Roundabout

Semaine de Paris

By KATHARINE WHITEHORN It must have been especially hard last week, since it rained in Paris most of the time: Paris women, dowdier than I had remembered, picked their way under umbrellas, gazing at sales in the windows—sales which still failed to bring the prices down anywhere 'near far enough; police- men whistled at the traffic—loudly—and at girls —less loudly—and flapped their batons under wet mackintosh capes. Signs of the crisis were few : trucks of bored policemen were stationed unobtrusively at crossroads and the people stop- ping to read the papers pinned up on the news kiosks looked worried. But when you ques- tioned anyone, they smiled sourly; like Texans with their Climate, Russians with their Winter, they seemed to take a gloomy pleasure in the frequency and seriousness of their crises and their own stamina in bearing up so well.

But if, outside, Paris was shrugging its shoulders, inside the dress houses people were naturally more concerned with what sort of shoulders were to be shrugged this season; and they began to get an answer on Monday night. The fashion week has a definite pattern : the first two or three shows get too much publicity, because everyone is keen and naive and looking for something to write about; the last few of the week too little, because half the press has written its copy and gone home. Cardin was their first serious show. His suits were interesting, his dresses fantastic; I expect his coats are about the only things ordinary women would wear with any willingness or any success.

The mannequins, of course, can get away with anything; they are there to show what clothes will do for a girl who needs nothing done for her. It is always a little disheartening to look along the front rows—at the back the hairs of mink are fewer and farther between—and see what women look like when everything has been done for them that anyone can think of: usually much too much. There are enough strings of pearls in the front row of any collection to strangle every one of the 14,000 Dior employees.

The personnel are always the same. Madame Bousquet, who runs French Vogue, and fidgets, and watches out of shrewd simian brown eyes, and is forever pursing her lips to gather her tired face together; Carmel Snow, alive or dead, sleep- ing, or waking, in colours a Caliph would think too piercing; running Harper's Bazaar ever since anyone can remember, her every note watched by a hundred followers. Helen Lazareth, who edits Elle and is married to a business fortune as well—so it can't have been grinding poverty that drove her to Balmain in black stockings and a crumpled mackintosh. The Elle girls always know better than to try to compete. There are always the American young men, their expressions a nice blend : of dismay at what the Frat. brothers would think of them being at a dress show, for Chrissake, and pardonable smirks of pride at attending a world-shattering opening. That's if it is an opening; after the opening the houses go on showing once or twice a day for weeks; and then there are the hard-faced manufacturers and the occasional celebrity and the German buyers, women who turn up without lipstick or high heels and laugh themselves to death at the silly clothes. They would look better doing so if they hadn't left their brassieres behind in Stutt- gart or Frankfurt or Bonn. At a good hbuse, there is a thriving, busy atmosphere about a second showing;- at a bad house, a distinct air of fertne le lunch about the whole thing.

We, the English press collection, were a motley lot : stifling under our furry hats, letting out small cries of relief at the sight of a familiar face, rushing around having coffees and lunches with each other to give an impression of bustle and gaiety suitable to Paris. Most of them stay in the Robelin Hotel, where they can be easily bearded by sly PROs from the marginal houses; and there, unobtrusively, they can decide roughly what to say.

Trying to pick the line out of a collection is rather like listening to a complicated concert of modern music and then having to rush out say which tunes will become pop numbers. And, to make it worse, any dress house showed 'the line' and nothing else would go bl rupt in a season. There have to be several very last year's, for the private clients who have just got to like it, and a few try-outs for there have to be great silly balloon dresses which the mannequins totter and smirk : don't sell, but they do get photographed there have to be a vast number of rather sl intensely wearable clothes, which are only fashion, as it were, by, implication. No we we rush about to avoid mistakes. So easily e too: I was sitting in a secondary room at collection and the model had got her suit .J3 looped up in a great puff at the back by mist[ Sensation. Pencils working busily. Then woman who was announcing the numbers g01 of her and sorted her out, and another new bit the dust as we all crossed it out again.

Balmain is an amiable man, still work, mainly for private clients.- Balmain and his d house give an impression of cheerfulness, pr ness, good humour : his marble entrance hail a bank of spring flowers where Dior masses controversial pineapples; his hats have brims' mannequins are even allowed to smile. His 51/1 were wearable, his gimmick for the day a se of Destry Rides Again ruffles.

Nina Ricci's, also, was a pretty collect' marred only by an insane bulk purchase of giP' ear-rings which had apparently gone to Jacci Crouhay's head. This is a house which assa, more importance than its elegance might sag!' because it is very popular in America. And sexy. It is taking, I am told, the place of Jaal Fath on the fashion scene—or, as a London Ile writer put it, 'Well, it isn't a queer's collectieriI* But when all's said and done, if it was Balmain and Cardin and Nina Ricci, the Wer would not bother to flock to Paris; all this w,, only a count-down for the Dior collection. A C11` opening is exactly like any other, only more se°' more crush on the stairs, hotter salons, hardoo gold chairs (maybe not; but the show goes THE SPECTATOR. FEBRUARY 5, longer); louder voices demanding things in American and refusing them in French; more frantic scribbling, more rage or joy at the end. This time it was joy—or at least relief. The Dior lines, the Dior notions were up to a good standard: beetle-backed coats by day, or blousy tunics over easy skirts, like a chic painter's smock; afternoon dresses; evening trousers with beaded bubbles winking at the seat-1 suppose the model never sat down on the job—great Peignoir evening dresses for home entertaining- ' Mae West would have loved them. This show g°t a fantastic reception. Madame Bousquet kissed St. Laurent till he could hardly stand. A Well-tanned American leaped up from the char in front of me and hugged him; and a girl near by v°iced everybody's feelings : 'Paris is going to be all right again.'

, While Dior was alive, everyone thought or pre- tended that it was the whole of what Paris had t° offer that attracted the world : the superb cutting, the meticulous sewing, the rigid and un- compromising insistence on perfection; the ex- cellence of the shoes and gloves and bags and hats. When Dior died, the smaller houses thought they might share a piece of his empire; but last season the jewelled curtain slipped and raw com- nierce looked through. Paris won't stand up without its Dior. What is necessary is not a place wisere good clothes are made. It is a megaphone: a Voice loud enough to reach the ends of the earth and change the shape of your typist from season to season.

S0 St. Laurent has obviously been taken into a quiet corner and told to pull himself together ---,Presumably by Boussac, who owns the whole "tor machine. He has done so. The collection is 80N1- Not rapturous. Not earth-shaking. But gond enough to make believe that St. Laurent, and not the Boussac- machine, is the world's fashion dictator.

In all this, no one was paying much attention rt°kle Gaulle and Lagaillarde and the crisis. On at GUY morning I tried raising the topic myself, that Goy Laroche; the clothes were not the kind h -"at Stop conversation. `Do not disquiet yourself, Mademoiselle,' said the urbane Frenchwoman at nlY side; and proceeded to give me a brief 1.sillrl6 of the facts suitable for anyone so out (,%.c key with Parisian thought as actually to be '"rried about the situation. 'Enfin, ks colons sons 1,e11°Iitallt,' she finished—and then used the word 'lam in her notebook for one of the revolting creations that was moving past us. Guy Laroche has Come a long way since he practically started He chunky-infant look three and a half years a&0: a long way, and all of it downhill.

0n Friday evening I cut a rayon reception and

141 off to seek television for the big speech. 14hind it in a tiny bar, a notch carved into a de Ill of houses, anonymously embedded in the bottles streets in the St. Sulpice area. There were lining the walls and four small tables: One of them was occupied by workmen in brown tehveralls playing 411. Their backs to the television, dash; rolled their dice in the circular green-baize only as eight o'clock arrived did they look Up bemusedly. The bar filled up with students i,,i fringe beards, one or two serious-looking men " thick coats and more workmen. De Gaulle,

in uniform, appeared on the screen. The dice game was reluctantly suspended; someone who asked for a glass of wine *as indignantly shushed. Half-way through the speech the kitchenmaid came out of a back room with her coat on : time to go home, crisis or no crisis.

Within minutes of the speech's ending, the bar was back to normal. The students, muttering 'imbecile' to each other, had gone off to bang their fists on the table in a more conspicuous place; one of the businessmen shrugged cynically and said, 'But how does he intend to do it?' The owner of the bar, with the unimpressionable face of all barkeepers, cleared up the glasses without interrupting the game. 'C'est on brave type,' he said. 'All the same he is proud—he likes to listen to himself talking.' I asked him if he was at all worried, and he used again the phrase I had heard from every taxi-driver, every newspaper-seller, every concierge. '11 s'arrangera,' he said.

There was more, I felt, than an absence of excitement : there was a refusal to get excited. There were no solutions past de Gaulle; so even those who disliked him and had voted against him were not prepared to march up and down the Champs-Elysees clamouring to put him out of power. Parachutists may nearly have secured

his downfall; but he is himself a parachute. When there is no alternative, you use it.

All week, the mood of /a anode has been cutting across the mood of Paris. Paris is one almighty shrug, a disillusioned refusal to consider utopian solutions: indifference: resignation. In the couture world—which is about as calm, at any time, as a roomful of budgerigars at feeding time—the pre- dominating mood was optimistic. Dior—not St. Laurent—was-on its feet again; and relief was in the air.

One thing puzzles me. According to all the information going around there was hardly a line, however original, that didn't ultimately stem from Givenchy. When Dior was alive the real leader and the big machine worked together. Now the big machine has heaved itself up to a self- respecting standard : but the leader is elsewhere. Why does Boussac not absorb Givenchy? Or has he tried, and failed? It hardly seems like him to fail, when he is the man who practically re- created Paris after the war; someone who owns Dior (Paris, London, Caracas, New York) and Dior shoes and Dior gloves and Dior scent and Dior stockings and the Monoprix ought to be able to fix a little matter like hiring a genius.

They ought to let him handle Algeria.