FRANCE: Bugles, Braid & Tinsel

Like harvest time in the wheat belt, like the fishing season on the Grand Banks, the opening of the dressmaking season is, to Paris, a business event. Last week by boat, train and plane sharp-eyed buyers piled into the city to attend the official autumn & winter openings of the great dress houses, openings that came so thick & fast that exhausted buyers had scarcely time for more than a foot bath, a glass of tea and a herring between engagements all week long. At the most popular house of all, Schiaparelli, on the Place Vendôme, department store executives who had crossed the U. S. and the Atlantic for no other purpose were glad to perch on a stair rail or the edge of a chromium table to peek at the new models.

One place that knowing buyers wasted no time on was the grandiloquent Pavilion d'Elégance in the Paris Exposition (TIME, Aug. 9), where frequent public fashion shows are held. Well they knew that none of the first-class designers was sending any new models to a place that any style pirate or country dressmaker good at copying could walk into free. On the other hand more U. S. buyers than at any time since 1929 attended the private shows.

At week's end when footsore buyers were ready to pack up with their order books suitably filled, the consensus on 1937 autumn styles seemed to be:

¶ Dresses for daytime are slender, simply draped, with skirts still moderately short. Waistlines follow the designer's whim.

¶ Hats are very tall or very crooked, with few wide brims, many draped berets.

¶ Evening gowns will be an embroiderer's delight, appliqued with sequins, bugles, braid, beads and tinsel. Alix and Molyneux favor very full skirts, elaborately draped—fashion scouts kept harping on the word "Baroque."

¶ Sensation of the week was a group of transparent georgette evening dresses by Lanvin, embroidered with designs in wool. Demurely the models hoisted their skirts to show full-length opera tights, dyed to match the dress.