Word: calfing
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East Germany suffers no fabric shortage, but a conversion to the midi would cost thousands of production hours in the textile mills if they had to turn out sufficient cloth to drape the collective calf. It is one Communist conspiracy that American men might welcome...
...Longuette? Although the term midi has now come to mean anything from below the knee to the ankle, it still meant mid-calf at the beginning of 1970. So Fairchild coined the word Longuette to launch his midi juggernaut last January. The paper's Paris bureau complained that there was no such word, but Fairchild knew better. He mailed them a page from his Cassell's French-English dictionary, where he had found it. WWD's front-page kickoff story began: "The word longuette means, in French, 'longish, somewhat long, pretty long, too long.' That just about sums...
Nonetheless, the new designs themselves were intriguing. One after another, the French designers displayed collections calculated to capture, if not the same bulk of orders from U.S. buyers, at least the fancy of women everywhere. Men might not be so enraptured: hems left not a hint of calf exposed, let alone knee. But the overall look was exotic and eclectic, a mixture of Garbo's Anna Karenina and Clyde's Bonnie, the aura of a Russian princess and the threat of a tommy...
...provide the boffs, we are presented with a modern, hip conception of the thirties. The ingenue is not just "lovely, fresh, and young," as Messrs. K. and H. described her: Kent Wilson's Alice is a veritable Breck poster girl, a walking Palmolive ad, a cutie who lifts her calf when kissed and who drops into a Pola Negri swoon when embraced. Colin Cabot's Tony, the boss' son, isn't just a thirties romantic; he crackles around the stage like a Keezer's clothes dummy...
...dream. It's hard for us to understand kids who have only a book idea of the flag. They didn't see men die within the framework of that idealism of World War II. It's as if people see the flag the way Moses saw the golden calf. Half our population remembers it as a blessing, and the other half, who have grown up since World War II, see it only as a golden calf. If only both could get beyond the symbolism...