Miss Jaffray & Japan

A favorite story of Julia Kippen Jaffray's concerns a friend who sent her rayon dress to the cleaners and got back only buttons. The dress turned to jelly. Julia Jaffray is a Canadian-born spinster of some 50 years who has made a name for herself in prison reform as secretary of the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor. Miss Jaffray is also much interested in women's club work and for the past year or two she has been the spearhead of a women's club drive which last week had the rayon industry seething with excitement. For Miss Jaffray has publicized her sex's textile troubles so completely that the Federal Trade Commission has just issued a set of rules causing headaches to everyone in the rayon business.

By disintegrating in the tub, inferior materials cost laundrymen some $6,000,000 a year; dry-cleaners some $16,000,000. And even the best rayon must be washed and ironed differently from silks if it is not to be injured. Women's clubs as long ago as 1920 were abuzz over the matter and in 1921 the General Federation of Women's Clubs adopted a truth-in-fabrics resolution. Last year the New York City Federation of Women's Clubs, through a committee headed by Miss Jaffray, sent a petition to Washington demanding that all goods have labels identifying their fibre content both so buyers would not be deceived and so they would know how to treat their purchases. During the FTC's year-long study of the matter, 2,000,000 more women sent petitions seconding the idea. Meanwhile, rayon producers grew worried, presented a voluntary set of rules which they agreed to follow. Since these merely restated the status quo, the FTC promptly rejected them. Three weeks ago it formulated its own set of rules, put them into effect at once over the anguished squeals of many a rayon man.

By the new FTC rules, rayon producers are ordered to label their goods specifically throughout the manufacturing and distributing process. If a scarf is part silk, but mostly rayon, it must be labeled "rayon-silk." If it is mostly silk it is to be labeled "silk-rayon." Makers who have sought to avoid the stigma that sometimes is attached to the name rayon by concocting trade and process names like Celanese, Bemberg and acetate may still use them, but must also label the goods as rayon. Sample: "Bemberg-rayon."

The FTC has no immediate legal weapon to force rayon producers to obey the rules,* but the National Retail Dry Goods Association was last week urging all its members to do so. The N.R.D.G.A. regards fibre identification as one more inevitable manifestation of the consumer research and protection movement that has been spreading through the U. S. for the past decade. But many a rayon man, forced into expensive changes of his production and advertising systems, thinks differently, and various rayon groups have spent the three weeks since the original FTC decision trying hard to get it altered. Last week Erwin Feldman, counsel for the National Association of House Dress Manufacturers, tried a new tack by storming that fibre identification is due to Japanese propaganda spread by the International Silk Guild in an attempt to spike rayon sales.

Retorted Miss Jaffray: "I have no knowledge of any Japanese propaganda . . . but I do not see that this story, whatever its basis, in any way affects the fairness of consumers being given full knowledge of what they buy."

Finding there was "no probable violation of the law" involved, the FTC refused to investigate.

*It can only complain to a court, which may bring charges.

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