High-Flying Fashion

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29962, 25 October 1962, Page 2

High-Flying Fashion

It used to be a few hundred dresses a week; now it is more than a few thousand. In freight planes and even passenger planes, clothing is flying round the would at a furious rate, according to an article in the N.Z. “Retailer.”

“Flying fashion has grown from nothing in the last 20 years,” said Mr E. C. Engledew, cargo sales manager in Britain for 8.0.A.C. “Now, in the last few years, it has exploded. Ten to 15 per cent, of the cargo we carry across the Atlantite is clothes.”

British European Airways confirms this trend. More than two-thirds of its freight cargo between Italy and London is clothing.

How do the clothes survive and what provisions do the airlines make for them? 8.0. AC. has a new garment peck which takes 25 dresses against the old type which took about 20. Only five to 10 packs a day were sent some years ago. Now about 100 are sent each day.

This new type of hanging wardrobe is made of rigid cardboard instead of • corrugated paper, which makes it easier to pack. Tiny slots have been made on the rack into which hangers are put so that there is little or no sideways movement and a yoke of cardboard fits down over the shoulders of the garments and thus prevents them from moving up and down. Manufacturers are allowed to barrow these packs. During the recent London Fashion Week when thousands of pounds worth of orders were placed with London’s fashion houses, there were 100 requests for packs in one day alone. Unlike the English, who seem to like sending clothes on racks, the Italians feel that placing them flat is better. Their containers are filled with high-fashion clothes, shoes or Italianstyle suits. What goes in return? Mostly English men’s suits, the article says.