FASHION—AN ECONOMIC DICTATOR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 122, 25 May 1936, Page 10

FASHION—AN ECONOMIC DICTATOR

Imoortance of Frills and Fal-Lals

EXPLOITATION ENTERPRISE

Fl ' * A ' T tf-MALL silhouette is a major world economic phenomenon. The jump in the world rayon output from 100,000,0001 b. in 1025 to 750,000,0001 b. in 1034, 000,000,000 in J 035 with the billion mark forecast for 1936 is intimately connected with the fashion situation, writes G. Patrick Thompson in “Britannia and Eve,” London. The Japanese have been paying for warships and their Manchurian exploit with proceeds of sales of silk stockings, rayon panties, and synthetic pearls in America and thirty other countries. Germany has gained some of the foreign exchange to pay for the biggest re-armament programme ever, through Anglo-Saxon demand for special dyes and the synthetic jewellery they make so well in the machine shops of Pforzheim. A large part of the economic recovery of Elster, centre of tho linen industry, is due to an immense British and American fashion demand for linen —a demand which has doubled the price of raw materia], flax, in a fear, to the great glee of our old friends the Russians, who grow 90 per cent, of the world crop. “A thick moire lame, shot through with copper thread, is among the loveliest of the new materials, but there are also supple tafletas woven with metal threads . . . “Metal buttons on gunmetal are the new season’s choice.” In such scintillating trifles the discerning learn that resourceful metalmarketing and development associations have forced an outlet for their products in the fashion field. Probe the frock that moulds the figure, the decollete gown that stays up magically with out shoulder straps, the perforated rubber girdle, ornamental garters, and you find the enterprising central exploitation bureau of the rubber industry. j “An extraordinary raw green, bright blue, combinations of green and brown j and yellow, violet, and purple, are some of the colours that we shall sec in next, season’s collections ...” Just a hint, that, why heavy chemical combines are spending more money looking for new textile dyes, and for dyes and processes which will succeed with new materials, than in research on new explosives and poison gases. There-

fore, using adve-rtising and. publicity expenditure as a yard stick, beautifying and adorning the female of the species is the world’s biggest industry. Automobiles, patent medicines, and branded foods stand lower on a space basis. An interested statistician has estimated that last year in the two biggest markets, Britain and the United States, around £400,000,000 worth of women’s raiment became obsolete. That amount had to be spent on renewals, thereby demonstrating that as a device for increasing the velocity circulation of money all the nostrums devised by academicians pale beside a major change in women’s fashions. Beauty parlours are increasing. Saturation point in the beauty-prepara-tions market is decades off. Five years hence, a 1935 world expenditure of £200,000,000 for powder, cold cream, perfumes, lipsticks and other aids to female attractions, will look like a depression figure. An annual figure for Britain of 10,000,000 boxes of rouge and £1,250,000 worth of hair-colouring substances (only a fourth of American expenditure) will look modest. Mass production technique and high pressure .s>lesmanship were harnessed to the fashion business for the first time when, one pre-war day, Premier Asquith’s brilliant and individualistic j wife allowed her favourite Paris* dressmaker to hold a fashion show for her j friends at No. 10 Downing Street. On the economic side this meant nothing, for fashion then was monopolised by a small world of aristrocrats, plutocrats, smart actresses and expensive demimondaines, buying at high prices. Two more decades were to pass, however, before the fashion lords linked up with the masters of the mass-produc-tion machines, thereby enabling the

t :- small-income woman to buy at a big 1 S store a copy of an authentic model i s frock, coat, hat or scarf, .... an article of raiment of a cut and style T which formerly was available only to j those women who had acquired, by 1 L fame, marriage, inherited, or gouged c t < monev, the large financial key to the 4 u * J t s fitting room of a Schiaparelli, Patou, t Worth or Molyneux. j. y Late in 1934 a number of the British < Royal family sponsored a fashion movemerit in cotton fabrics. The Royal iny itiative was not linked to any propa- i ir ganda to aid the depressed cotton indus- 1 try. Nevertheless, sales of Lancashire < r cotton goodi in the Home market rose, 1 nine million yards in four months. ( A leading cotton man calculated that • if only petticoats could be charmed - } back into favour the industry would i regain all the 200 million yards it had 1 lost in the home market; a loss which ] lias been rayon’s gain. ; Early in his regime, Mussolini was . e applauding “naturalism” in women. The regime frowned on plucked eye- ] u brows, rouge, lipstick, and “that parish look”. An attempt was made h to build up characteristic Italian d fashions. There were official designs of it approved gowns. The concensus of »r opinion among the younger women was i c that they were terrible. .. In time Mussolini discovered that , r women could not be dragooned as easu ily as men, and that to interfere with women’s ideas of how to look attractive ” is to make a worse blunder in human a psychology than the one made by the American political leaders who tried i" to outlaw alcohol. Neither Italian industry nor the State finances could '' stand the strain. P ’fhc Nazi drive against cosmetics, a- silks stockings, and other appurtentejances of the fashion-conscious female,

was ended by an official ukase to the effect that Nazi zealots must not go about washing synthetic tints off ladies’ faces: and, further, that a nice taste in chiffon blouses, and lipstick is not incompatible with loyalty to the leader. Nazi puritanism was killing one of the most prolific of the geese that laid the golden eggs of national revenue. Austere Socialists who thought that tho women of the new order in Russia would be content to wear a “rational” uniform dress, have been sadly disappointed at a widespread reversion to the old eve, with all its dangers of incitement to individual competition, growth of external social differentiations, and thoughts flying away to the gayer and lighter side of life. The Soviet rulers too, have found that they cannot neglect a market of 40,C00,0G0 women. It was short .skirts that first made women stocking-conscious, and thereupon huge businesses have been erected whose taxable profits are an important item in the national finances of Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, France and the U.S. And the popularity of the flesh-coloured stockings brings a very large revenue to the manufacturers of special soap products; for women now wash their stockings almost as habitually and regularly as they brush their teeth, Fashion designers have found apparnetly inexhaustible mines of inspiration in the different periods of European and Asiatic art, and the peasant modes of Mediterranean fishing villages, Basque hamlets and Austrian mountain resorts. But more and more the great American film factories, with their synthetic and enormously popularised beauties, enview and studied by tens of millions of girls and women are influencing women’s fashions, both directly and indirectly. Austere moralists and socialologists have deplored the ever-rising figures of fashion and beautification expenditure. But our civilisation could not now go Puritan and rule out frills, fal-lals, perfumes, face paint, and powders, and fashions. Its debts, and its industrial life, would not permit it.