Fashion Notes

One of Mexico's active volcanoes was in eruption again: 61-year-old Diego Rivera. Mexican women, he rumbled in public and private, dress too much like U.S. women. Not that Artist Rivera had anything against American womanhood.

"American women," said he, "are wonderful--long in legs, not much in rear or breasts, but marvelously small in waist. The arm just aches to curve around." The female Mexican form is fine too, but different: "Short, luscious, round, delicate." Clothing it in "dresses designed for tall, slim and fair women ... is as becoming as a pair of pistols on the Holy Christ."

Cried Rivera: "The classic Mexican dress [flowing skirt, blouse and shawl-like rebozo]has been created by people for people. The Mexican women who do not wear it do not belong to the people, but are mentally and emotionally dependent on a foreign class to which they wish to belong, i.e., the great American and French bureaucracy." His wife and fellow artist, Frida Kahlo, said he, has worn nothing but Mexican clothes for 22 years, and when she went to Paris in 1939, Madame Elsa Schiaparelli was so impressed that she designed a "robe Madame Rivera."

"The terrible complex of Mexican women," said Diego, "is proved by the phenomenon that North American women, especially the most beautiful and well-formed, as soon as they reach Mexico and go to a semitropical climate, for example Cuernavaca, throw off their imported clothes and dress Mexicana . . . gaining 100% in their looks."

When Diego had stopped erupting, a pretty, 21-year-old bank worker named Martha Figueroa poured a little cold water on the lava. Said she: "Every time a girl wearing a rebozo comes into the bank, all the girls behind the counter say how beautiful she looks. But if I wore one the boss would ask me if I thought I was a turista, or was on holiday in Cuernavaca. And it is going to continue that way as long as people are afraid of what people will say and the stylish people think a rebozo is the badge of a housemaid."

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