"Potent Force"

No fashion writer is more alert or more knowledgeable than the New York Herald Tribune's petite, saucy Eugenia Sheppard. Herself a taste setter by virtue of that which she chooses to ignore, Fashion Editor Sheppard delights in telling her readers as much about the people who wear good clothes as about those who design them. Last week she told of her attempts to scout out the details of the wardrobe that Jacqueline Kennedy had assembled for her trip to Asia.

"The day," she wrote, "started out black with the bald announcement that Mrs. Kennedy's trip was 'purely political' and that she wanted the fashion angle played down. Fashion hasn't had such a slap in the face in years. Second to politics? It was enough to make any fashion editor see red.

"The shopping trail wasn't too hard to follow since a leak from the White House last week mentioned the Park Avenue shop, Chez Ninon, and California Designer Gus Tassell as supplying the clothes, along with the official Cassini.

"Naturally, in true spy-story fashion, everybody denied everything. 'She wants to play it cool and I want to keep her wearing my clothes,' said Gus Tassell hoarsely, when we telephoned him in California. He had been fending off wire services, city desks and female fashion reporters all morning. It's a tough spot for a designer to be in."

Tassell, said Sheppard, "denied absolutely" that he had closed his factory for a week just to make Mrs. Kennedy's India wardrobe, and "feebly" denied that he had made up a special version of his Beauvais embroidered ball gown with flowers just on the long skirt. Explained Sheppard: "Orders from Mrs. Kennedy are accompanied usually by a polite note asking the store or manufacturer please not to tell." But somebody "is always sure to make somebody promise not to breathe a word, and that somebody is hot on the telephone to Mata Hari in a few minutes.

"Actually, it's not so much what Mrs. Kennedy is buying as the thinking behind it that makes the news. She stands for the simple, easy, sportswear type of fashions against the contrived kind. She stands for the Givenchy look and all its interpretations over here, as against the fussier French fashions. She stands for colors, and for forgetting all the nonsense about definite seasons. She is the most potent force in international fashion today."

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