THE ANKHSENPATEN SMILE

The "fashion cycle" may soon return to the point at which it started 3,000 years ago, if a recent announcement from the second international silk exposition is confirmed. One manufacturer has copyrighted the title "Tutankhamen silks" for a line of fabrics embroidered with Egyptian designs, and the suggestion of a new type of "Pharoahic styles" has been brought forward. Luxor, the burying ground of the sovereigns of ancient Egypt, may succeed Paris as the home of fashion.

This possibility has been strengthened by the discovery of what may be a fashion model in Tutankhamen's last resting place. This is the life-size wooden statue of a young woman, coated over with plaster, and painted with an enigmatic smile which can only be compared to that of the comparatively young and blooming Mona Lisa. This inhabitant of Egypt, past and present, may be a likeness of her imperial majesty, Queen Ankhsenpaten, for she has gazed at the dead prince with a never-failing smile for more than a hundred generations--proof enough of devotion. But some skeptics claim that she is merely the model on which the queen tried her new evening gowns.

The mere lapse of a few milleniums is not enough to relegate a custom of the past to oblivion. Life, perhaps, is fleeting, but time is short. When a certain Pharoah was embalmed and laid away in his royal tomb in the hillside, a mouse happened to wander in with his funeral procession. When the slaves sealed up the gate the mouse lay down beside the king, and so they were found when the archaeologists broke in--companions in eternity.

The mouse, the fashion-model, and the king all have borne their three thousand winters without signs of old age. They were found as they had been left, connecting links between the ages, to prove that ancestors are not far different from contemporaries. There will be nothing incongruous in the appearance of the modern debutante in a dress made of Tutankhamen silks. "Luxorian models are all the rage, and the Pharoahic skirt is destined to appear at Palm Beach and the Copley." And wives of the future may adopt the "Ankhsenpaten smile."