THE CRAZE FOR COSTLY CLOTHES

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2298, 17 November 1925, Page 9

THE CRAZE FOR COSTLY CLOTHES

EVE AND HER EXTRAVAGANCES

Magic dancer and her £10,000.a, year dress bill . . . gold gowns and shoes at £6O a pair . . . Sorel the magnificent . . . while frocks grow scantier the cost of fashion accessories soars . . .

The other day a pretty Parisian actress had a little Are in her flat and lost, among other trifles, a pair of lizard skin shoes. She put in a claim under her insurance for 6000 frtincs. or around £6O in English money at present rates, for that pair of shoes, and when the company resisted she produced the bill. It was for 6000 francs all right. The company paid. This may sound like an exceptional case of dizzy extravagance, but in the fashion houses and luxury establishments of.', the great capitals they could tell '(you tales of extraordinary expenditure on frocks, frills and follies which, make this incident seem trifling by comparison. One famous rue la Paix couturlere recently failed to produce anything magnificent enough to please the Italian wife of a Greek millionaire. So they designed a special cloth of gold gown in the modern sheath manner. The threads were so fine and sensitive to temperature that the girls sewing them were encased ih a dust.proof glass chamber. Friend husband footed the bill for 50,000 francs for that frock," but the brunette beauty scored a triumph when she wore it at a great reception in Rome.

That gold gown was the talk of the day—no more. For women of fashion were never so lavish in expenditure —and never so numerous. The great modistes used to count the £SOOO a year spenders by the dozen. Now they count them by the hundred. £40,000 Worth of Jewels on a Plain Dress. The English society woman who. in the High Court a few weeks back, ad. mitted to the possession of 100 pairs of .stockiiigs, made most people gasp. Yet there are wealthy fashionables with as many gowns always in their wardrobes, and scarcely a week passes without additions coming in. Irene Castle, the slim magic dancer who thrilled less fortunate women a year back by declaring a dress bill of £IO,OOO a year' has a hundred rivals in expenditure. One is Mistinguett, the liveily little singer and dancer who claims the prettiest legs in Paris. Another is Cecile Sorel, the Queen of Comedie Francaise, the blonde beauty whose great violet eyes under delicately pencilled brows once in. fatuated a President of the Republic of France, whose passion had a tragic ending in a stroke which killed him in Sorel’s apartment. When Sorel went to the States recently she had a £40,000 jewelled hat in the liner’s strong room. Some of her sumptuous gowns—for she adopts the magnificent dress style of "Grand Monarque” days—are worth a small fortune, and you could not buy some of her,plumed hats for 40,000 francs. I remember, sayi a a writer in “Ideas", seeing her simply dressed only once. . She was just going for a crive! in the Bois when I called; and she stood chatting, back to the ornamental fireplace, in her great drawing-room with its ISth century portraits on the pearly walls and dewy .‘flowers filling the precious Chinese 'bowls -of incredible antiquity. She wore patent shoes, pearly-grey silk .rtociv.ngs, smart u hat. plain satin coat and, skirt. But luxury, magnificence, in her bones. Even ns I wondered at lie.- unusual restraini. I noticed a mysterious green flash—and observed that she was worth abon. £4, .000 is she stood.

She wore, in daytime—doubtless feeling uneasy at her dress simplicity —•a long necklare Urminating in the famous Sorel emerald, the largest emerald in all the world.

Paying for Cut and Not Much Else. But stli, she was in the latter day manner. In daytime the ‘elegantes" can’t spend an unheard of amount on the mere fashioned material which cover their bodies. The Victorian grande.dames, now, could; for frills, furbelows and laces were in vogue. But modern Eve, limited by the mode to a skimpy bit of severly cut chiffon or ninon, or maybe broadcloth, cut short.skirted, trim, often sleeve, less, to slim silhouette requirements, pays for cut and not much else.

Consequently she spreads herself over furs, jewels, trinkets, the Tiun-dred-and-one costly accessories of the toilette. In former days jewels were reserved for the evening regalia. Now they are flaunted in daytime, and many ultra-smart women go to racemeetings and tea dances with a thou, sand pound pin stuck in her hat, and five thousand pounds worth of pearls round her throat and twined round a wrist.

A Beer, Redfern, Paquin, or Molyneux frock, scanty but marvellously smart and expensive, gold or platinum chain mesh bags, thin platinum cigarette case and match box initialled in diamonds; chiffon or mnon parasols with handles of precious jade or old carved ivory set with a huge jewel or • two, and jewelled clasps and pins. For my lady’s bare white powdered arm there will be the new, flat platinum bracelet encrusted with diamonds, and still she will probably have a thin gold chain round one ankle under a gossamer stocking woven of the finest silk from worms hatched out at the breasts of little Chinese girls—those luxuries cost £lO a pair. This member of the cosmopolitan smart set will have paid a thousnd guineas for her champion Alsatian and £2OOO or more for her fur cloak of sleek jaguar, chinchilla, spotted leopard or ermine. Her bills for the exquisite silk and lace trifles she wears under the frocks will tot up to more than £IOOO in the year. She will be -worth four or five thousand pounds annually to her beauty parlour man, and probably £2OO a year to Andre, the hair artist. Who is she? Ten or 20 years ago any member of the crowd which 'amuses,-Itself in the. seasonal play-

grounds of Europe could have named her —a frivolous princess, some haughty Russian Grand Duchess, a King’s mistress,, a lovely actress who had infatuated a banker . But to-day—who knows? She may be anybody. They come and go, their menfolk, who supply the money, mil. llonaireg one season and bankrupts the next. Many of them, or coarse are American millionairesses, young, slender, supple, exquisitely groomed, aflame with'life; and a lot more come over from South American coun. tries, dark, lithe young beauties whose husbands or fathers have made huge fortunes in grain or cattle. Silly Slu-ewd Fashion Kings.

But there is always a little ultrasmart set, noted for its boundless extravagance even in the midst of extravagance; the queens of the demimonde, The fabulously wealthy Russian Grand Dukes used to pay their bills in the old days. A new financial and industrial plutocracy shrugs and pays for their mad whims from Dot. lomless purses to.day. These are the reckless women who to-day enable the great modistes of the rue Royale and the rue de la Paix to buy the most expensive cars, keep footmen and chauffeurs, buy leases of ,flat s in the most exclusive quarters of Paris, and own country chateaux like great bankers or the heads of famous champagne firms. Silly shrewd,, the fashion, kings know how to stimulate and gratify the most expensive tastes. Their windows arc barely adorned with maybe a single tulip in a deep blue vase. But inside, their establishments are enchanted palaces.

One man specialises in alluring -no woman who is alartned to feel mld-dle-age creeping on her and wants still to look smart. Another sells ms wares by having them shown by a bevy of the smartest and prettiest French, English and American mannequins ho can collect. A third sitting like a plump, bearded spider in a little “den" like a spoilt actress’s dressing-room adorned with impressionist sketches, mascots, flowers and fuzzy-haired dolls with elongated limbs, dreams of frocks to emphasis the sex appeal to beautiful, but not too virtuous women of the world. He "makes" more fashions than any of his rivals. Effects which he designs for one naughty beauty are copied innocently by 10,000 virtuous young women who think the new model “too wonderful for words." Just now all the dress 'tnonarchs are busy. August Is their month for showing the last-words for the autumn and winter. Thousands of rich fashionable women from a score of countries are flocking to the "de. flies" of Paton, Bechoff, Worth, Chanel, Jean, Magin, Rodier, Jenny, Poiret, Caret, Redfern Paquin, Xj&long, and, perched on little fragile gilt chairs In exotic salons, amid seductive perfumes, soft chatter, music, are watching sylph-Uke mannequins whose names are as well.kniwn to Paris as those of revue or cabaret star s swaying and gliding down the "joy-path” In modern Eve’s last-word substitute for the original Eve’s figleaf.

Millions of pounds will be spent in the one city of Paris alone as a result of the feverish activities of the fashion lords to intrigue the fashion, able world with new dress ideas which will filter down from the smart to the great, everyday world, from the “elegante" to the girl-in-the street.

Mad spending on adornment by the smart set women lends itself to denunciation by the moralists of the day. And yet the spending by other classes is proportionately as great. Middlecloss girl s now spend as much ‘at their hairdressers, manicurist’s and shoemaker's os their mothers and grandmothers used to spend on everything connected with their toilette, from the main item of frocks to the minor items of hairpins and face powder.

The Victorian and Edwardian genearation did not know the modern “necessities” of shingling, permanent waving, friction massages, mud baths for the face, and all the tinted pow. ders, creams, washes, tonics, and lotions which the modern girl “simply must have.” Even factory girls insist on their silk stockings “for best,’’ now, and have their smart satin shoes with slim high heels for the night or so a week with their boy at the dance palace. Their best hats are modelled on the last-w r ord hats the ultra-fash, ionables were wearing six months ago; and the plaited.strip shoe? which they buy for a pound in the ready-to-wear shop are exactly like those which, two years ago, were made especially for a famous Paris beauty by a Russian refugee, and created such a furore when she wore them that the smart set tumbled over themselves to get shoes like them, and Paris went mad about the new Russian sandal.

So it goes. What is at the back of the new extavagance, which has seized high and low alike? The keen. °,r competition for men!

Men are scarcer; they are also harder to catch. And just as the scintillating star of the stage or millionairedom must adorn herself more lavishly or lose prestige, so every woman, who values man’s admiration and wishes to allure, must make herself a trifle trimmer, and smarter, than before. If man were wiped off the earth tomorrow, all the fashion houses and beauty parlours and shingle shops would close down next day.