Business & Finance: Simple and Complicated

Parading smartly about the U. S. these past few weeks has been the elegant figure of M. Lucien Lelong, French War hero and member of that small coterie of Paris couturiers who rule the world of feminine fashion. M. Lelong has been in the U. S. frankly drumming up trade for his dresses and for his new perfume Impromptu which now shares honors with dress shields, bathing caps and fingernail polish in many a corner drugstore. An up & coming rival of M. Lelong is M. Marcel Rochas in both Paris fashions and perfume. He too is in the U. S. drumming up trade but by different means. His rivals concede that he is doing a daring thing for a Paris dressmaker, for Marcel Rochas last week opened a Manhattan branch, the first such opened by a major French couturier.*

U. S. women are wealthier and, according to no less an authority than M. Lelong, better dressed than any others in the world. Therefore they are one of the best markets for Paris dressmakers. But to open U. S. branches—that was something formidable, entailing a little risk and certainly much courage. Let M. Rochas do it, and then, if he succeeds and is not démodé, certainly others will follow.

Sleek, medium-sized Marcel Rochas, a conventional French brunet, is grandson of a Burgundian shepherd and son of an Avignon artist. He was born in Paris in 1902, and presently set out to be a lawyer. He readily explains how his Gallic temperament led him to become a dressmaker:

“I was madly in love with my young and beautiful bride but our means were limited. And so I came swiftly to the conclusion that the best way to meet my budget and still have my wife beautifully dressed was for me to become her couturier. A solution both simple and complicated at the same time. Simple because I was in love; complicated because I possessed only $5,000.”

M. Rochas now has a pretty blue-and-white salon at 12 Avenue Matignon where he does a thriving business, sketching his designs himself and personally directing fitters as they drape dresses on live models. His new Manhattan establishment is identical in style and layout with his Paris shop. An old five-story private house at 32 East 67th Street, with a new, shining, white façade and MARCEL ROCHAS in deep blue over the lintel, it sits in a row of old brownstone apartments, like a blue-eyed blonde on a bench with pickaninnies. Inside is a big desk which no one, however pompous, may pass without presenting an invitation (issued this week only to socialites and nouveaux riches)—a barrier raised partly for swank, partly to keep out style pirates of whom couturiers have a healthy fear, in spite of the fact that to make cheaply a good copy of either the drapery or workmanship of a fine dress is often virtually impossible.

In Paris, Rochas sells models both to individuals, retail, and to stores, “wholesale” for copying. In Manhattan he will sell retail only, at prices from $300 up, higher than any other U. S. dressmaker. All dresses will be made on order, all designs created in Paris. The collection shown this week includes about 100 dresses and will not be shown to Rochas’ private customers in Paris until October. Rochas’ clothes, generally simple and neat, often have vigorous color combinations. Rochas makes no hats, but does produce three brands of perfume: Audace, Ave. Matignon and Air Jeune.

-A charming but minor Parisian dressmaker named Yvonne Carette momentarily opened a shoppe in Manhattan in 1923, opened a more lasting one in 1934 which is now located at 17 East 53rd Street. She encountered what may prove a severe stumbling block for Marcel Rochas—by selling retail in Manhattan a Parisian couturier competes directly with some of his best wholesale customers in Paris, such swank Manhattan buyers of Parisian models as Bergdorf & Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue.