CLOTHES: Home Styles

“Last week, for the first time in more than two decades, some 300 U. S. dress manufacturers, designers, buyers and fashion editors failed to spend early August in Paris, France. For the first time in over 20 years the cables were barren of news from world headquarters of the haute couture. For the first time since they began publication, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar sent to press their all-important autumn issues without a single last-minute Paris model to rave about. The U. S. dress business, whose 7,000 manufacturers and 250,000 workers turn out upwards of $1,000,000,000 worth (at wholesale) of garments each year, was headed without a rudder toward the open sea.

Last week these manufacturers wound up their own “openings” on Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue. Onlookers like Vogue’s Francophile Edna Woolman Chase, Harper’s Bazaar’s blue-haired, dynamic Carmel Snow, declared they were enthusiastic about what the U. S. woman will wear this fall. But the fall styles were not made in Manhattan. Their keynote was struck in Paris last May—by Schiaparelli, by Lanvin, by Chanel, Molyneux, LeLong, etc.—in their regular midseason openings, sparsely attended but well covered by cable and sketch. Since then Paris has fallen. The U. S. dress business will soon need more guidance. Otherwise it will not know what to make.

Importance of Paris to the U. S. dress business has been partly synthetic, partly real. Manhattan’s fashion world has plenty of adroit and imaginative designers of its own — some (like Bergdorf Goodman’s Ethel Frankau, Saks Fifth Avenue’s Sophie Gimbel) custom designers of exclusive models; others (like Nettie Rosenstein, Germaine Monteil) adapters of style to the mass-produced items that have made the average U. S. woman the best-dressed average woman in the world. But the U. S. dress business, from Fifth Avenue to Seventh, is atomic, leaderless, cutthroat, jealous of itself. Its genius is mass production; its best designers have shown little will to be independent of Paris couture. And Paris couture was only 30% dependent on the U. S. market.

Glamorous, remote, subsidized by its own French suppliers, Paris uttered its whims from a sort of international vacuum, an oracle in a cave. To get the oracular word was worth lush expense accounts (around $5,000 a trip) to respectable U. S. manufacturers. From Mrs. Harrison Williams, who bought her wardrobe at the openings, to a 30th Street shoestringer who stole his line by camera from Bergdorf’s window, the whole world got the same word, simultaneously. Last week the U. S. dress business still half-hoped Paris would rise from its tomb to speak the authoritative word. But it also prepared to go on its own.

The search for native oracles of U. S. fashion is an old one. Hollywood, with a lag between picture production and release, has long had to anticipate (or rise above) the coming styles. Its designers—led by M. G. M.’s Adrian—have a cachet of their own. Last week Hollywood Agent Mitchell J. (for Joseph) Hamilburg, who sold $1,000,000 worth (retail) of Deanna Durbin frocks to the trade in 1938, was organizing a fashion guild of studio designers to dictate the mode. Main drawbacks to Hollywood as a complete substitute for Paris (it has influenced Paris) were its stagy tastes, its distance from the dress-manufacturing and textile centres. Other bids for the crown:

> Bergdorf Goodman’s designers worked on a collection for custom-made distribution by other retailers.

> Vogue talked of sponsoring a design exhibition for American artists.

> Manhattan’s young Museum of Costume Art planned enlargement of its membership and its historical library to supplant the vast research facilities of Paris, raised $5,800 for the project at a cocktail party last week.

> Schiaparelli, in the U. S. for a fall lecture tour sponsored by CBS’s Columbia Artists, Inc., was designing a dozen tour costumes, to be copied by select manufacturers.

> Model Renter Ellerbe Wood’s clients will be shown an “American Couture Exhibit” late this month. Designed by still-to-be-announced dressmakers, her line has had important cooperation from textile manufacturers.

> Meanwhile some medium-priced retailers were featuring their own designers —in Manhattan Lord & Taylor’s Brigance, Jay-Thorpe’s Wilson Folmer.

With these incoherent signs of an emerging U. S. couture, the garment industry was still unsure of its future last week. Anyone could make trade headlines with an idea. Three weeks ago Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune announced a $7,500 design prize with the idea of making Chicago the new Paris. London, with Worth, Stiebel, Hartnell, Lachasse and the repatriated Captain Molyneux, was after the business. Even Berlin sent photographs of eight new Nazi numbers (three of them for summer wear). And Editor Carmel Snow talked of her magazine (200,000-pulse circulation) as the logical medium for the job of discovering the trend. Paris was silent.