Dressing Down

Nearly a decade ago a New Yorker cartoon by Carl Rose showed a mother urging broccoli on an emancipated child whose response became immortal: "I say it's spinach--and I say to hell with it." To designers, spinach is not only a humble green but a trade word for any superfluous decoration. From these two sources came the fitting title of a book published this week by Manhattan's No. 1 dress designer, petite, smart, feline Elizabeth Hawes.* To Designer Hawes, "fashion" is superfluous decoration. In the process of telling how she shrugged it off she gives the dress trade a sane and entertaining dressing down.

A Vassar girl who found out about chic during apprenticeship with Paris copyists, "Babe" Hawes made no study to write her book, told only about what she had run up against or figured out in business. This was considerable. First U. S. designer to challenge Paris successfully, first to show U. S.-designed clothes in Paris, first foreign designer invited to show her stuff in the Soviet Union, Elizabeth Hawes believes in "style," a quality in a dress which enables its purchaser to wear it happily for three years. Style changes about every seventh year. On the other hand, the fashion world is a dizzy merry-go-round of superficial changes which enable mass manufacturers to sell cheap, ill-fitting, flimsy garments by the million.

Elizabeth Hawes thinks this is already a complete anachronism, that the time has come and that she herself has proved that U. S. manufacturers would do better each to hire a real designer and specialize in something the public wants, instead of herding frantically after the French or one another.

Last week Fashion Critic Hawes was still pouting at her publishers because they refused to illustrate her book with drawings she had had made by one of her favorite artists, the New Yorker's Helen Elna Hokinson. She vowed she was going to write another book, one that no publisher could consider too serious for Hokinson illustrations. Far less concerned with the incident than the fiery Hawes, shy Artist Hokinson, a specialist in the idiosyncrasies of clubwomen, was last week mainly interested in a delightful mass of raw material--a mob of inimitably shaped Garden Clubbers who descended on Manhattan's annual Flower Show. One of the few New Yorker satirists whose style has resisted fashion for a decade, Hokinson's workshop is her bedroom, in a neat little apartment on Manhattan's Beekman Place. On her living-room wall are two glossy, old-fashioned American landscapes which she picked up in Connecticut last summer for $7. She calls them her van Goghs.

*FASHION IS SPINACH--Random House ($2.75).

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