Modern Living: Those Designing Europeans

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Loewy's emphasis on design's commercial and industrial responsibilities is shared by Roger Tallon, 45, whose projects have included the striking new Mexico City subway system. "For me, design is a pipe that does not leak, a bottle top that closes and does not break," says Tallon. "If a designer is not considered an engineer, then this profession has no future." Among his current contracts are designs for new subways in Paris and digital watches for Lip.

French furniture design is dominated by Marc Held, 44, who claims the all but unique accomplishment of having created distinctive products for both the top and bottom of the line. In 1970 Knoll International, the firm that introduced the classic Saarinen "tulip" chair among many other designs, offered the new Held chair, a combination swivel-rocking chair made of leather-covered fiber glass with a rounded base.

Despite the growth of general design, French fashion designers are still lionized. None has enjoyed a more sustained success than Yves Saint Laurent, 38, the boy wonder who blazed onto the haute couture scene at 21 and has stayed at the top ever since. With 80 boutiques round the world selling men's and women's clothing and a wide range of accessories, Saint Laurent rings up sales of $8 million in women's ready-to-wear alone. He has dabbled in towel and sheet designs because they "are like designing scarves," but, unlike Cardin, has declined to venture farther afield of fashion.

In Paris this year, the spring-summer haute couture collections emphasize an elegant simplicity, feminine and slender. Gone is the "tent," except as a thin summer coat, tightly belted. Dresses are either close-fitting sheaths and tubes —as at Saint Laurent, who showed the skinniest of all, faintly reminiscent of the long T shirts popular a while back in ready-to-wear—or fairly full skirted with waists clearly marked by tucks and belts, as Givenchy does them. Suits emphasize the midriff too, with slim skirts, or skirts tucked to the hipbone, worn with jackets that skim the body closely. Jersey, flannel and gabardine are daytime favorites, with the emphasis on navy, white and variations on tones of beige; and the dressier clothes lean to muslins, chiffons and thin crepes in soft prints, like Dior's pointillist patterns, blurring from color to color to color.

What makes European design so successful? Is it because, as Italy's Giugiaro immodestly claims, "the level of taste is higher in Europe than anywhere else in the world"? Perhaps, though many Europeans concede that in some other realms involving taste on an even more rarefied level — painting, for exam ple — the center of action has left Europe for the U.S. or elsewhere. Indeed, though most new cultural trends begin in the U.S., Europeans say, they need filtering through the Continental sense of style before becoming internationally acclaimed.