From Natives to Natives

Manhattan's Carolyn Schnurer is a fashion designer who gets her best ideas abroad, but not from the salons of other designers. Every year she travels to such far-off places as Haiti. South Africa and Japan to see what native styles and costumes she can adapt for American natives, especially as sports clothes. In ten years of such globetrotting, Carolyn Schnurer has built a big reputation--and a $7,000,000 annual business.

Last week the latest catches of Fashion-Hunter Schnurer--the results of a three-week trip to Turkey last summer--went on sale in Manhattan and Los Angeles. Priced from $14.95 to $65, her 1954 line of winter resort clothes includes simple but smartly styled bathing suits, jackets, blouses and dresses decorated with tar-booshed figures and such Turkish zigzags as designs copied from the ceremonial rug of a Turkish emir and from wrought-iron grillwork that she spotted in Istanbul.

Designer Schnurer is a onetime elementary-art and music teacher who married a bathing-suit manufacturer 24 years ago and later went to work for him. She took her first fashion-scouting trip to South America during World War II, under the auspices of Manhattan's Franklin Simon & Co. and three other department stores, which wanted her to look for new fabrics and ideas. After brushing up on her Spanish, she went to Peru, Ecuador and Guatemala, bought clothes right off the Indians' backs, and came back with plenty of ideas, notably the design for a short, pleated beach jacket known as the "Cholo" coat.

While introducing dresses and other garments to her line, Carolyn Schnurer applied what she had learned in making bathing suits. Says she: "We got used to working with the body that way, and so we make our garments the way girdle-and brassiere-makers do. They fit so well it's not necessary to wear a brassiere." As for the bathing suits themselves, Designer Schnurer helped force "women to stop wearing those great big dressmaker-skirt bathing suits" and don one-piece suits.

Her first trip to South America was so successful that plump, jolly Carolyn Schnurer persuaded other stores to help pay the costs of nine subsequent trips to far-off places. She and her husband, who runs the business side of the operation, never know what may come from her trips. From Haiti, she borrowed a Mother Hubbard-style dress; from the fishermen of Brittany, a pullover sweater; from Japan, a straight-line coat modeled after a judo wrestler's dressing gown. Designer Schnurer got some of her best ideas from Ireland. Says she: "I decided just to relax when I got there and go to the races. The first things I saw were the most gorgeous satin jockey coats in the most wonderful colors you've ever seen. I adopted them. Then I went to the pawn shops. I got some of the most marvelous heavy, cable-knit sweaters there, and even some underwear. When I got back to New York, I remembered the beautiful blue, blue Irish sky and the fresh green grass, so I combined the colors in my fashions."

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