Return to Normalcy

After a first look at the new Paris styles, a veteran U.S. fashion specialist made his critique: "Hooray, they've finally put things--principally the bosom--back where they belong." That they had. At the annual spring fashion showings in Paris last week, the big news from dressmakers was the "return to normalcy."

Gone were the shroudlike lines of the chemise and the rib-pinching high waists of the Empire line. In their place was a natural, gaily colored (mint green, bright red and blue, fuchsia and violet) silhouette with lines round enough to brighten the dullest male eye.

Waists: Down. By tradition (and the essential limitations of design), fashion rings up changes in three areas: hemline, waist and shoulders. For 1959, hemlines and waists are lower. The trend is to nicely bloused tops, wider shoulderlines, sleeves that hover near the elbow level, big collars, plenty of pleats and button-downs--provided the top three buttons stay unbuttoned.

Though there are some eddies of eccentricity among a few designers, e.g., evening dresses with a "hula hoop'' motif, all the big houses have done their best to please the women who last year looked boxy and sexless in sack dresses--and complained about it so loudly that the new trend in bathing suits is the Italian bikini.

Up: Ricci. The loudest cheer was not for Dior, Chanel, Manguin and other big names but for an almost unknown couturier. His collection of neat suits and petite bell-skirted dresses had the buyers raving over "the exciting new house"--and buying. The house is Nina Ricci (pronounced reachy), in business for 27 years in a modest establishment far from the fashionable couture neighborhood. The designer is little (5 ft. 6 in., 154 lbs.), blond Jules-Franc,ois Crahay, 41, who "merely did what I've been doing all my life." The Paris-trained son of a Belgian dressmaker, he settled at Madame Ricci's after three years of military service and five years in German prison camps had wrecked his own business in Belgium, has been designing clothes ever since. Says Crahay: "Couturiers can make a living only if the ready-to-wear buyers purchase their things; so we have to design for the woman in the street. Isn't it pleasant, after all, that you can make a whole street pretty?" Concentrating on simple morning suits and handsome evening dresses ("I have no use for the afternoon -that hour when women sit together and sip tea"), Crahay splits his styles into X and Y lines: the X with bloused top, narrow waist, padded hips; the Y with wide shoulders and a dizzying decolletage swooping down to the waist. Prices : about $300 for an evening dress, $120 for a daytime dress. The U.S. buyers, who had been wary of last year's styles and had held down buying, were stepping it up again. As Macy's Fashion Coordinator Marjorie Reich said:"Because the clothes are so wearable they'll sell thousands and thousands of a model. I don't think the collections could be better for America."

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