Fashion: All About Yves

BOSOMS ARE BARED, headlined the world fashion press. Naturally buyers, editors and celebrities, gathered in Paris for the haute couture fall previews, have got to headline something, and Christian Dior’s Marc Bohan had just given them nothing-sacred necklines. Jacques Heim, breaking with top secret tradition, called in photographers and gave them permission to expose to the world his deep-dish evening dresses. It was a fun way to liven up a dull week, but Paris has long since taken bosoms to her heart.

Then last week Yves St. Laurent threw open his salon and voila! the priestesses of high fashion rocketed into orbit. “It made a week of life on gilt ballroom chairs worthwhile,” wrote the Herald Tribune’s Eugenia Sheppard. “St. Laurent has always known that what modern women really want to look like are little boys.”

St. Laurent’s lean, leggy line is a canny blending of swashbuckle and swank known as the “Robin Hood Look.” Into a Sherwood Forest setting enhanced by a pair of real copper beech trees trooped the svelte St. Laurent mannequins—all bundled up in shirts, jerkins, tunics, dark knitted hose and seven-league boots. A big hit of the collection was a costume consisting of tight pants, mid-thigh-length boots and a hair seal pullover, with a Robin Hood hat and chained pendant. Pageboy hairdos were common.

Though the world of fashion could scarcely exist without its sense of discovery, if truth be told, there is less to a scoop than meets the eye. The giddy excitement of the St. Laurent show in Paris is partly real, partly a tempest in a B cup. Manhattan store windows and women’s magazines were already chock-full of the new trends. Long before summer, Vogue Editor Diane Vreeland and best-dressed Viscountess Jacqueline de Ribes of fashion’s Hall of Fame were wearing above-the-knee textured hose to all the best places—which automatically decrees the shape of things to come.

Any reader of Vogue or Mademoiselle could have told Paris that other “In” notions for fall are: jerkins, jumpers and tunics; boots (chukka-short, mid-calf height or higher, mostly in fake fur and leather); tights and tight pants; turtlenecks (on practically anything except a turtle); schoolboy suits, tarns and caps; and, for a campus fillip, men’s bow ties worn as hair bands.

“Bringing the country into the city,” is the way one Manhattan fashion coordinator interprets St. Laurent’s little-boy look. The miracle is that even when girls will be boys, they somehow contrive to make it the most girlish look of all.