Photograph by the Missouri History Museum Photographs and Prints Collection
"Organdie," opined Lillian Eichler in her Book of Etiquette, published the same year these Hosmer Hall high school girls trundled out to Forest Park to cook hot dogs over an open fire, "seems to be the material best suited for the garden-party frock." Of course, no one likes to find her good organdy sooty, greasy, grass-stained or buggy. So — with the exception of the weird miss in the Shakespearean tog and the chaperone anxiously clutching the picnic bench, as if she is afraid she might accidentally levitate — these girls wisely donned their wrinkliest frocks, picked the dress pushed into the far right corner of the bottom dresser drawer, the mothy shirtwaist at the back of the closet. Being well-bred young ladies, however, they at least surely followed Miss Eichler's advice to choose colors suggestive of the outdoors: violet, orange (though "pale and not vivid"), old rose, Nile green, orchid ("for the person whose complexion can bear it") and, for the matron, "black satin," which Eichler assured her readers could be "quite festive enough for a garden party when it is combined with a pretty shade of henna or old blue" — or maybe an iridescent beetle, riding unnoticed in the folds of an amply cut skirt.
