Summer Fashions — The Woman's Voice in Paris

The Woman's Voice in Paris
The house of "Modes" for dressmaking and fashion
Mansur Munsif

Summer is at the gates ... and woman, as is her way every year, has set about preparing to receive it. It is the bridegroom of the seasons, despite its heat, and despite all the toil and discomfort a man suffers in it ... For in it woman may strut upon the shore, slender and bewitching, or pass over the hills light as a bird, leaving behind her trails of perfume and color and shadow. And shall summer appear, with its shores and its sea, its hills and its evenings of good company, and woman not have prepared for its radiant coming a costume — nay, costumes — with which to court it? ..

The summer costume this year has many advantages of beauty never available before. Chief among them: that the dress is not exaggerated in length or in fullness, so that it does not hinder a woman from walking quickly, from climbing, from moving about; that it brims with gaiety and youth; and that it brings out, as far as ever it can, the principal quality in woman — I mean femininity. Often this costume is close-fitting from the waist upward, clinging tightly to the bust; often its bodice ends in sweet kimono sleeves, or in short sleeves that free the shoulders and all but bare them. Among the traits of this costume, too: it opens in a curve upon the throat and rises a little behind. Its skirt is narrow and full at once, dressed with broad pleats or with folded fans, so that it seems a furled parasol.

"Jacques Heim" would not let the summer pass without devoting to it one of his creations. This year he has taken to cutting strange dresses which he has named "the vagabonds," so that those who love vagabondage and roaming free across wilderness and mountain may take their pleasure in them. These dresses are distinguished by their simplicity, their harmonious cut, and their roominess at the hips, with a pleasing opening on one side.

And there are "vagabonds" in which there is much strangeness and extravagance. Some appear torn, held together by fine cords, till you would take them for a chessboard or a surveyor's maps. Some are adorned with flowers hung upon cords. As for the skirt, it is high in front and low behind.

I pass on to a third kind of vagabond costume, namely the "zigzag." In this kind black prevails, dressed with white pieces in zigzag form. There is also "the red and black": this begins with a full blouse of cotton colored deep crimson and black, and ends with black "shorts." And there are couturiers who have torn the sleeves away at the shoulders, narrowed the shorts, and finished them with teeth like the teeth of a saw.

"Lanvin" has spared no effort in creating summer fashions. But these fashions

differ from those I have described in their sober style. The flower inspired in him shapes of dresses it would take long to describe — the most splendid of them made of folded white tulle, with a full black skirt from between whose velvety leaves the bodice springs as the flower springs from its sheath.

Nor can I, while I am on the subject of summer fashions, refrain from pausing a little over the maillot and the variety that has come over it. Perhaps the most famous maillot today is the one known as the Ball, suggested to the couturiers by the ball played with in the water; they made it in its shape, of two pieces colored in violent tones: black and yellow, or red and blue. Nor did they stop there — they puffed out its sides and completed it with a bodice, a cap, and a bag all of the same color.

And speaking of hats, bags, and colors, I will say that these too have been shaped as summer and its coquetry willed: of the sea hat they have made two fluttering wings of straw, or a fisherman's net hanging down to the shoulders, or a small colored cap. Of the bags they have made round, ball-shaped pouches in color, or black cotton ones covered with netting, or dainty little baskets which they have called "the hunger-stayers." And the colors most in vogue in all that I have described: red, black, white, blue-dotted, gray, and green.