Nothing Silly

The fashion show was put on with the best of intentions. Each garment was approved beforehand by a secret committee which agreed that it did not want anything silly or sensational. The purpose, said the sponsoring Los Angeles Fashion Group (mostly movie designers), was nothing so sordid as sales or headlines; it was to "improve taste" and "help turn fashion into more channels of sound and dignified progress [and] away from fly-by-night fads."

Thus shrewdly lured, some 1,200 store executives, buyers and fashion writers from all over the U.S. attended the $17-a-plate champagne supper last week at which Hollywood's "Fashion Futures" were unveiled. What they saw, in Earl Carroll's gaudy Hollywood restaurant, was enough to make some of them wonder who was being kidded. The 98 displays, each by a different designer, ranged in effect from the muffled look of the '90s to the bare look of tiger-skin days.

One outfit, a jacket with pencil-slim skirt by M-G-M Designer Irene, was so tight that the hobbled model could not walk down the stairs in it. A complicated "Toga for Travel," by Bonnie Cashin, consisted of a black dress under an enormous brown knee-length cape, set off by a matching sun helmet and candy-striped spats. Another cold weather number was a white fleece overcoat, by Elois Jenssen, electrically heated by batteries carried in two side pockets (with an extension cord that could be plugged in on planes or trains).

There was also Anne de Weese's three-piece "interchangeable," a striped daytime dress on which the top part could be dropped down to the waist to make a long-skirted, flounce-hipped evening dress, or taken off entirely to make a bathing suit. Among the more popular items (according to spectator ballots and a poll of designers present) were dresses and coats with foot-square monograms on the back. Not so popular were nine outfits for men, including a purple suede topcoat with shoes and hatband to match.

The most eye-catching were three dresses which featured what one observer dubbed "the pneumonia neckline." One of them, a Jean Louis "suit" slashed down to the solar plexus, employed a large artificial rose in the open air bodice as the only ward against chills.

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