Fads: The Follies That Come with Spring

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With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino, spring with all its fads, fancies and general nuttiness arrives, and of general folly there is no end.

All over the world, for instance, the new bestseller is suddenly Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, which JAMES F. COYNE comes encased in red plastic with a red-ribbon marker. At Berke ley, it is treated like an amulet by the Black Muslims; at Columbia, it is outselling everything since Henry Miller; and Bren-tano's at the Pentagon has already unloaded 1,000 copies at $1 each. A few of the buyers may be genuine sinologists, but for the vast majority it is the new camp classic.

Harvard students are now exhorting one another with such Maoisms as "What we need is an enthusiastic but calm state of mind and intense but orderly work," in Great Britain, sassy teenagers have taken to Maothing retorts to teachers who rebuke them, and Carnaby Street regulars have begun wearing $22.40 Red Guard uniforms; in Manhattan, Mao sayings are briefly as popular as old Confucius-say. But their days as a cocktail-party drop are numbered. For as London's Sun Columnist Henry Fielding noted: "In their cunning way, the Chinese are now using it instead of their water torture; they are just boring people to death."

With youth, the "antique look" this spring is in. Students in Paris and London have been ransacking secondhand stores for old uniforms dating back to the Crimean and FrancoPrussian wars. But in the U.S., uniforms are generally out in favor of the Frank Nitti gangster look, including palm tree-studded ties and double-breasted pinstripe jackets. At Dartmouth, the particular "drinking uni" (for uniform) at the moment is the "blow-lunch look" (so called, one student explains, because "when you look at one of those ties you want to blow your lunch") topped off with a Red Baron Flying Ace helmet, complete with ear flaps and shrapnel holes. At Harvard, the grapevine passes the word around within hours whenever Secondhand Deal er Max Keezer or "Morgie's" (Goodwill Industry's Morgan Memorial) gets in any old taxi-driver hats or brownand-white shoes, and some Harvards are even beginning to talk antique: "Those teeny-boppers are a caution." Getting the Message. Women, after years of going hatless, are now covering up again. At the moment, the vogue for hats is running strongest in Paris, where the noctambules show up at La Coupole in Montparnasse wearing floppy Garbo-style fedoras, gaucho hats with chin straps, and overgrown newsboy caps. One reason that hats are back on top is that there is suddenly much less hair underneath. Short hair cuts, among them what Parisians call le Farrow and I'Artichaut, are replacing the elaborate bouffant hairdos that made hats hard to wear. Paris' Alexandre has already shorn Elizabeth Taylor, Queen Sirikit of Thailand, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. And while Elsa Martinelli, Sophia Loren and Jean Shrimpton have so far resisted the shears, they are all tucking their hair under short wigs to achieve a similar effect. Manhattan's Kenneth, who gained fame as the architect of Jackie Kennedy's bouffant extravaganzas, has switched to the short crop. Explains Kenneth: "Short skirts need a small, close head, and my clients are getting the message."