Dressmaking Is A Cult Among French Girls, And Runs In The Family.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18940, 10 December 1929, Page 8

Dressmaking Is A Cult Among French Girls, And Runs In The Family.

TO-DAYS SIGNED ARTICLE.

(Written for the “ Star ” by

A. D. FLEUROT.)

So far as the visiting foreigner is concerned, the Rue de la Paix is most to be appreciated, perhaps, about 7, when the girls, after their ten-hour day, come out by the hundred from every door, to pass for a few minutes chattering along before they separate. They come like an unconscious defile in a music hall; first, the mannequin, the slenderest and most graceful of them all, still swinging slightly in the cadences of the stilted walk of. the showrooms; then the salesgirls, the best paid, so the best dressed, singly or by twos and threes; and hard on their heels flocks of little cousettes, pieces of thread still sticking to their sleeves and stockings and with pins raining from them as they leap joyously into the open air by tens and twenties.

For a few minutes at the end of the working day the Rue de la Paix, like every other street in Paris where there are many dressmakers, is alive with giggling little persons whose gaiety has not been killed by the long day’s work. The average age is well under twenty. Very few are being waited for at the street door by their young men For the most part the bands break up within a hundred yards, and each little pair of feet can be seen hurrying pff to get into the lines forming everywhere down the stairs into the Metropolitan underground, in the queues governed by chains where the tramways and motor buses start. There is an extra service for them at this hour, and within fifteen minutes all are in crowded vehicles bound to different parts* of the city and the suburbs to report home to mother. If any happen to be late, or are obliged to stay for extra work, the houses by which they are employed give them slips of paper stating the exact hour and minute they left. Their mothers can check up on the time and .see whether they have loitered by the way. In almost every case their mothers, and their grandmothers, before them, went through the same apprenticeship and the same years of work. Theirs is a cult. Dressmaking runs in the family. They inherit their supple fingers, their quick eye for line. They are moulded for their life, like soldiers. They are the aristocracy of the workers of Paris, the elegant nobility of the Rue de la Paix. Their position demands a certain decorum. Dressmaking is not to them a refuge, but a career. All that the famous couturiers of Paris have done is to organise and direct this choice body of women with an inherited taste in clothes.

In this changing world of Paris the class consciousness of the elite of the dressmaking world is as fixed as that of the Quartier St Germain. The girls carry on the tradition, of course. As soon as they have had the pretty good grounding; of a French grammar school education they enter the ateliers, and those who are not married young, and some of those who are married young also, work up to become premieres, competent y.ouhg women who can design, cut and sew dresses which will have the Parisian chic wherever they may go.

Between the actual dressmakers and the saleswomen there is a common bond. They are all modest workers, getting ahead as fast as they can on their ability. In consequence, they hold rather aloof from the mannequins, girls from all classes of society, incapable of doing anything beyond wearing a dress to good effect. There is a little jealousy, of course, always so 1 mixed with the- disdain of the nobility of the ateliers. These pretty often make rich marriages, and pass on into other worlds far beyond the dream of the serious little workers who scorned them in the shops. And when they do they almost invariably become clients of the houses for which they

worked, assiduous clients in diamonds and sables who, at least in the first months of their new fortunes, come back day after day for try-ons but stay to see the other girls swing through the showrooms by the hour. The sales girls and the premieres who used to stand aloof now have to please them and satisfy their caprices.

Of the 9,000,000 women left without mates by the late European unpleasantness, the Rue de la Paix has its share, and that unfortunate circumstance has been turned into the one spontaneous festival of the year, the day of St Catherine, when all unmarried girls of twenty-five make themselves fancy paper bonnets and so let it be known to the town. It is not the elite of. the dressmaking world which advertises itself, however, in the streets and at the hundreds of balls that day. Instead, the big dressmaking houses arrange parties where the girls, inviting only a few scared brothers and salesmen of dry-goods houses who are there every day, and so do not count, stage for themselves series of masquerades where all their suppressed fancy in clothes has its play. Outsiders who are lucky enough to participate at these spectacles from the inconspicvious background find themselves admiring groups of young women who usually, in sober uniforms, dress themselves once a year as their wildest fancy dictates. The tendency is almost always romantic. To any one who appreciates freshness of soul and delights in the spontaneous expression of pure joyousness it is worth while going to a ball attended by this elegant aristocracy of the workshops. It is a little old-fash ioned, agreeably so, with the grand mothers who giggled through the Rue de la Paix in their time trying to maintain the dignity of their years, but caught in the spirit of the occasion, with a glass of champagne to revive their youth, out on the floor going around and around in the oldfashioned waltz, which remains the traditional dance of this conservative aristocracy of labour. The dressmaking caste is one of the few things of Paris which has not been affected by the turnover since the war. Viewed from the family angle, it is the small bourgeoisie of Paris, but it is kept from getting narrow and stuffy by its constant contact with a world that is more elegant, in its fictitious way, than any other world to be found anywhere. (Anglo-American N.S. Copyright).