France’s Dress Customers.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXV, Issue VI, 11 August 1900, Page 274

France’s Dress Customers.

The fact alarms a writer that English and American women spend so n uch money on French dress goods and accessories. The other Continental nations buy comparatively hardly anything from France. British women buy annually no less than 120.000,<‘O(> francs’ worth of silk and ribbons to the value of 30,250,000 francs more. This is more imposing in francs than in pounds sterling, but in English coin it is something like £6.ooo.ouo. It is evidence of how the two rich and luxurious Anglo-Saxon coininiiiiitu > al sorb the splendour, thai. of the 35.000.0u0 francs’ worth of feathers annually prepared in and exported from France. Great Britain takes over 15.000,000. and the United states 13.000.000 francs’ worth, leavinir only ( .000.000 or so to be drawn upon by all the rest of the world. Fans, again, so far as bulk govs, are mainly exported from France to Spain and North America, but the small proportion of the total numbei made that comes to England is o 4 one-fourth of the value of the whole. Great Britain and the Cnited States take between them every pound of manufactured whalebone, one-third <»f 1 he corsets, ami nearly half of the buttons exported from France, and so on.