Fashion Repeats Itself
A Commentary on Clothes through the Ages
Maisie Marshall
In her undergraduate days Maisie Marshall acquired a reputation for making dresses, properties, . and scenery for various dramatic activities at Lady Margaret Hall. She was still living in Oxford when Arthur Bryant came there in 1926 to organise and produce his pageant of St. Frideswide's Fair, so it came about that she designed for the whole production, and supervised the numerous workrooms in and around Oxford, where all the work was carried out. Since then she has done the same kind of work for all Mr. Bryant's pageants, notably Heart of the Fens, produced at Wisbech, and the Night Pageant at the Royal Naval College in 1933. She came to London in 1926 to dress Gustav Hoist's choral ballet. The Morning of the Year, and also one of the earliest productions of the organisation now so well known as the Women's League of Health and Beauty, a ballet play, Philippa the Fair, composed by Prunella Stack.
Since then some of her chief activities have been the- organisation of a correspondence course in designs and patterns, and instructions for the Melbourne workrooms of that city's centenary celebration pageant in 1934, and the designing and making of costumes for the ballet at the Johannesburg Exhibition last year.