Truly Completely Marvelous

While her dachshund sank his painted scarlet toenails into the damask couch, the elegant woman known simply as Countess crossed her legs and yawned. A journalist stood for an instant's breath of air, sat back down on two lady buyers who were clawing for her chair. Actress Jeanne Moreau blinked drowsy eyes and flicked waves of ashes to the rug. Vicomtesse Jacqueline de Ribes swung black-mesh-stockinged legs, started a fad, and smiled her best-dressed approval. Outside, snow fell softly on the streets of Paris, and there were some who talked of De Gaulle and the Common Market. But inside, up and down the length of the gilt salons, the talk was only of hems, heels and seams. For it was the time of the spring collections.

There were 47 shows in ten days. At each, there was the usual crush to get in; flowers fell from vases and were trampled under stiletto heels; ordinarily well-bred ladies pinned oldtime friends to the salon walls, picked their pockets for the proper credentials, and raced upstairs to jockey for front-row seats.

The Chosen. Though final identification was only possible by prying patron from chair, the better to read the gilt-embossed name card affixed to it, some players could be told without a program. Bigtime buyers for stores or manufacturers, from both the U.S. and Europe, tended to be short, squat, greying and myopic; they wore lumps of coats with muskrat collars, orthopedic shoes and chewed Sen-Sen by the handful. Lesser buyers, reluctant to pay the heavy cost of admission (often a promise to buy as much as $1,700 worth of merchandise) lurked around showroom exits, approaching departing guests with whispered offers of "anything, just name it--what about a last-season Balenciaga?" in return for a word or two on what fabrics Dior was using, which colors seemed in the lead.

Then there were the customers and friends of the designer, the chic nameless women whose patronage often still accounts for as much as half a couturier's profit, who stepped out of chauffeur-driven limousines with cool, perfumed disdain, pulling sables close about them. For thern^ invitations were not generally required; they had their checkbooks in hand. The press representing the smaller papers kept to the backs of rooms, appeared pink-cheeked and pleasant, proved deadly when cornered ("Out of my way!" shrieked one Midwest reporter caught in an entrance crush, delivering side jabs and bloody noses with the efficiency of a karate enthusiast). They met between shows over bitter coffee, confided their impressions the way girls will, and the way girls will, betrayed one another to say it first in print.

The Rivals. No one could mistake the Big Two--Editors Nancy White of Harper's Bazaar and Diana Vreeland of Vogue (known to every friend and nonfriend in the trade as "Dee-ann"). Flanked by a squadron of outriders, they did not so much attend a show as occupy it. Miss White, a nonviolently well-dressed woman, with her broken wrist (the result of a slip on the ice before she left the U.S.) bound in a sling that changed daily with her outfit, got the honored spot on Coco Chanel's couch; but Mrs. Vreeland, turbaned, fiery-eyed, and putting in her first appearances as Vogue's top editor, made up for it all by making more noise. Leaning slightly to one side or the other--the staff sits just a touch to the rear of the Queen--and dispensing cigarette ashes as if she were favoring the carpet, she shared her various comments ("Perfectly DREADFUL, my dear, don't you think?" "Perfectly GLORIOUS! my dear, don't you think?") with the room at large and even, some thought, with the outlying suburbs of Paris.

Smoke settled in the crowded rooms, voices cracked, tempers rose, and then, the hush. The first model. Under the hot white lights she seemed put together of plastic, not flesh; skin dead-pale, so thin that when she swallowed her body trembled with the shock, she strutted and twirled as if a newly wound toy, never perspiring, only glistening prettily. Buyers scribbled on programs: nice cut, good lines, but can it be copied easily? Will it go in Passaic? The press looked frantically for trends: everything old? Anything borrowed? How about a trend toward the old and borrowed? Customers clapped hands in delight at dresses they loathed, hoping to divert rivals' attention from the ones they really coveted.

Final Word. Behind the scenes, designers took final tucks, drew a cautious curtain for a peep at the audience, were sometimes coaxed out to accept compliments, false or otherwise, and a chance at the champagne. "Darling," trilled Actress Melina (Never on Sunday) Mercouri, smashing her way through ranks of lesser spectators to get to Dior's Marc Bohan. "It was magnificent! Fantastic! Extraordinaire!" "No," said Bohan, pale but for the thousand carmine kiss marks on his cheeks, "I was not nervous, just a little worried." Said Mrs. Vreeland: "My dear, how really truly completely MARVELOUS!"

Just exactly what was MARVELOUS, and what not, was at week's end something less than absolute. Hems stayed mid-knee, shapes kept narrow, colors vivid. Though Designer Capucci offered something called "the Peking Look," and Dior presented a wide-armhole, blousy sleeve, hardly anything was really brand-new. There we're flowers on everything--Balmain cinched the waist of an evening gown with green satin leaves. Saint-Laurent flung lilies of the valley onto everything from formals to hats. The results, while not revolutionary, were some of the handsomest clothes in years.

But the merely beautiful is never enough for the vendors and makers of fashion. By the buyers who had fought for the right to sit down, by the fashion press who can find stupendous news in the shape of a buttonhole, and by the customers who rejoined their chauffeurs warm with the special contentment that comes with ordering a couple of thousand dollars worth of little nothings, it was pronounced a week of staggering sensations. Nothing like it ever before; nothing like it ever to come. Or at least not until the next round of shows in July.

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