fashion turns itself upside down (which it is, of course, perfectly capable of doing), elaborate clothes, except evening ones, are entirely useless, even in Newport. We have all of us abandoned Paris fashions for country wear in favor of those of England. The Valenciennes insertions and trailing chiffons of some years ago, still seen at watering-places in France, have been entirely superseded by country clothes.