Impudent Insult

Since France's fall, chief debate in the $1,000,000,000 U. S. dress industry is whether U. S. designers can do the job that trend-dictating P'aris once did for it (TIME, Aug. 19). For three months Paris Couturiere Elsa Schiaparelli has barnstormed the U. S. talking fashions under the auspices of CBS's Columbia Artists, Inc. She also had a profitable sideline in selling her tour wardrobe designs to U. S. dress manufacturers (at $600 apiece plus 7% of the sales). By last week, as she was preparing to Clipper back to France, members of the U. S. haute couture were boiling mad. They were maddest at her continued insistence that the U. S. was too money-conscious to originate its own fashion trends, that Paris, ruled by the Nazis, still ruled the world of fashion.

"The Eiffel Tower is not displaced by the Empire State Building," cried Mme. Schiaparelli early last month, at a Los Angeles Junior League luncheon. Fashioneers were not amused. In Manhattan last fortnight, Mme. Schiaparelli made her farewell speech--on the same day that delayed news came from Paris that Lucien Lelong's "corporative reorganization" of the fashion industry had been completed.

"Skap" stuck to her guns. "The Paris designer is free," said she, expressing annoyance at questions implying a new order in France. Some fashion experts began talking of "Skap's" Italian origin. They saw no other logical reason for her leaving a lucrative U. S. perfume business and a personable U. S. citizen daughter (Greenwich Village-born, British-schooled "Gogo") for a questionable future "helping her former employes in Paris."

Labor was first to explode publicly. Said Julius Hochman, general manager of potent I.L.G.W.U.'s Dress Joint Board (at a conference of labor and employers last week): "She insulted both our industry and the American women. . . . Unfortunately our industry is not organized sufficiently to meet such slurs, and there was no one to reply to this impudent insult." But there was.

Cautious, publicity-shy Adam Gimbel, president of Saks Fifth Avenue, was the No. 1 pre-war U. S. buyer of Paris high-style merchandise. But "Skap's" stand made him see red. His wife Sophie had recently completed showing her own custom-made midseason collection, without any help from Paris, was full of excitement about fine textiles and exclusive gewgaws that she had been able to coax out of hitherto mass-production-minded U. S. manufacturers. Said Mr. Gimbel: "The Paris of the old days is not the Paris under totalitarian government. Schiaparelli is either misguided--or under the influence of the Vichy Government."

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