Counter-Revolution

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Not since Irene Castle bobbed her hair in 1914 had there been such turmoil, twittering and posturing among American women. What was going on? The search for the "New Look." What was the New Look? No one knew precisely.

Some fashion designers proposed hobble skirts, hoop skirts and skirts that flapped about the ankles. Some went in for unpadded shoulders; others padded hips. Some placed their trust in the back bustle, side bustle and the wasp-waist corset, whose constrictions in the last century had been a mainstay of jokesmiths and had made its wearers subject to fainting fits and worse.

In short, fashion was up to its old tricks--peddling, as Oscar Wilde observed, "that by which the fantastic becomes for a moment universal."

All this dithering convinced many a woman that the New Look was merely cockeyed. In Georgia, a group of outraged men formed the League of Broke Husbands, hoped to get "30,000 American husbands to hold that hemline." In Louisville, 1,265 Little Below the Knee Club members signed a manifesto against any change in the old knee-high style. And in Oildale, Calif., Mrs. Louise Horn gave a timely demonstration of the dangers lurking in the New Look. As she alighted from a bus, her new long, full skirt caught in the door. The bus started up and she had to run a block before the bus stopped and she was freed.

Revolution. Despite such minor setbacks, the style revolution rolled on. It had been too carefully planned to be stopped by such molehills as unorganized scoffers or individual critics. When wartime clothing restrictions were abandoned a year ago, designers had cautiously lowered hems a bit. This excited so little interest that the $4 billion women's clothing industry, one of the biggest in the U.S., fell into a frightening slump this spring. Orders in many lines fell off as much as 60% (some of this was due to manufacturers' waiting for fabric price cuts that never came). Obviously, what was needed was a sweeping change--a revolution in style that would make all the present styles unwearable.

As U.S. designers fell to this job with a will, they were ably abetted by Paris. There the brasshats of fashion, indifferent as always to the wishes or even the shapes of their subjects, panted to regain the attention, if not the prestige, which they had lost during the war. Almost before anyone could say haute couture, such Parisian newcomers as Christian Dior were making a great to-do about squeezing waists into wasp lines and padding out hips--and the revolution was on.

Counter-Revolution. As with most revolutions, this one bred its own counterrevolution. Last week, in the perfumed air of a pale blue room on the third floor of Manhattan's Saks Fifth Avenue, one act of that counterrevolution was being staged. There Designer Sophie Gimbel was displaying her fall collection of 125 models. In the world of high fashion, it was a notable event.

The collection constituted Sophie Gimbel's conception of the New Look. As head of Saks's famed Salon Moderne, its custom dress shop, Sophie is one of the top U.S. designers. Moreover, as the U.S. dress industry is well aware, she has a razor-keen sense, as sharp as any other designer's, of what U.S. women will finally choose to wear out of the hodge-podge of new styles. As far as the great mass-producing dress shops of Manhattan's Seventh Avenue are concerned, that makes Sophie a fashion chart. What she displays one week--at $255 a dress and -up--is often what the Seventh Avenue lofts will be busily making into a reasonable facsimile a year later, for $49.50.

As Sophie's slim-waisted models swept about her salon last week, the carefully curried audience of women (and one sad husband looking like a Displaced Person) cooed with pleasant surprise. Nowhere was there a sign of fantastic extremes that had given the New Look its painful expression. Sophie had simply gone her own, independent way and created a New Look that was an easily recognizable alteration of the Old. Shoulders were padded slightly less than before and waists were narrower, but few were corseted, and daytime hemlines, only slightly lower, were still a long way from the ankles. ("Everyone," said Sophie, "knows that dresses were too short.")

In a word, Sophie was reassuring: she was telling the world that the New Look could be acquired with comparatively little pain to either torsos or pocketbooks. "After all," said she, "our girls have beautiful figures. Do you think they'll want to spoil them with padded hips? Even if they do like this tight waistline, how many are willing to go through the agony to get it? I put on one of those new corsets and after 15 minutes I had to take it off. I've never been so uncomfortable in my life."

Conservative Manifesto. Sophie has always been content to let more flashy designers go their own gait, and doesn't worry about trying to set a trend. She believes in the maxim that the best-dressed women follow the fashions at a discreet distance. Her style is to be simple and unaffected. Says she: "I try to make a woman look as sexy as possible and yet look like a perfect lady." Many women want to look like that. Consequently, Sophie probably sells more clothes than any other designer, with the possible exception of her archrival, Hattie Carnegie.

At 49, her tall (5 ft. 8 1/2 in.), slim figure is still a fashionable model's size (35 in. bust, 26 waist, 36 hips). She keeps it that way by calisthenics, by often walking to work from her Manhattan house, by dieting and by plenty of golf, which she plays in the high 80s. (She wears a girdle, as thin as possible, only because she doesn't think it's "nice" to go ungirdled.) Her working dress is usually one of her own simple black $300 daytime dresses.

She puts in a concentrated working day. Usually she is in her salon by 10 and works straight through, often without lunch, until 6. Her corner office is tiny (12 ft. by 15 ft.). Her desk has a bargain-basement clutter of sketches, snapshots and a teacup or two. For her big-spending customers, such as Mrs. E. F. Hutton, Mrs. Pierre du Pont and Mrs. James Van Alen, Sophie usually pops out of her office and plays salesgirl herself. She is quite a salesgirl, and can usually manage to charm the customers into wearing what she thinks they should. Before an adamantine customer who knows exactly what she wants, regardless, Sophie gracefully gives in. "I used to tell everyone when something wasn't becoming to them," she says. "Then they went right out to other shops and bought something like it anyway. Now I only tell it to those who'll take my advice."

Nor does Sophie worry about that bugaboo of smart shops--selling the same $500 dress to two women and having them both wear it to the same party. She tells her regular customers what their friends have bought. But occasional customers have to take their chances.

For designing, selling and overseeing the 300 fitters, seamstresses, etc. in her workshop, Sophie is paid $34,000 a year by her boss, who is also her husband-Adam Gimbel, president of Saks and cousin of Bernard Gimbel, president of the parent company, Gimbel Brothers, Inc.

Model at Work. Sophie and Adam live with her son, Jay Rossbach (by Sophie's first marriage), in a modernized four-story house on Manhattan's East 64th Street. (Their twin beds have "Sophie" and "Adam" cosily embroidered on the pillowslips.) Sophie's hobbies are collecting china dogs and raising tulips and rhododendrons in the small garden in the rear. They also lease a small, seven-room country house near Red Bank, N.J.

As boss of Saks, and as a genial extravert who likes to air his opinions, Adam is not above telling Sophie how she ought to run her fashion business. Sophie usually ends such discussions: "Now, Adam, dear, we've been all over that before. You know how familiar I am with the subject, so let's not discuss it again."

Although Sophie works hard, she has enough time for an active social life and usually is not in bed before 1 a.m. Even at parties she is really working at modeling her own clothes. She seldom comes home from a party without a handful of orders for whatever she had on.

Looking Backward. As Adam's wife, Sophie's abilities as a designer have not always been above suspicion in the skeptical dress industry. Her rivals try to belittle her by saying: "After all, she's the boss's wife." But no one who knows Adam really believes that that's the answer. Sophie has her job because she has earned it. And in the backbiting world of fashion she is quite able to take care of herself. As Sophie says, in her most ladylike tones: "After all, my dear, Hattie Carnegie isn't really a designer. She's a saleswoman." (Catty-cornered across the way, Hattie parries this knife-thrust acidly: "I wouldn't call Sophie a competitor because I don't even think twice about her.") Sophie makes no bones about the fact that she is no drawing-board designer, that she couldn't draw a curve to save her neck. If it comes to that, most of the other top designers are no better with a pencil than Sophie. "But," as she says, "they won't admit it. We all design in just about the same way."

Sophie designs with the help of a sketcher and tall, bald Stewart Erlkin, who is a good enough designer to do Sophie's sophisticated models with little help from her. She also buys sketches from outsiders, changing them to suit her taste. And, like all other designers, she constantly combs over the styles of the last 5,000 years. One of her most fertile hunting grounds is the Brooklyn Museum, which she likes because it lets her take costumes back to her shop for copying. This year it supplied the inspiration for a woman's suit jacket copied from a man's hunting coat, and 15 dresses and a blouse with a filmy, peekaboo look, copied from a 75-year-old camisole. Sophie is well aware of the limitations of her art, and that styles run in amazingly regular cycles.* The trick is timing: to pick the right idea out of the past at the right time in the present. (This year's much touted "domino coat," which makes a woman look as if she were peering out of a tent, is nothing but the pyramid coat of 1866.)

Expensive Bargains. Sophie designs by telling one of her $125-a-week modelmakers exactly what she wants. To save money, a "mockup" of the dress is usually made first, in cheap muslin. When this is satisfactory, the muslin serves as a pattern. Compared to her costs, Sophie's selling prices of $255 to $1,500 are comparatively modest. Example: in her most expensive evening dress, the ermine trim alone cost $500, the chiffon another $76, overhead and workmanship, $294. With the markup of 42%, the selling price was $1,500.

On her cheapest suits--which sell for $365--Sophie laments that she loses money, making them only as a courtesy to customers. On the other hand, her clothes seldom wear out or go out of style quickly. Recently, while she was visiting the Darryl Zanucks in Hollywood, a party was given for Sophie. Mrs. Zanuck wore an eight-year-old Sophie dress.

Dress & Doll. Sophie was born in Houston, Tex. Her father, Felix Haas, a tobacco merchant, died when she was four years old and a year later her mother married Dr. John Alexander McLeay, a Canadian surgeon, and the family moved to Atlanta, Ga. (Now 80, Mrs. McLeay lives alone at New York's Hotel Delmonico.) Sophie's first fling at designing was as a child in Atlanta; she made clothes for her dolls. Her mother believed in girls' marrying young, so Sophie obliged her by marrying at 19, went to live with her husband in Philadelphia, where he was in the leather business. For nine years she lived the superficially quiet life of a well-to-do housewife, spent her spare time designing clothes for amateur theatricals. Then she was divorced ("it was all very friendly--we just decided we didn't get on together").

Adam Gimbel, a chronic bachelor whom she had met socially some years previously, hired her after a look at some of her theatrical designs--as a "stylist" at Saks. (Stylists were experts in good taste who counseled buyers on what was "chic.") One of her jobs was to go to Paris and buy French models to bring back for Saks to copy. In 1929, he asked her to take over the then slipping Salon Moderne.

The French and all other designers guard their new styles from each other like atomic-bomb secrets (no customers can get into Sophie's salon unless they have been "introduced" and she is sure they aren't there to crib her ideas). But after their showings they are glad to have American style-cribbers buy them to copy; it is a large part of their business. Sophie was returning from such a Paris mission in 1931, when, on the last day out, Adam called her by ship-to-shore phone from New York: "Hold your breath, we're going to be married tomorrow." They got married on a Saturday and Sophie went back to work on Monday.

Run a Salon. The trouble with the salon was that it had no prestige. Determinedly Sophie set out to get some.

One way was to design for Broadway shows. So Sophie designed for 29 shows one year and 32 the next: among them were Dodsworth, The Women, Reunion in Vienna. As customers began to find their way to the salon, she dropped all theatrical designing except as an occasional favor for one of her friends. The profit was not worth the worry. "They always beat down your price and then wanted another 10% off for the publicity," Sophie says.

As the salon prospered, Sophie put out a cheaper ready-to-wear line--the Sophie Originals--which are sold in nine specialty shops around the country for as little as $89. A month ago, Sophie-expanded further. She opened a branch of her salon in Saks's Hollywood store, to the enthusiastic squeals of screen queens and producers' wives. In the first week, the new salon grossed $49,000, much more than Sophie had expected. Hedy Lamarr ordered seven Sophie numbers. Darryl Zanuck told her confidentially: "Our stars simply refuse to wear those outlandish new things." Hollywood had one complaint: Sophie's prices were "too cheap."

"If they don't pay twice as much as a dress is worth, they think it's no good," said Sophie, then added stoutly: "But I'll be darned if I'll raise my prices."

Profit or Loss? As to whether the salon makes a profit, there is some disagreement. Together with the new Los Angeles salon, it will gross about $1,000,000 this year, said Sophie, and "make plenty of money." But in the incredibly expensive business of custom-made women's clothes, a profit is an elusive thing. Adam Gimbel won't say whether the salon will make one. However, Saks will net some $900,000 on Sophie Originals. Though Adam occasionally winces at Sophie's extravagant way of using $40-a-yard material (she keeps nearly $1,000,000 in materials on hand), he is exceedingly happy to take his salon profit in prestige for Saks. Though Saks carries the clothes of 27 other American designers, it no longer buys any Paris models. "If they want Paris clothes, they'll have to go somewhere else," says Sophie firmly. "But in the last two years, few of my customers have wanted anything from Paris."

New for Old. But other U.S. designers are not so sure. Manhattan's Hattie Carnegie, who claims to have started the hip-padding "before anyone heard of Dior," was featuring Paris dresses last week, and busily pinching in waists, lowering hems. So was Manhattan's Henri Bendel, who was showing ankle-length skirts and padded hips. Nettie Rosenstein, the top designer of the mass-producing Seventh Avenue factories, was going in for padding and long skirts. Seventh Avenue's Harriet Harra went even further with a "wraparound" cocktail suit which would have made an Egyptian mummy feel at home. But Russian-born, beautiful Valentina (Mme. George Schlee) was almost as conservative as Sophie. Her hems were down slightly and her decolletage was down a lot. Said Valentina: "The bozoom ees half-exposed, jost enoff to cover the--you know." Many a small-fry designer was trying so desperately to get everything Parisian into one dress that some models looked like an anthology of style.

To make matters warmer for those trying to take Paris or leave it alone, Christian Dior hustled to the U.S. last week to accept an award from Dallas' Neiman-Marcus Co. for his "outstanding service" to the clothing industry. For the counter-revolutionists he had a well-bred sneer. "The women who are loudest for short skirts will soon be wearing the longest dresses. I know very well the women. The short skirt was never a good fashion-- very vulgar. The American women will accept the new fashions. You can never stop the fashions."

No one was really trying to stop them. Despite the outcries, women were already showing enough enthusiasm for the New Look to pull the dress industry out of its slump and set it humming. Hems of old dresses were being let down with such speed that many a town ran out of seam tape. Said Harper's Bazaar airily: "Clear your closet and get your clothes into the hands of those who can use them [in Europe]." But the dresses most likely to be sought would probably be closer to Sophie Gimbel's ideas than to Dior's.

*In her definitive study, Recurring Cycles of Fashion, Agnes Brooks Young discovered only three major styles in women's dresses in the last 200 years: back fullness (the bustle), tubular skirts (the basic fashion from 1900 through 1937), and the bell skirt of pre-Civil War days. Each cycle seemed to last about 38 years.

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