The Living End

For years, skiing was a sport for sun burned huskies in low-slung plus fours and a handful of hardy girls willing to bundle up like a G.I. blanket roll. Now the whole shape of skiing has been changed by a trim, cozy and inordinately sexy import from Germany: stretch pants. Many a girl who did not know a slalom from a sitzmark has discovered that stretch pants round out her personality in a fetching manner and make a skiing weekend an opportunity rather than an ordeal; men linger on the trails to see rather than ski as the girls in the stretch pants schuss by. Says one spectator sportsman: "The development of stretch pants is really more important than the discovery of the ski."

Schiaparelli of the stretch pants is snowy-haired Maria Bogner, 47, stunning wife of former German Olympic Ski Star Willy Bogner. In 1950, after Bogner's release as a prisoner of war (he had been an SS lieutenant), Willy and Maria bought a small factory just south of Munich, started making and selling sportswear. One day a salesman arrived with a bolt of a Swiss-patented kink-nylon and wool-yarn fabric called Helanca. It stretched up, down and sideways, then sprang miraculously back into shape. Maria ordered some and set about turning it into ski pants. Still svelte, she created a minor sensation wherever she appeared in her new stretch pants. Next year the Bogners sold only 1,000 pairs of the pants, but have since stretched their output, last year sold more than 120,000 all over the world--many to clients who will never see a slope steeper than the spiral ramp of Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum.

Bogner pants are not cheap (prices run from about $50 to $60), and there are many cheaper imitations. But for every snow bunny from Squaw Valley to Stowe, a pair of Bogners is the basic status symbol. And Willy Bogner finds U.S. girls the best advertisement his stretch pants could have. Says he: "They are trimmer, you know. American girls are built like pears. European girls are like apples."

Despite Willy Bogner's generous views, not all U.S. girls are pear-shaped, and many an Ample Annie has packed herself into stretch pants only to find that she is courting disaster at every turn. Gasps one: "Every time I climb into my pants I have the feeling that somewhere the stretch is going to give; I'm afraid to sit down, and I just walk around like a mechanical soldier. The fellows don't realize that Bogners are really gigantic girdles. Last week I was dancing with a Dartmouth senior who kept ogling this blonde who could hardly move in her stretchies. 'Now there's a nice pair of Bogners,' he said. And I said to myself: 'Buster, you should see her trying to get out of them.'"

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