Business: Haute Couture

(See front cover)

Not for three months will the, horse chestnut trees on Paris’ Champs-Elysees begin to turn yellow. Yet last week on the brief and severe Rue de la Paix autumn had already come. And on hand for its coming was an excited little army of U. S. dress buyers who crowded through closely-guarded doorways into the salons of the great Parisian couturiers. Inside the warm air was heavy with perfume and the smell of new silk. Buyers who usually paid $100 to get in (refunded on the first order) cocked their heads and adjusted their glasses as the sleek mannequins rustled to ward them in long-skirted evening gowns, sport dresses with Brazil nuts for buttons, coats made of steamer rugs, woolen dresses with oilcloth grapes. Soon the buyers would stream out of the city with notes and gossip on the fashions Paris was about to set the world for the winter of 1934-35.

To Parisians the excitement from the Etoile to the Rue de la Paix was an old story. As every fashion follower knows, there are two months in the year — February and August — when the couturiers throw open their shops to a select few to reveal in their “collections” what the best dressed women will wear during the next six months. Smaller midseason displays are held in April and November.

Present at last week’s openings, to which admittance was by card only, were four types of people: 1) a few celebrated European socialites, who as private customers may be expected to buy a half-dozen gowns; 2) reporters and fashion writers; 3) manufacturers, many from the Americas, who will buy gowns as models and sell copies wholesale to every little dress shop; and, most important, 4) buy ers from big U. S. department stores, Altman, Macy, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller, scores of others. There is no competitive bidding between buyers and the price is the same to all couturiers who will make up any number of duplicates of a favorite model.

To supply its customers with Paris copies, a department store, through its buyer at the opening, will purchase a variety of original models and import them into the U. S. under bond. If the model is returned to France within six months, the store does not have to pay any U. S. duty on it. During that period the store turns the Paris gown, which may have cost as much as $1,000, over to its private manufacturer to make, say, 50 copies to sell at $69.50. The store is at liberty to advertise its 50 dresses as copies of Chanel or Schiaparelli or whatnot. Then the original dress is shipped back to Paris and the department store gets a refund on its customs. In Paris the soiled model is peddled to some small back-street dress shop which sells it sometimes for as little as $10.

The topnotch independent clothing manufacturer whose buyers have also attended the Paris openings follows the same routine, except that he usually makes thousands of copies and sells to smaller retail stores. He it is who is responsible for the fact, that, within 30 days of the original showings, every shopgirl in the land is wearing a cheap imitation of what is the best Paris style.

To get their news of last week’s openings, most big U. S. department stores were in constant cable communication with Paris. B. Altman & Co. went a step further, with a transatlantic telephone service. This scheme was originated last year by Altaian’s top Fashion Copywriter Laura Hobson. Young, smart Advertising Director John C. Wood planned to launch a display campaign in newspapers and magazines this week to publicize the new designs. The trends of fashions as Altman and other stores studied them last week: There are three predominant silhouets —medieval, crinoline, Empire. Empire features long toe-length skirts and extremely high waists to emphasize the curve of the bosom. The crinoline type, adorned with bows and puffs, has a hoopskirt effect. The ecclesiastic medieval silhouet, which fashion experts predict will be the most popular, emphasizes slim waists, full sweeping skirts, and necklines either demurely high or wickedly low. But since it is impossible to look ecclesiastical in feathery chiffon materials, the medieval silhouet is certain to have far-reaching effects upon the fabric world. Dresses of this type must be made of stiff velvets, bulky slipper satins, heavy faille taffeta.

Tweeds have come off the golf course into the drawing room, are now correct for tea. Reason: the informal shirt waist has been supplanted by blouses of stiff velvet, chenille, soft duvetyn.

Furs are used extensively for trimming and edging, but big fur collars are frowned upon. Most amusing fur note is an Astrakhan muff shaped like a dachshund. Hats, also exotic, feature the stovepipe which sits high on the head, the Francois Villon, and the tiny velvet head turban with three and only three feathers. Skirts are split, but not notably longer than last year, varying from floor length to 15 in. above the floor. Trains are conspicuously absent. Predominant dress colors are black, “poison” green, purple.

The art of creating costumes is obvious; the business, obscure and confused. The haute couture— must risk its millions of francs of profit upon the artistic fecundity of 40 or 50 designers. The wages of 300,000 cutters and sewers, 150,000 embroiderers, glove makers, bag makers, hundreds of thousands of copyists the world over depend upon their creations. If they fail, the price is instant oblivion. If they succeed the rewards may be as great as those of Charles Frederick Worth, draper’s assistant who revolutionized the haute couture in the 1850’s and whose sons and grandsons have prospered mightily. No aspiring Paris dressmaker ever forgets the fact that Gabrielle Chanel, the country girl from Auvergne, was said to be worth $15,000,000 as late as 1932 and is considered one of France’s richest woman. Even 35 years ago openings attended by such widespread public interest as those of last week were unheard of. Before the War the couturiers of Paris were a small, select group catering to the queens and grandes dames of Europe. Even these moneyed customers consulted a couturier only when they wanted dresses for particularly grand occasions and were willing to spend as much as $1,000 for a brocaded ball gown. For everyday clothes—street dresses, afternoon frocks, sportswear— the grandes dames considered the little dressmaker around the corner good enough. But after the War there was little demand for expensive robes-de-style and no money to pay for them. So the couturiers set out to supplant the little seamstress around the corner by designing all women’s clothes, even down to the negligee. These designs, simple, practical, not too expensive, brought the haute couture down from the ballroom to the tennis court.

War had an even more important effect on styles in the U. S. Before 1914 only the wealthiest of U. S. matrons bought their gowns in Paris. To the women of the great middle class, Worth, Redfern, Poiret, Callot Soeurs were simply glamorous names. After 1918 the couturiers began for the first time to dress the whole Western world. Their designs, altered and adapted to suit cheaper grades of materials, began to flow out over all Europe and the U. S. Paris became the hub of world fashion. It still is.

That change laid the haute couture open to further inroads by the hordes of unscrupulous style pirates whose activities are currently the industry’s chief economic headache. They contrive through spies to pet detailed information on nearly every important opening without going to the expense of buying models. They make up copies from this information, bootleg them as bona fide originals at greatly reduced prices. French law prosecutes style pirates relentlessly: 400 were once jailed in a single drive. The fight against piracy was led by an Egyptian named Trouyet, head of the house of Vionnet. He is described as “a horrible person, but smart.”

Haute Couture: 1934. The scores of big and little couturiers to whom buyers Hocked last week may be divided roughly and not without argument into three groups. First are the older houses who are heavy with prestige but exercise comparatively little authority over fashion trends. In this class are Worth, Paquin, Callot Soeurs and Redfern, who was the first couturier to receive the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor. Next is a large group of comparatively young houses or old ones which have passed their prime. Although they may startle the trade almost any year with a new trend, they are not at present the most dominant influence in fashion. Preeminent among them are Lelong, said to be the best organized house in Paris, Chanel, Bruyere, Goupy, Louiseboulanger, Jane Regny, Lucille Paray, Martial & Armand, Marcel Rochas, Maggy Rouff, Vera Borea, Alix, Dilkusha, Jodelle and the redoubtable Jean Patou.

Finally there is a handful of houses now at or near the peak of their power as arbiters of the ultra-modern haute couture. They are not necessarily the most popularized, nor are they all heavily patronized by U. S. buyers. Regardless of who else might be included nearly every fashion expert would agree that in this group the following houses most decidedly belong: Vionnet, Lanvin, Augustabernard, Main-bocher, Molyneux and Schiaparelli.

Vionnet is in appearance a typical French seamstress. Small, nimble, birdlike, she is incredibly skillful with the needle, sews better than anyone in her shop. Although she is reputed to be the daughter of a Monte Carlo cocotte, her contemporaries speak of her with awe and respect, consider her the dressmaker’s dressmaker. She achieves a classic elegance of line at the expense of color. To make her gowns cling to the figure she cuts her materials on the bias. A couturier for nearly 40 years, she designs her models on a famed wooden doll.

Lanvin made her first dresses at home for her daughter, who is now the Comtesse de Polignac. Others liked them so well that they went to Mme Lanvin to be dressed. Never an extremist, she bases nearly all of her designs on historical fashions or documents, adapting and reworking them to modern colors and materials. The results are regal and highly dramatic, which is one reason why she is patronized by European grandes dames, South Americans, French actresses.

Augustabernard, noted for her temper. is popular in the U. S. She is noted for her superb technique which makes her dresses the favorites of connoisseurs. Commercial buyers are less enthusiastic. Her gowns depend on expensive materials, are difficult to copy. But she has a large following among well-bred socialites, dresses some of the smartest women in Paris.

Captain Molyneux, an Irishman who was thrice wounded in the War and won a British Military Cross, is a favorite of young U. S. and English girls. In his grey-walled shop, his grey-clad -vendeuses specialize in selling slender evening gowns, tweed sports and town ensembles, nearly all designed by Molyneux himself.

Mainbocher (“Main” to his friends). was born in Chicago and edited Paris Vogue. Five years ago he resigned to go into business for himself, reputedly with the backing of Mrs. Gilbert Miller (daughter of Broker J. S. Bache), Elsie de Wolfe and the Comtesse de Vallambrosa. Mainbocher, youngest of the currently prominent houses, turns out chic and tasteful gowns in a chic and severe salon on Avenue George V.

Schiaparelli. “Of course we don’t want pants,” cried Elsa Schiaparelli in a speech before Manhattan’s Fashion Group last year. “Men are already ugly enough in them without having women wear them.” But Mme Schiaparelli gave women practically everything else, including dresses made of cellophane and rubber, collars of china, gadgets designed from harness. One of her best textile designs grew out of some plaster and netting she picked up in a rubbish pile. In her crusade for sharp, dramatic line (“skyscraper silhouet”) Mme Schiaparelli persecutes the button with morbid zeal, has substituted all manner of gadgets in place of it, including metal coat fasteners in the shape of dollar signs.

Madder and more original than most of her contemporaries, Mme Schiaparelli is the one to whom the word “genius” is applied most often. Even to her intimate friends she remains an enigma. Her great-great-grandmother was an Egyptian. Her Italian father was dean of the University of Rome, a professor of oriental lore, an authority on Sanskrit and old coins. Her uncle, Astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. discovered the canals on Mars. Elsa Schiaparelli was born in Rome, educated in Switzerland and England where she married a Polish gentleman and moved to New York. There she lived on 9th Street, worked for the cinema in New Jersey, did translations for importing houses, had a baby. After five years of marriage she left her husband, fled to Paris.

One day in 1925 she designed a black & white sweater for herself. Her friends liked the smart melancholy of black in sportswear, urged her to take an attic in the rue de la Paix and set up as a designer. She did, in 1927. Two years later she moved down two flights. By 1932 her 400 employes were turning out between 7,000 and 8,000 garments a year and Mme Schiaparelli, with no previous experience and only five years’ work, was the most discussed fashion-maker in Paris.

Midinettes and Vendeuses consider it a privilege to work in her house, though she is often autocratic, impatient and hasty. She arrives promptly at 10 o’clock, opens and answers every letter herself, signs every check. She can design gowns with pencil and shears but more often puts them together in her head while driving in a motorcar. At her opening last week, clad in a last season’s black crepe dress, she tied each scarf and fastened each belt on the mannequins before they left the cabine. Then she hastily escaped to her studio.

Though her fame continues to spread, one thing keeps Schiaparelli, now in her middle thirties, from becoming the very smartest of the Paris dressmakers. Her designs are too easy to copy. The mutton sleeves and tray shoulders which she sponsored last year were instantly popular on the Champs-Elysees and Manhattan’s Park Avenue. But it was not long before every little dress factory in Manhattan had copied them and from New York’s 3rd Avenue to San Francisco’s Howard Street millions of shop girls who had never heard of Schiaparelli were proudly wearing her models.

Of late the fashion supremacy of Paris has been challenged by New York whose couturiers are growing more articulate. The autumn openings of Elizabeth Hawes. Clarepotter, Muriel King, Helen Cookman will not begin until September. But in Chicago last week was an indigenous fashion show of the 225 principal manufacturers of inexpensive dresses for the farmer’s wife, the restaurant waitress, the ribbon clerk. On the tenth floor of the huge Merchandise Mart important cloak & suit makers like J. Baach of Chicago, Biberman Bros, of Manhattan, Liberty Frock Co. of Kansas City — firms of which the consuming public rarely hears — proudly displayed the jersey wools and striped cotton washables that this autumn S. Klein (“On the Square”) will sell in Manhattan; Pogue’s, in Cincinnati; Schuster’s, in Milwaukee; Famous & Barr, in St. Louis. Women’s and misses’ swagger coats were $3.25 a dozen, wholesale, cotton prints as low7 as $6.75 a doz., checked and tartan synthetic dresses (“51% cotton according to the code”) from $2.50 retail up. Top retail price was $42.50 for knitted wools. There was no champagne for thirsty buyers but free beer and sandwiches were served in a room on the 14th floor fixed up like a prison and called “The Kooler.” Special fashion shows were held on two nights in the exhibition hall, where a scantily-clad “Miss Merchandise Mart” and four buxom japesters in red-striped flannel nightgowns paraded across stage sets decorated to suggest winter.

*Literally, high-class sewing.