Fall Opening

From the Place Vendome to the Etoile, along the avenues and down the alleys where Paris couturiers have their lairs and set the world's fashions, all was feverish activity last week. U. S. department store buyers and fashion reporters, newsgatherers and ladies of the haute monde scurried from one fashion house to the next, for it was the official Fall Opening. They and the waiting world were eager to learn what the well-dressed woman must wear for the next six months.

The first ten days of Spring and Fall showings are secret affairs, by invitation only. Prior to this there are even more exclusive Private Views, with champagne and salad at the bigger & better houses, a custom begun in 1921. Jean Patou, as every schoolgirl knows, has an elaborate modernistic cocktail bar, free to customers, favored friends and to all comers admitted to an Opening. To Jean Patou first flocked last week's observers.

Buyers and reporters sat staring pensively as the mannequins wove languorously back and forth before them, checked favored numbers in their catalogs. For exclusive rights to the models, U. S. importers were ready to pay from $3,000 to $5,000 apiece.

Notes on new models seen last week:

Jean Patou--High waistlines, skirts five inches below the knee for sports, just clearing the floor at night. The "Egyptian silhouet," evening gowns with a draped front, skirt slit to the calf. Peaked cloth caps for winter sports with fur ear-laps a la Kennebunk Port. Featured colors: dark yellow, green, astrakhan beige.

Jeanne Lanvin--Again Greek and Egyptian evening dresses, leg o' mutton sleeves and rudimentary bustles. Whole dresses of ribbon and chenille on net. Intricate sleeves, much button trimming. Coats flared from the shoulder rather than belted.

Augustabernard--Pastel and white evening dresses with twisted belts of chiffon velvet. In reaction to the waist-length velvet evening jackets of last Spring are toe-length evening coats, draped like dresses. The Augustabernard waistline is down to the top of the hips.

Paul Poiret, always theatrical, startled fashion scouts with high Elizabethan ruffs on formal afternoon dresses, with lame skirts over lace trousers, an evening sensation.

Captain Roland Molyneux--Loyal to the Empire waistline, the captain-couturier is even more Napoleonic in attempting to revive the poke bonnet, trimmed with fur, ostrich feathers, cock plumes. Lounging pyjamas are voluminous, trailing like a dress in back, trousered in front.

Mme. Gabrielle Chanel--Even hemlines, waist at the hips. Sport skirts just cover the knee. Evening skirts flare from the hip or the knee, have ruffled backs. (Again the bustle.)

Jean Charles Worth--Square velvet fans and leg o' mutton topped satin gloves. Black ermine muffs. Fur hems on jersey skirts. Evening dresses of gold lace.

Paris police gave a fillip to the Fall Openings by raiding a small apartment, arresting two U. S. women: Caroline Davis, 38, of East Orange, N. J. and Ida Helen Oliver, 40, of Parnassus, Pa. The crime of which Misses Davis and Oliver were accused was that of copying the copyrighted designs of Parisian couturiers, bootlegging them to U. S. buyers and bargain-hunting Frenchwomen.

Bane of Paris dressmakers are the copyists, elaborate are the precautions taken to defeat them. Models, patterns and exclusive materials are kept locked in office vaults. At the exhibitions, pads and notebooks are forbidden, amateur detectives tiptoe about on the lookout for surreptitious sketching. Copyists retaliate by employing memorizers, artists (generally women) who have trained themselves to sit empty-handed in showrooms and memorize every detail of the dresses that pass before them, then rush home to put these designs on paper.

There is no recognizing a memorizer--they may appear as guides, interpreters for rich U. S. women, newsgatherers, trained nurses, or wealthy widows from the Argentine. For stolen designs, memorizers are paid up to 50 francs ($2) apiece. It is a paying profession. Trained memorizers can remember every detail of 80 or 90 different dresses in an afternoon. Caroline Davis and Ida Helen Oliver, confessing last week, said they had earned nearly 50,000 francs ($2,000) in good months the past three years.

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