Easter Lays a Small Egg

In the first springtime of the new peace last year, U.S. women shopped giddily for Easter finery. This year, things were different. Shopping was definitely sober.

The 1947 range of styles, colors and materials was wide. But prices were higher (shoes, hats, suits were up as much as 10% over 1946). And sales were slipping. Average dollar volume in Manhattan's apparel stores was off only about 1%. Yet this was enough to worry many a merchant with high inventory because it meant that unit sales were considerably under last year's. Said a salesgirl in high-hatted Hattie Carnegie's: "A woman who bought six hats last year will buy only four this year." (Hattie Carnegie's "popular" price $55.)

Women were tired of shoddy stuff. Now they wanted their money's worth. One milliner sighed, "If they say silk, it has to be real silk."

Like a Bag Race. To make matters worse, women were none too happy about 1947 fashions. They especially objected to lengthened skirts. Designers, revelling in OPA-less freedom, had gone berserk with swirls and pleats. They had dropped the hemline from the knee to at least midcalf. Some daytime dresses went almost to the ankles, making their wearers look like entries in a bag race. Resistance to these long skirts increased in direct ratio to distance from New York. In Chicago, a parade of long skirts at a fashion show drew a chorus of disgusted "Eeeks!" A customer at Chicago's Russeks insisted on having her new spring suit cut to knee-length until, after two fittings, she took a trip to New York. Back for a third fitting, she said resignedly: "All right, start all over again--hang the darned thing 14 inches from the floor."

Hats were not so bad. Most of them actually looked like hats. The freaks of 1946 were gone. Naturally, if a woman wanted to, she could still manage to get loaded down with a bowlful of fruit or a portable flower garden. But most husbands could see their wives in a Walter Florell lace halo or a Sally Victor straw without reaching for something to swat it with. Straws (from the Far East, Milan, Panama) were back in quantity, and popular.

Sales of perfume and costume jewelry were dolefully slow. But sales of gay scarves were phenomenal. They were 1947's chief fad everywhere. Another fad: "shorty" coats (known in some stores as "swallow tails"). In Chicago, Marshall Field's offered a shorty specialty which was going like hot cakes among teenagers: a "hot-jive jacket" of yellow plastic with such sharp legends as "Natch" and "Slick Chick" printed on it. The "slicker" days of the twenties were back.

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