The Wet Look

Some people say it looks like porcelain and feels like the skin you love to touch. Others think it looks more like something peeled off the kitchen table. It makes raincoats seem wet before they are out of the closet and slacks look as though their wearer had just stepped out of a rocket ship. It is the latest gift from the U.S. to the haute couture. It's vinyl.

From Park Avenue to Pensacola, girls are wrapping themselves in the oilcloth look. The fashion house of Originala adopted it for a $200 trench coat, and fashion firms in the $30 to $75 range are now coming in strong on the vinyl boom.

The expanded-vinyl cloth was developed in the U.S. in the Fort Edward, N.Y., plant of Cohn-Hall-Marx Co. three years ago and nobody much in the U.S. cared. When a Cohn-Hall-Marx representative showed it around Paris though, big-name houses like Courreges, Dior, and V de V saw big new possibilities in this soft, slick stuff that draped so gracefully and was so easily printed with clear color and bold design. Now some of the big Paris houses are backing away a bit from what bids fair to be an all-out fad, but U.S. manufacturers are bringing it out in all kinds of new colors and patterns--tiger, pigskin, and the ubiquitous Op.

"Smartest-looking stuff in the world," said Vogue Editor Diana Vreeland. "It improves the look of a girl's skin, raises the eye high." Since it is as impermeable as rubber, it can raise the temperature rather high too, and during the coming months the wet look may spread from many a girl's coat to her countenance.

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