The Undressed Look

Writing in the highbrow French review Arts last week, Poet Jean Cocteau diagnosed the midsummer madness that gripped Paris: "A lightning-quick epidemic which forces different and antagonistic persons all to obey the same mysterious order, to submit themselves to new habits which overturn their old ways of life, up to the moment when a new order arrives and obliges them to turn their coat once more."

As every woman knows, Prankster Cocteau was defining fashion, not the Suez crisis. Last week, along the Right Bank from the Place Vendome to the little streets south of the Arc de Triomphe, fashion's fever reached its infectious peak in the high-fashion capital of the world. To see the couturiers' fall collections, 800 buyers from big stores all over the world had come to place their orders (from 20 to 60 dresses each at prices ranging from $700 to $3,000). Manufacturers from Manhattan's Seventh Avenue were there to buy dresses for reproduction (up to $1,800 for an evening gown);copyists spied out the buttons, bows and furbelows that will sprout on readymade clothes from Brisbane to Bonn this winter.

Dresses for Men. The chitchat on the boulevards was of Balmain's lavish, fur-trimmed evening cloaks, of Balenciaga's cocoon-like capes and Givenchy's balloon-like cocktail dresses. But wherever gores and gussets were discussed by experts, Christian Dior's name led all the rest. Mindful of the dismal failure of 1954's sad-sack flat look, Dior had turned out a collection of slinky new gowns that puff up the bosom, pinch down the rump, swoop low around the neckline. Exulted the New York Herald Tribune's Eugenia Sheppard: "Dior has designed a collection for the men this time. The kept lady look. The undressed look!"

By far the biggest (1,200 employees) and most prosperous of Paris' 820-member couturiers' protective association, Designer Dior, 62, is a shy, balding Norman with a birdlike face and trencherman's paunch. Son of a wealthy chemical manufacturer, he started out to be a diplomat, instead opened a picture gallery, where he helped launch the career of Salvador Dali. Switching to fashion during the Depression, Dior first made his mark as a hat designer. After World War II service as an enlisted man, he was one of Lucien Lelong's top designers when Textile Tycoon Marcel Boussac decided to back a new fashion house. Boussac put

Dior to work in a mansion at 30 Avenue Montaigne. There, as L'Express Fashion Editor FranC,oise Giroud once remarked, diffident Christian Dior was "unknown on the 12th of February, 1947, famous on the 13th." The overnight event that made Dior: the New Look.

Guerrilla Warfare. Though Dior made headlines by dropping hemlines, he has made his fortune with the help of clever merchandising and Boussac backing. He branched into perfume, sports clothes, stockings, opened New York and Venezuelan branches to make high-priced ready-to-wear dresses (Dior's 1955 gross: $18 million). Today there are eight wholly owned Christian Dior companies and 16 firms that make Dior products under franchise.

By contrast, all but a designer's dozen fashion houses are engaged in a constant struggle for survival. Fortnight ago, Paquin-Worth, successor to the first Parisian couturier who made dresses for the trade instead of merely turning out clothes to order, folded after 106 years in business. France's elaborate social-security regulations make it impossible for the couturiers to cut the cost of elaborate hand labor. Moreover, they are constantly engaged in guerrilla warfare with the copyists who can market cheap versions of their gowns within weeks after the fall showings. Dior alone files about 40 international lawsuits a year; Givenchy and Balenciaga this year took the unprecedented step of barring the press from their salons.

Priceless Ingredient. Despite the purse-popping prices and cutthroat competition, Paris fashion houses sell about $15 million worth of clothes a year, still rely for at least 50% of their income on the wealthy women who can afford made-to-measure originals. Increasingly, however, the top designers depend for their bread and butter on manufacturers who buy their dresses for mass production.

Buyers flock faithfully to Paris, though the fashion houses seemingly make no effort to lure them there, no longer even throw the lavish champagne parties for which the late Jacques Path was famed. For though Paris no longer has a monopoly on fashion, it has one priceless ingredient no other style center can duplicate: the everlasting appeal of Paris itself.

But even if Dior shifted his headquarters to Paris, Texas (pop. 24,000), say most buyers, they would still have to make the annual pilgrimage to see his new designs. As one fashion expert said last week: "He's Atlas, holding up the entire French fashion industry."

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