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Fashion is spinach |
THERE are only two kinds of women in the world of clothing.
One buys her clothes made-to-order, the other
Buys her clothes ready-made.
The made-to-order lady frequents Molineux, Landin, Piquing, and
Chanel, in Paris. In New York she is deposited by
her chauffeur "on the Plaza," at the door of
Bergdorf Good- man, or she threads through the traffic of Forty-ninth Street to
Hattie Carnegie, less advantageously placed geographically but equally
important where fashion is concerned. She may do her shopping out of the
traffic, in a gray house on Sixty- seventh Street, Hawes, Inc., or just hit the
edge of the mob at the Savoy-Plaza where Valentina holds sway.
In any case, the made-to-order lady can shop and dress to
her entire satisfaction. Thousands of skilled craftsmen and women are ready to
sew up her clothes. Tens of design- errs in London and Paris and New York and
Los Angeles will work out her special sketches. Hundreds of salespeople are on
tap at all hours of the day to watch over her fittings, ad- vise her what not
to buy, send shoppers to find that special color and material which really
should be worn in her dining
Room.
She pays, yes. But it's worth it a thousand times. Her clothes
are her own and correspond to her life as she under- stands it. She may spend
hours fitting them, but in the end they are right.
Meanwhile, the ready-made lady shops. She too may want a
special color to wear in her dining room. She may find that color after two
weeks of hunting, or she may never find it, since very possibly "we are
not using it this season." She may find a really warm and sturdy winter
coat which
will last her for the next six years and only cost $35 or she
may discover that the coat she bought last year is not in fashion this year,
that the material was, after all, not all wool.
Millions and millions of women go shopping year after year.
They are tall and short, fat and thin, gay and de- pressed. They may clothe
their bodies for the simple purr- pose of keeping warm or not going naked. They
may choose
Their wardrobes with care for wintering in Palm Beach, or going
to the races in Ascot. Their first necessary choice is, can they pay enough to
get exactly what they want or are they at the mercy of mass production. Can
they buy style or must they buy fashion?
Landin and Chanel, Hawes and Valentina, are fund- mentally
occupied with selling style. The manufacturer and the department store are
primarily occupied with selling fashion.
I don't know when the word fashion came into being, but it
was an evil day. For thousands of years people got along with something called
style and maybe, in another thousand, we'll go back to it.
Style is that thing which, being looked back upon after a
century, gives you the fundamental feeling of a certain period in history.
Style in Greece in 2000 B.C. was delicate outdoor architecture and the clothes
which went with it. Style in the Renaissance was an elaborately carved stone cathedral
and rich velvet, gold trimmed robes. Style doesn't change every month or every
year. It only changes as often as there is a real change in the point of view
and lives of the people for whom it is produced.
Style in 1937 may give you a functional house and comfortable
clothes to wear in it. Style doesn't give a whoop whether your comfortable
clothes are red or yellow or blue, or whether your bag matches your shoes.
Style gives you shorts for tennis because they are practical. Style takes away the
wasp-waisted corset when women get free and active.
If you are in a position to deal with a shop which makes your
clothes specially for you, style is what you can have, the right clothes for
your life in your epoch, uncompromised- ingle, at once.
On top of style there has arisen a strange and wonderful creature
called fashion. He got started at least as far back as the seventeenth century
when a few smart people reclog- nixed him for what he was and is. "See’s
thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is?" Mr. Shakespeare
demanded in Much Ado about Nothing. But nobody paid any attention.
Now we have the advertising agency and the maniac- truer,
the department store and the fashion writer all here to tell us that the past,
present, and future of clothing de- pends on fashion, ceaselessly changing. Manufacturing
clothes is the second largest business in the United States. Not one-half of
one percent of the pope- lotion can have its clothing made to order or wants to
for
That matter.
This means that a large portion of $2,656,242,000 changes
hands annually under the eye of that thief, fashion, who becomes more and more
deformed with practice. Fashion is a parasite on style. Without style, he
wouldn't exist, but what he does to it is nobody's business.
Fashion is that horrid little man with an evil eye who tells
you that your last winter's coat may be in perfect physic- call condition, but
you can't wear it. You can't wear it because it has a belt and this year
"we are not showing belts."
Fashion gets up those perfectly ghastly ideas, such as ac- accessories
should match, and proceeds to give you shoes, gloves, bag, and hat all in the
same hideous shade of Kelly green which he insists is chic this season whether
it turns you yellow or not. Fashion is apt to insist one year that you are nobody
if you wear flat heels, and then turn right around and throw thousands of them
in your face.
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