FASHION FROM EGYPT

Taranaki Daily News, 3 November 1934, Page 18 (Supplement)

FASHION FROM EGYPT

CLEOPATRA STYLES SHOW. One day last summer a group of Press representatives and outstanding figures in the world of fashion design witnessed by invitation a preview in New York of the costumes which had been designed at Hollywood for the forthcoming production of the picture “Cleopatra.” This was the first time that a preview of cinema costumes had been made available to a New York audience, and the significance of the event was recognised by the grande couture of that city. The display was dazzling. The startling silhouettes, the sumptuous fabrics, the blare of jewels, the exotic headdresses, the spider-web sandals, the twinkling girdles modelled by maidens whose swarthy colouring evoked, as did their costumes, the illusion of the Ptolemaic court, flooded New York with novel emotions, and left no doubt in the thought of those assembled for the show that autumn clothes would borrow many ideas from Egypt. On August 16 New York witnessed the premiere of the motion picture, and the next day Fifth Avenue went Oriental. Of course it was a moment long prepared for. Frocks expressing features of Egyptian drapery dominated the showcases; splendid fabrics sparkling with metal threads opulently filled the windows of silk merchants; jewellers presented, against the background of a lurid Cleopatra upon a fabulous throne, bracelets of amazing width, fashioned of gold with inlays of coloured stones, and pendulous ear-rings of intricate workmanship. Milliners, notably Mme. Lilly Dache, offered American women the charm of the great Queen by posing on their flaxen and auburn locks evening hats inspired by her diadem, bearing aloft the symbol, sacred to the Egyptians, of the winged globe. A department store advertised ‘Cleopatra sandals,” built of gold and silver kid strippings and encrusted with gleaming stones.