More's the Pitti

If Paris designers never look back, it may be because they have a feeling something is gaining on them. If something is, it is probably Italian designers, every one of whom is aware that he can make up some yardage only by being even a little more daring than the French.

Suspenders, No Straps. Thus it was naturally Italy's Emilio Pucci, lightweight sportswear champion of the world, who predicted that it would not be long before bikini wearers, dissatisfied with halfway measures and interrupted suntans, would drop their modest pretensions along with the tops of their suits. And though the U.S.'s Rudi Gernreich was the first to snatch the idea off the rack and get it on the market (TIME, June 26), the evidence presented at the fall fashion collections in Florence last week showed that the Italians were not prepared to let the U.S. run off with the topless suit honors.

Paraded on the temporary runway installed in the staid old Pitti Palace, where Florence's fashionmakers stage their shows, bosoms were bared in a multitude of styles and shapes. Some designs were legitimate, some looked more like gags: Micia tore holes that left a knitted overblouse looking like supersized Swiss cheese, showed a G-string bikini beneath to any mouse man enough to peep. Glans left only two prim pockets on an otherwise totally transparent shirt. Veneziani attached five-inch-wide suspenders to the waist of a party skirt and called it an evening gown; Princess Irene Galitzine cut a V that kept going, fore and aft, out of a sleek leopard-printed swimsuit. Baldini decorated a perfectly modest little bathing suit with two prominent painted breasts. And Frederico Forquet un-topped them all with a full-length strapless dress that was minus more than straps, leaving the bosom up in the air and out in it.

Coveralls, No Show. But Pucci, who had started it all, was not about to yield the field. First to be bold, last to be undone by fellows who had followed the leader and left him behind, Pucci could only retreat or fight. In a virtuoso display of fashion theatrics, he chose to do both, for a starter wrapped two pretty Negro mannequins in hoods and long silk burnooses that whipped off, without warning, to show patches of scanty bikinis underneath.

The topless suit? With a shrug and a yawn, Pucci turned gentleman and traitor, offered women wary of fads or of catching a cold, a grand way to cover up. It is a one-piece coverall outfit that fastens down the front, has to be stepped into, and is so difficult to get out of that the sun is bound to go down before it does, leaving a beachful of spectators ogling in the dark.

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