In Search of Style
Two women undertake a modern odyssey to find the golden fleece of fashion in Dallas and San Antonio. Where do they find it?
(Page 2 of 3)
With that good advice, in the afternoon the girls took on Marie Leavells and Lou Lattimore—two smaller Dallas stores that gave women a more intimate environment to shop in than Neiman's and other large department stores. The older generation it seems had demanded boutiques even before the young. These stores were the outcome of that desire.
Salesladies dominate the smaller stores. You are walking into their lair. A good saleslady is like a good waiter. She is there to serve, but not to interfere. Like a waiter who introduces you to the good wines or the specialty of the restaurant, she should introduce you to the store's merchandise and perhaps make suggestions, but not hover like a hawk.
At Marie Leavells there is a rich muzak playing, all the better to look at the superb separates—skirts, blouses, pants, all wonderful colors and fabrics. And a whole room of just dresses—the big names and small names. Plus costume Jewelry, shoes and accessories.
Unfortunately at Marie Leavells, Maria and Emily were invisible. It was as though a caste system prevailed, with the salesladies in black at the top of the ladder, and anyone not a regular or type-cast client, an untouchable. The girls did not look tacky; they did not even examine price tags. After their arms were filled with dresses and separates and they stood stranded, a saleslady from the pool of gossiping employees approached them gingerly. She showed them to a dressing room and vanished.
Because the price tags had their own hieroglyphics, they found they had a dressing room of misfits. Finally the saleslady returned, carrying a bunch of sale dresses that ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. One, a brown taffeta number with a bouquet of autumn flowers and ribbons in the bodice, looked just right for a chic condolence call. The saleslady was either unacquainted with their type or was just trying to push anything. Emily however had found a wool suit with an Eisenhower jacket that looked smart, if not stunning. She stared at three reproductions of herself in the mirror, then stared some more. It was 90 degrees in Dallas and hard to get on the wool bandwagon.
She turned to the saleslady and said, "I want to think about this for an hour; will you please hold it." "Oh gosh," Said the saleslady, hissing (all her worst premonitions realized). She had wasted five minutes on these hussies. Sweeping the dresses out of the room, she disappeared without a word into the small unfathomable psychological void of the store. Neither Ellen nor Sally had prepared the girls for the cruelty of salesladies.
At the threshold of Lou Lattimore things looked more hopeful. The store not only caters to mature women, but has a good department for the younger set, with clothes clearly designed for those under 30, and a new shoe closet from Henri Bendel. The salesladies pride themselves on having call customers whom they nurture through new styles and notify when new clothes arrive. They also don't appear to disdain a new customer. As one saleslady said, "Customers come in. They're going to buy clothes somewhere. If not here, then somewhere else. So I'm nice to them."
It is clearly the search and seizure method that works at Lou Lattimore. The girls put themselves in the hands of a young saleslady. She brought in beautiful pant outfits, and told Emily that an outfit she was then trying on was just too S S and G (sweet, simple and girlish). After trying on three thoroughly smart outfits, the girls got the feeling that if they could send in a second, an understudy, it would be the same experience. The clothes were there with or without you. There was no mystery, no space to play with. The clothes made a statement whether they were on a hanger or you tagged along. The girls reacted against this premeditated, successful look.
There were a few hours of store daylight left so they decided to follow the lead to Colette Brezin, a small boutique located in Old Town. Not only does Paris play a historic part in couture fashion, but stores now are starting to order French ready-to-wear fashions like Cacharel and Frank Olivier. This boutique was an extreme example, carrying only French imports.
The girls were filled with hopeful anticipation. Like many young people, they derived some of their style from movies. One could say that movies are manufacturing style. In the streets of Dallas they had seen weird Cabaret-looking characters in askew derby hats and green and red nails. Luckily for Maria and Emily, they had always been partial to the minor characters: the French walk-on who appears for three minutes behind Simone Signoret in some obscure movie; the woman who has the one-minute bit sipping coffee and smoking a Gauloise in a cafe.
There are many styles of French clothing, some casual and some strident. They all have in common a unique cut that traces the female body with beautiful colors and fabrics.
Maria disappeared into a dressing room with a pair of smashing black pants and an armful of blouses.
She casually looked down at the price tags—$34 for the pants, $34 for the silk blouse, and $30 less 30 percent for the short green sailor top with the revealing net that said Paris. Emily told her friend, "Stop your penny pinchin' self and buy it." The girls, with eyes much bigger than their purses, drove away with a green Cacharel shopping bag between them and $80 worth of French imports.
Remembering the wise words at the luncheon that a good alterations lady can save you a fortune, the girls hied themselves to one the next morning. Gussie, she was called, and she had both young, old, rich, and poor customers. And as luck would have it, she also had the gift of gab.
At her home they settled into a comfortable couch. The girls began probing. Do most of your women, they wondered, have style? "Oh my dears, I've seen the dowdiest ones that God ever let live. Their taste is all in their mouths. Some even will listen to anything their husbands say. And that's a pity because all men are partially color blind, don't you know. If daddy don't like it, mommy takes it back. I had one woman come to me and say, 'Gussie, my husband don't like it.' I told her, 'Well tell him you wasn't gonna let him wear it anyway.'"
Continuing on from this perspective, Gussie said that women like clothes that look as if they were made for them. Of course with the range of measurements and no two manufacturers using the same standard size, alterations are usually a necessity to make a dress yours. "I do a lot of work on Italian clothes. They allow for no bust and get tight little arm sizes." Suddenly her eyes turned toward heaven: "And the clothes out of the Orient—the bane of my existence. Those Oriental women are the same size up and down. The clothes are cut so slight. Dallas women go over to Hong Kong, have dresses made in two days and Gussie spends two weeks trying to get them to fit em."
Gussie talked about the rare l00-percent natural fabrics: wool, silks, cotton and flax (some of them endangered fabrics). However, she admitted the necessity of the new acrylics for people who cannot afford help anymore and who have no time for wrinkles. "I work on some of the weirdest conglomerations—the law forces manufacturers to print the contents—19 percent silk, 50 percent acetate, 9 percent nylon and whatever. The Japanese—bless their little enterprising souls—have cornered the natural fiber world."
Gussie off on her own steam told of her customers' experience with fashion: "I have one lady, I call her the Duchess, because like the Duchess of Windsor, if she finds a style she likes, she has it made in every shade of blue. If I didn't call a halt, every dress would be exactly the same."
The girls asked a question, though Gussie needed no stimulus—"Do women buy everything the manufacturers feed them?" She looked triumphant. "Three years ago with the midi, I didn't have but three customers that bought them. That old ugly mid-calf length you can't even shorten it, and it makes it look bobbed off. Women started wearing pants that year, cause of the midi, and big Mr. Fairchild nor no one else will ever get women out of pants. They're just too comfortable. Yes, sir, the midi gave me faith in American women and a lot of manufacturers went broke that year," she said with a glint in her eyes.
The girls wondered what gripes she as a dressmaker had about current clothes. "Why, the shoddy workmanship; even in designer clothes—it's unreal! When Norell died last year, there went the last tailor in the world. The boutique lines are the worst. My ladies bring these $50, $100 dresses in and say, 'Gussie, just take the Sears Roebuck look out of them.' No one fastens facing down anymore; the seams will split on you the first time out. I have to reseam them all. I got one woman, a gal who's 40 with a figure that wouldn't quit: she spends her whole life made at New York."
Upon leaving the girls asked for a last piece of advice. "Get something that does something for you, dears. Cause if it doesn't do something for you, it does something to you." Amen.
The girls realized that a lot of their generation, themselves included, were just wearing cut-offs, as though some fashion sense had been short-circuited. Thrift shops have recently come to the fore as the vogue place to shop for expensive rags. Like sea gulls you have to be at the right place at the right time to scavenge the perfect thing. In this way it may take two months to complete an outfit; a scrap found here, a scrap there, but once found that outfit might stay with you for years. Whenever Maria had ventured into thrift shops and tried on garments, she always came out worse in the bargain than the actual char lady who had originally abandoned the house dress or whatever—after all she had neither the robust nor frail measurements of the past.
The Gazebo, a relatively new boutique in Dallas, appreciates the past, but is unwilling to leave it to fate to find the perfect halter to go with the perfect old skirt. So, they have new revivals of the past and end up being a near-perfect thrift shop with Neiman's prices.
My Library
