Category: Elizabeth Hawes

And again and again, why, oh why, Joe Rosenthal, were you so surprised when skirts got long and waists natural? For three long years it had been coming. It was a style, Mr. Rosenthal. Style is never unpredictable. But Rosenthal and Levine are not occupied with style. They believe that everything changes twice a year and they want it to. Otherwise people wouldn’t have to buy so many clothes. Nor are the manufacturers occupied with quality because it wears and makes future buying unnecessary. They are not concerned with whether clothes are useful or beautiful or functional. That, apparently, is not a part of their job.

After all, the butt of Fashion’s dirtiest jokes is the public. The present American boast, that all women can be beautifully dressed if they choose, has been so clearly stated in so many ways for so long a time, that a large number of American women believe themselves to be beautifully dressed who are actually horrors to behold. Take those $10.75 copies of the dresses worn by the Duchess of Windsor in the summer of 1937. You could tell by the look on the faces of the American girls who wore them that they really felt beguiling enough to snatch off a Duke because they had a modified silhouette corresponding to that of a Duchess. The actual dress, stinted on material, cheaply imitated as to print design, bad in color and ill-fitting, was a horror to behold. You may say, if the girl feels like a Duchess, what more do you ask? I say, she looks to me like the worst mass-pro- duced imitation of a Duchess I can imagine, and it just isn’t pretty.

Take all the fullness out of this skirt,” they say. “Ok,” we say, “but you’ll feel awfully silly in it next year.” “What do I care about next year?” they answer. “Any dress which isn’t in style for at least three years isn’t any good to begin with,” we say.