Hemlines of the Week

The world's best-dressed press corps, packing into Paris to tell women from Zurich to Zanzibar what they will look like this winter, jammed the wires last week with stories that were often contradictory, mostly incomprehensible to male editors--and almost unanimously ecstatic. For some 500 writers and editors who covered the fall showings of more than 30 top French designers, there were few opportunities to break sensational news, since fashion's shoguns jealously guard their secrets against leaks, force reporters who break deadlines to surrender the identity cards that serve as passports to the salons. Wary of offending the couturiers, who have been known to exclude overcritical reporters or banish them to back-row seats, most of the well-tamed fashion writers were careful to praise all they saw, come hell or--as happened last week--high hemlines.

In this game of Paris mutuel, the most outspoken U.S. fashion writer by far was the New York Herald Tribune's merrily irreverent Women's Feature Editor Eugenia Sheppard. A onetime reporter for Ohio's Columbus Dispatch, fiftyish Editor Sheppard ranged from dresses that had too much tummy ("Believe me, you could be having twins") to those that had no shape at all ("Just a gunny sack, with diamonds") with the keen eye and sharp tongue that have earned her a growing reputation as one of the astutest critics in the business.

Provoked by the designers' fascination for buttons and bows, eupeptic Eugenia wrote: "It's all terribly cute, but like giving a girl candy when she craves steak." Of Lanvin-Castillo's new extra-short skirt length: "Pretty sexy for a tall girl, but it may make a short one disappear altogether." Of Jean Desses' "dovetail look": "Desses has always been inspired by birds. I think it's time somebody came right out and told this nice guy to switch to biology or some other ology. Anything but birds."

Sparrow-sized (4 ft.11 in.), blonde Eugenia Sheppard--in private life the wife of Fund for the Republic Executive Walter Millis, a onetime Trib staffer--proved last week that she is a fast-working, enterprising reporter. Barred, with the rest of the press, from Balenciaga's and Givenchy's showings, Newshen Sheppard got U.S. buyers who had inspected the new lines to sketch them on napkins at the Ritz bar, filed full, accurate stories on both showings in time to make Page One next morning. "Don't think black-market reporting can't be fun," she chirped. "I just wish Balenciaga had been there to see how well we Americans all work together."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.