Fads: The Follies That Come with Spring

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Short skirts also mean new lengths in stockings. Courreges recommends tennis socks that rise to midcalf; Ungaro pulls his stockings two inches above the knee. And for Palm Beach, the Duchess of Windsor is packing along a pair of Givenchy's yellow knee socks to go with her Dior cullotte. What ever the length, bright, solid colors are in and applied dimensional texture is out; the pattern, if any, is now being knit right into the fabric.

Everywhere, ongoing fads are picking up momentum. Among the campus set, wall posters depicting its heroes and anti-heroes are bigger than ever. "When wa-,j#^ '" " ter is boiling, it's hard to tell when it gets hotter, but the fad hasn't reached its peak," says Martin Geisler, owner of Manhattan's Per PROTEST BUTTON sonality Posters. Right now the Monkees are the most popular of his 70 posters; other favorites, each for $1, include Chairman Mao, Dracula, the Hell's Angels, Shirley Temple, Humphrey Bogart, Allen Ginsberg in his Uncle Sam suit, and Peter Fonda on a motorcycle. Also prized: the offbeat "You Don't Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy's" subway poster ads for rye bread.

With posters go protest buttons, and they are popping up dirtier than ever—at least in the eyes of the Manhattan district attorney's office, which is now prosecuting a Greenwich Village retailer for selling "obscene" buttons. The offenders ranged from "Pornography Is Fun" to pornography unprintable. But for Civil Liberties Un ion Lawyer Robert Polstein, banning buttons is restricting of expression. "What young people see clean," he argues, "older persons see dirty."

Rhino Desk, Ostrich Bar. With fads turning on and fading out with the dizzy psychedelic speed of a discotheque slide projector, the old, posed Bachrach studio shot may be becoming passe. A Columbia University philosophy major, 24-year-old Julie Motz, has set herself up in business making 20-minute-long, 16-mm. BioPix. For $500, she will follow her subject (a Texas brewery president, say, or a New Jersey American Legionnaire), shooting candidly and in color from dawn to dusk. So far she has been banned only from Manhattan's "21" Club ("It bothered the other customers"), had to sneak in shots at the Forum of the Twelve Caesars after hours.

And what makes the perfect setting to view an instant film biography? Right now in Chicago, it is the animal furniture-sculpture of French Designer Francois-Xavier Lalanne. Delighting the throngs at the Art Institute are his furnishings, including a flock of 22 woolly-coated, roller-footed sheep that serve as seats, sofas or hassocks; a monumental housefly three feet long that sports a rosewood toilet seat; and a life-size brass rhinoceros weighing 735 Ibs. whose side swings down to make a desk.

Lalanne's prices are equally fantastic: $10,000 for the sheep or the housefly, $25,000 for the rhino. Among the happy few who have chosen to afford them: Designer Yves St. Laurent, who bought a rhino, and French Premier Georges Pompidou, who bought a pair of china ostriches whose beaks hold a metal board serving as a bar. And why does Lalanne spend his time creating such extravagant fancies? His answer is as good as any likely to be heard this spring: "For the most elementary reason—it amuses me."