French Fashions Now Inspired By Africa

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31365, 10 May 1967, Page 2

French Fashions Now Inspired By Africa

Safari and African fashions are turning countless Parisians into counterparts of the white hunter. The new fashion which has swept through Paris from the haute couture down to inexpensive mass productior is symbolised by a feroci-ous-looking tiger in Christian Dior’s boutique window. The most significant store window display in the French capital contains no merchandise —only the lifesize tiger.

Following the haute couture showings, leading Paris department stores are staging Special promotions of Africaninspired clothes, accessories, and jewellery, variously labelled “Africa” at the Gaieties Lafayette; “Safari” at the Printemps; “Timbucktoo” at the Magasin du Louvre, and “Exotisme” at the Bon Marche.

No other fashion trend since Yves St. Laurent launched the Mondrian modem art theme two years ago, has been adapted as extensively or popularised so quickly in mass production.

In all stores and boutiques the khaki shorts and trouser suits, bush helmets totempole striped stockings, Boubou dresses, and jungle prints inspired by primitive Negro art, are selling almost as fast an messages are relayed by

drums from one native village to another.

The African beat actually emerged first in the French ready-to-wear showings at the end of November, two months before the haute couture opened their new collections, but it took the authority of Christian Dior and Yves St Laurent to make the dark continent a popular French fashion image. Long double-breasted jackets with big patch pockets and gold buttons go with matching wide-legged shorts made of shantung, poplin, sail cloth, or khaki. The ankle-length boubou dress for leisure wear at home or on the beach comes in giant floral and verdant prints ed cottons, with thigh high slits at the sides—an effect which many Frenchmen consider more seductive than any mini-skirt. The “inside Africa look” concentrates on infinite variations of pants, ranging from shorts and Bermudas to divided skirts, and hipster trousers.

Shorts and trousers are generally cuffed, and worn low on the hips, with wide leather belts or copies of the Dior and St Laurent metal chain belts.

The shirt-coat launched by Dior, and now on sale in every price range, is inspired by a man's Shirt with narrow tab buttoned down the front to mini-hemline.

African-inspired accessories include the most fanciful of all stockings, stylised millinery, and the return of belts and buttons, often made of such off-beat materials as cork, wood or glazed nuts.

Park brown, a colour habitually synonymous with autumn, emerges as a top selling shade in solid toned hosiery, especially in mesh and lacey effects.

After years of hatlessness, millinery is back in the limelight, even for teenagers, with a veritable epidemic of Greta Garbo and sunshade cloches, broad-brimmed bush hats, complete with chin straps, and colourful silk scarf turbans draped on the back of the head and worn with enormous square-framed sunglasses. The season’s most successful bandbag is the shoulderstrap carry-all. This roomy bag, fashioned like a camera case, can be detached from the shoulder-strap and buckled on tn the belt African jewellery comes in unorthodox and amusing, media. Necklaces are contrived of glazed nuts, or beads made of cork or polished wood.