Passion Fashion

Lips pout, eyes smolder, bosoms and hips swell like baked goods with too much yeast. Clothes cannot contain these creatures--nor are they meant to. Bras and girdles, filmy negligees and deep-plunging necklines only point up the obvious, or pad out the underdeveloped until, literally, their cups runneth over. They are the antithesis of haute couture's slender subtleties, these fantasy models in the catalogues put out by Frederick's of Hollywood. They promise, in striking graphics, what any woman might achieve in styles by Frederick's.

Frederick is Frederick Mellinger, 55, the biggest and most durable designer and retailer of passion fashions in the U.S. Others in the mail-order or over-the-counter trade handle a few lines of aphrodisiac undies and false fronts, calves and bottoms. Mellinger conceives, promotes and sells an entire wardrobe for women who fancy the look of Sadie Thompson.

Giving Action. Mellinger was working for a New York lingerie mail-order house in the late '30s when the notion first struck him that "there simply was not enough romance in the way of clothes. I was always making notes saying more bust here, more fanny there, less waist here." After the war, he picked Hollywood for home base and in 1947 turned out his first designs, using leering catalogue copy for emphasis.

Frederick's was the first in the country to conceive crotchless panties ("an exotic addition to your wardrobe"), the inflatable bra ("blow yourself up to your favorite size"), girdles with padded bottoms ("for unrivaled curves"), foundations without any bottoms ("the living end"), bras with holes in the middle ("a Hollywood favorite").

When not pioneering new items, Frederick's offers old ones with frills, such as panties with embroidered messages ("eeny, meeny, miny, moe, this is as far as you can go") and see-through wisps of nightgowns, designed to be torn off ("elastic straps and neckline are made to G-I-V-E with the action").

Live Marriages. The pitch has worn well. By 1965, Mellinger owned 22 retail stores around the country and had gross sales of more than $5,000,000. This year, with volume already past $9,000,000, there are 38 Frederick's of Hollywood outlets, all but three of them owned by Mellinger. The others are franchised. They are not in Newport or Palm Beach or on Fifth Avenue. Instead, the market is in places like Dayton, Omaha, Oklahoma City and Youngstown. The ultimate target, of course, is the TV-numbed husband or the uncertain swain who needs some visual encouragement to remember the woman in his life.

Though Mellinger boasts that he is "interested in women dressing to please men," he also admits that he is "in the business of deceiving men like crazy." Many men prefer it that way. Mellinger claims that he receives dozens of letters a week testifying to "a wonderful evening I'll never forget," products that "have kept our marriage young and alive."

Aside from the vulgarity, the Frederick's phenomenon is an almost perfect target for the Women's Liberation Movement. Passion fashions are clearly male-chauvinist and designed to turn females into mere sex objects. That is part of their nostalgic appeal. In the world of Frederick's, the bra not only endures, it prevails. The allure of Rita Hayworth, circa 1945, lives on.

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