A GREAT DRESSMAKER

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 48, 26 February 1927, Page 20

A GREAT DRESSMAKER

THE PASSING OF M. WOETH. ■ The business of M. Worth, whoso funeral took pla^e-on 15th December in Paris, differs from all other great dressmakers' in the position it holds in the memoirs and novels of last century (states the London correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian"). In recent years the son was unable to maintain ih full prestige against the new rival firms and in a world of new rich customers, but the fame his father had giv.en to the business in the Eve de la Paix never faded in the eyes of the faubourgs. / . | The original Worth came from Huddersfield, married a Frenchwoman, •settled in Paris, and became the dictator of feminine fashion for the world. He never asked for business, but the •greatest ladies in Paris had to come to him to ask him to make.their dresses It was said of him that he could make a dowdy banker's daughter into a princess. He encouraged ladies to continue to wear a dress that particularly suited them. The elder Worth figures in the novels of Ouida, Lever, and many of the Victorian writers who dealt with grand society, and his name occurs continually in memoirs and letters of the period. _His son who has just died followed the hnes his father had laid down and had a very independent way in dealing with his clients. One side of the fashionable world remained . faithful and many English ladies have their Court dresses made at Worth's. In the war he founded a hospital for soldiers whose faces had been badly injured. His daughter married Cartier, the Paris jeweller, and their daughter married Kevillon, the Paris furrier. He had a very impressive funeral,- and many of the French great ladies sent representatives, . ■".-■.