NORMAN HARTNELL SAYS:- Fashion War Affects Ordinary Buyer

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31654, 15 April 1968, Page 2

NORMAN HARTNELL SAYS:Fashion War Affects Ordinary Buyer

An extremely, sophisticated, and highly serious, civil war has been raging in high fashion for the last five years or so. You may think that the internal machinations of the rag trade have nothing to do with you, but they have a profound effect on everything you buy and wear.

On one side, you have the “trendsetters.” These are the designers who believe fashion is an exciting, fast - moving thing, and whose main markets are the ready-to-wear store and the boutiques. On the other, you have the traditional practitioners of haute couture who maintain salons and cater basically for private clients. I am pleased to consider myself a “traditionalist”—in so far as I believe that most good fashion is evolution rather than revolution. But that does not mean I do not admire the "trendsetters" and like a lot of what they are doing. I do. But I also think the young designers are wrong when they say that boutique-fever has sounded the death-knell of couture in its traditional form. There is room for both schools of thought in fashion today, and each can learn a lot from the other. New Wave I believe (although perhaps I am biased) that traditional couture is still the most powerful force in fashion today. Whatever faults we may have, we do know our trade. Some of the new wave of designers have come to fashion from architecture, painting, and all manner of ancillary occupations. Some, although they produce very interesting work, cannot sew a stitch. Traditional dazzling trends —their clientele do not want them. Indeed, such traditionalists as Pierre Balmain maintain that the change in good fashion should be almost imperceptible. “Smart women,” he once told me, “don't want to renew their wardobe every six months.” I think there is a lot in that. No Funeral Nevertheless, we do have a good deal to say that affects the ordinary clothes buyer. And if you do not believe me, just look how the wholesale buyers flock to the haute couture collections for ideas and inspirations. A few weeks later, you will see adaptations of our clothes in the store down the street —for about a twentieth of the price I would have to charge if I were making the dress especially for you. So when people ask me ; whether haute couture is dy- ; ! ing, and hint that mine might i be the last generation to prac- < tise it on the present scale, I reply that we are not con- i templating a funeral for a : long time yet. i But haute couture is chang- 1 ing—and moving towards its '

own special type of ready-to-wear business. Let’s face it: today there are precious few opportunities for wealthy or famous to wear lavish clothes. Life today is geared to a different kind of socialising. The time for mink and diamonds, sequins and rubies, flowing gowns and exquisite furs is fading (regrettably) into the past In A Hurry Instead, we have quick, glittering, brief social occasions, calling for mini-skirts and little black dresses brightened up with jewellery. Anyone who owns a superb ball gown will most likely find that it hangs in mothballs at the back

of her wardrobe for months or years, waiting for a chance to be worn. Even in the realm of less exotic clothes, the haute couture business is changing. Nowadays, I find that a customer will want, say, two dresses at £5O each, rather than one at £lOO. The tempo of life is different today, and a customer gets bored and fidgety. She is too busy to stand still for an hour to be fitted for a £lOO couture gown. She has got too many other things to do. She would rather pop in briefly to my Petit Salon for her two dresses at £5O which, being ready-to-wear, do not require a lengthy fitting. More For Money If you translate these dresses into off-the-peg prices at big stores, you might find a secretary prefers two dresses costing Bgns each to one at 16gns from a boutique. But traditional couture will never be finished so long as Paris stands on the other side of the English Channel. People are always saying “Paris finished.” But it

is not, and I am quite certain it never will be. Yet, even in Paris, top couturiers are having to turn more and more to their own brands of ready-to-wear clothes. There just are not enough wealthy women to keep Paris going in the more exalted realms of fashion. People imagine that couturiers such as myself in London wish Paris did not exist, but this is not true. We love Paris and all that excitement and stimulation caused by those spring and autumn collections. Nobody who loves clothes can hate Paris—even If Paris seems occasionally to take the bread from our mouths. “This is all very well," you

may be saying to yourself, “but I could still buy the clothes I want if haute couture was abolished tomorrow.” In fact, traditional couture affects you far more than you think. If you are over 30, the gimmick couturiers will probably be having a decreasing influence on you. Instead, you will be turning more towards wellmade clothes in more restrained designs. And this is the market that haute couture influences most Although you may never walk into a couture salon in your life, its passing would make probably quite a remarkable difference to you. We all like to think we are dictators of fashion—the traditionalist with his obsession with quality, the modernist with his love of gaiety. But in the last analysis, the final dictator is not the couturier, the buyer, or anyone else in the rag trade. It is the woman'who comes into my salon, the girl who takes her wage-packet into the local boutique, the mum who is determined not to lose touch. After all, they are the! I ones who foot the bill. I