WOMEN'S CLOTHES

Why They Are So Expensive

DO women's clothes cost too much?

Men through the ages have darkly --and vociferously--suspected that they do. They cannot possibly see how a few straps of leather, sewed together and called a shoe, can justifiably cost $50; how a few sequins and a wispy veil, stuck on a postage-stamp hat, can be worth $80; or how any dress can cost $300 or more. To the cynical male, the answer is only all too obvious: the value of women's clothes is determined only by what silly women (and acquiescent men) are willing to pay for them.

The $9 billion-a-year U.S. women's wear industry has another answer. It can quote yards of facts and figures to show that high-priced clothes are not only worth every penny they cost, but even more. For example, Manhattan's Sophie of Saks Fifth Ave. custom salon, where cocktail dresses sell for as much as $695, just manages to break even; the salon is operated only for the prestige it brings to the store. The markup for expensive clothes is heavy--up to 100% of cost--but it has to be so to cover overhead. At a high-fashion house like Nettie Rosenstein, the cost of designing a dress and turning out one sample may come to more than $1,000; so few copies are sold that the designing cost per dress may come to $200 or more. Labor costs are out of the designer's hands; they are regulated by an independent labor-management committee, and vary according to the difficulty of the work required. A pocket on a cheap dress, for example, may come to only a few cents in labor; on an expensive one, labor may cost up to ten times as much.

In the millinery field, one leading designer spends upwards of $50,000 a year just making sample hats for his showrooms, may take a full day to make just one original. In shoes, the daintier the product the more tedious, exacting and expensive the work. And while it may seem that women get stuck when they spend $25 or more for a pair of shoes that will last only a few months, it is not easy for manufacturers to get rich on the deal. I. Miller, one of the leading makers of expensive women's shoes, makes a mere 4% gross profit on its sales--far less than super-efficient General Motors makes on autos (22%).

Nevertheless, in one sense it is true that women are not getting their money's worth in clothes. Reason: by the standards of other industries, the garment industry is woefully inefficient. Hand-operated machines are the rule; mass production, as known in other industries, is almost unheard of. Competition is cutthroat; some 5,000 companies are locked in the battle to clothe the female form, and hundreds of them fail every year. Many of them are fly-by-nights riding a sudden fashion craze.

A few manufacturers, like Manhattan's Henry Rosenfeld, have proved that the garment industry need not be so inefficient, that mass production can pay off. Rosenfeld sells 2,500,000 well-designed dresses a year, all retailing from $14.95 to $35. His secrets: 1) buy in bulk; 2) break down dressmaking into separate, specialized operations, e.g., collar-making, pocket-making, buttonhole-making; 3) keep design simple and smart.

Yet even a Rosenfeld can do little about one major factor that makes a woman's wardrobe cost so much: fashion itself. Says an old garment-industry saw: "Women are slaves to fashion for two reasons. One is that they want to look different from other women; the other is that they want to look like other women." Thus, women may be swept up in new fashion crazes such as the Empress Eugenie hats of the '30s or the stoles of today, but they must always feel that the particular hats or stoles they are buying are just a little different. When individuality comes in, mass production goes out and costs go up; if bigger production comes in, then by an inflexible rule, style goes out.

A complex fashion code also requires that women have more clothes than men. Explained one young working housewife: "My husband can be well dressed for almost any occasion with only two or three suits in his wardrobe. But with me it's different. Maybe I can transform an office dress with the addition of a rose or a jewel, but you can do just so much of this and get by. A dress that goes well at a cocktail party might fit in at a wedding, but the chances are it won't." Just how this exacting code arose, or why women adhere to it, is as inexplicable as why the female may weep when she is happy.

"Vanity thy name is woman," said Shakespeare. As long as that is true the garment industry will have a good thing. And so--for all his protestations--will the C.S. male, perplexed as he is bound to remain.

A woman will always spend more than a man on clothes. The reason is simple: in trying to look more expensively dressed than she is, a woman often ends up being more expensively dressed than she had intended to be in the first place.

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