The Man Dressmaker.

Otago Witness, Issue 2934, 8 June 1910, Page 93

The Man Dressmaker.

Have women no imagination that they are content to let men design the works of art they wear? Everything except the designing is done by women. They execute, they cut out, they sew, they embroider, they fit on, they finish. But it is always the creation of a man's imagination they work unon, _ below_ the first rank every dressmaker in Paris is a woman : in the first rank everyone is a man. This is so much the case that if a- woman tells her ladv friends, " I aim going to my couturiere," it means. "/

don't spend more than £SOO a year on my clothes." If the lady friend answers, "I have just come from my couturier," she implies that her dress costs her anything ■up to the £IO,OOO a year which Madame Cecile Sorel, of the Francais, is supposed to have fixed as the proper figure for a woman who intends to be perfectly dressed, though she now frantically denies ever having said such a thing. Anyhow, says a writer in the Daily Telegraph, to be dressed by a couturier means that a woman spends at least double what she would if a couturiere dressed her. I daresay she is just as well dressed bv the latter as by the former. But the difference is that the couturiere does not dress her in her own models, but - in copies. The couturier dresses her in the new masterpieces he has 'just invented himself. Consequently, to be dressed by a couturiere means that a woman is at least a week behind the fashion, which, if she went to a couturier, she woiild catch by the forelock.