Business: Haute Couture

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Though her fame continues to spread, one thing keeps Schiaparelli, now in her middle thirties, from becoming the very smartest of the Paris dressmakers. Her designs are too easy to copy. The mutton sleeves and tray shoulders which she sponsored last year were instantly popular on the Champs-Elysees and Manhattan's Park Avenue. But it was not long before every little dress factory in Manhattan had copied them and from New York's 3rd Avenue to San Francisco's Howard Street millions of shop girls who had never heard of Schiaparelli were proudly wearing her models.

Of late the fashion supremacy of Paris has been challenged by New York whose couturiers are growing more articulate. The autumn openings of Elizabeth Hawes. Clarepotter, Muriel King, Helen Cookman will not begin until September. But in Chicago last week was an indigenous fashion show of the 225 principal manufacturers of inexpensive dresses for the farmer's wife, the restaurant waitress, the ribbon clerk. On the tenth floor of the huge Merchandise Mart important cloak & suit makers like J. Baach of Chicago, Biberman Bros, of Manhattan, Liberty Frock Co. of Kansas City — firms of which the consuming public rarely hears — proudly displayed the jersey wools and striped cotton washables that this autumn S. Klein ("On the Square") will sell in Manhattan; Pogue's, in Cincinnati; Schuster's, in Milwaukee; Famous & Barr, in St. Louis. Women's and misses' swagger coats were $3.25 a dozen, wholesale, cotton prints as low7 as $6.75 a doz., checked and tartan synthetic dresses ("51% cotton according to the code") from $2.50 retail up. Top retail price was $42.50 for knitted wools. There was no champagne for thirsty buyers but free beer and sandwiches were served in a room on the 14th floor fixed up like a prison and called "The Kooler." Special fashion shows were held on two nights in the exhibition hall, where a scantily-clad "Miss Merchandise Mart" and four buxom japesters in red-striped flannel nightgowns paraded across stage sets decorated to suggest winter.