Fashion: Son of Culotte

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Every few years, a fashion gimmick sweeps locustlike out of Paris onto the fields of fad. After the "sack look" and the "trapeze line" came the craze for "culottes"—dress-length pants divided in front by a wide pleat and designed to look like skirts. This year, as the release last week of the first photographs of the Paris fall collections showed, the day of the gimmick has come again. Sequel to the culotte: skirts divided in front by a wide pleat and designed to look like pants.

House of Dior Couturier Marc Bohan puts the reverse culotte on everything from beach clothes to ball gowns, and makes slender tubes of evening dresses seem vaguely practical enough to go hiking in. German Model Brigitta Schmucker (see above) wears a silver-embroidered pale pink nylon net version.

While the culotte, regular or reverse, may make news in Paris, U.S. women have a head start on the gimmick. American Designer Norman Norell popularized it in the U.S. in the late '50s.