No More Nettie

Nettie Rosenstein is through again, and the U.S. wholesale dress business feels as jewelers would feel if Tiffany's were folding up. "Miss Rosie" has made more fine women's clothing and sold it at higher prices than any other designer in the business. But that was before Pearl Harbor. Things look different now, and Nettie Rosenstein was never a woman to miss a trend.

The language of the dress business is extravagant, but, even in plain English, genius is the word for Nettie. Her peculiar genius is summed up in her favorite maxim : "It's what you leave off a dress that makes it smart." Luckily for her, this passion for simplicity coincided with the emancipated anti-ruffle trend started by Paris' great Paul Poiret around 1916, the year before Nettie started making clothes for her friends (and their friends) as well as for herself. For four years she did all her work in her brownstone house, but by 1921 so many customers were cluttering up her rooms that she moved to bigger (and swankier) space in the East Fifties.

She had already landed (in 1919) her first, and still her largest, wholesale customer, California's I. Magnin chain of high falutin women's specialty shops. Within a few years, stores like Neiman Marcus in Dallas, Mrs. Blum's in Chicago (who said Nettie could get "more money for four seams than anyone else"), Nan Duskin's in Philadelphia, were proud to snag exclusive sales rights to Rosenstein models that set them back 60-$300 apiece, wholesale.* During the '20s, when the best was supposed to come from Paris, U.S. dress makers sold these fancy models under their own labels -plus an awed whisper from salesgirl to cognoscenti that they were really "Rosenstein's" -but in due course the Rosenstein label became too valuable to hide. Today in Manhattan, she sells to three or four other shops, but rights to her label belong exclusively to Bonwit Teller.

The size of "Miss Rosie's" business is her own well-guarded secret (guesstimated 1937 peak: $1,000,000), but she readily admits that war has made a big hole in her sales. In some lines (particularly evening clothes, more than a third of her total sales), volume fell off 50-90% after Pearl Harbor, said her business manager, "Gumpy" Gumprecht, last week. Further pushed by a lease about to run out, and by the mounting shortage of fine fabrics (be fore the war, 80% of her materials used to come from abroad), it looked like a good time for her to retire to private life as Mrs. Saul Rosenstein, real estate broker's wife and mother of two. How long she can keep away remains to be seen: the last time she tried it (1927-31), kinetic Nettie bored herself back into business.

*At retail, Rosenstein dresses run from $110 to more than $500, average $175.

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