Word: fashion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dresses sell for as much as $695, just manages to break even; the salon is operated only for the prestige it brings to the store. The markup for expensive clothes is heavy-up to 100% of cost-but it has to be so to cover overhead. At a high-fashion house like Nettie Rosenstein, the cost of designing a dress and turning out one sample may come to more than $1,000; so few copies are sold that the designing cost per dress may come to $200 or more. Labor costs are out of the designer's hands; they...
...machines are the rule; mass production, as known in other industries, is almost unheard of. Competition is cutthroat; some 5,000 companies are locked in the battle to clothe the female form, and hundreds of them fail every year. Many of them are fly-by-nights riding a sudden fashion craze...
...even a Rosenfeld can do little about one major factor that makes a woman's wardrobe cost so much: fashion itself. Says an old garment-industry saw: "Women are slaves to fashion for two reasons. One is that they want to look different from other women; the other is that they want to look like other women." Thus, women may be swept up in new fashion crazes such as the Empress Eugenie hats of the '30s or the stoles of today, but they must always feel that the particular hats or stoles they are buying are just...
...complex fashion code also requires that women have more clothes than men. Explained one young working housewife: "My husband can be well dressed for almost any occasion with only two or three suits in his wardrobe. But with me it's different. Maybe I can transform an office dress with the addition of a rose or a jewel, but you can do just so much of this and get by. A dress that goes well at a cocktail party might fit in at a wedding, but the chances are it won't." Just how this exacting code arose...
...table at Twenty-One?"). Moreover, Poppy's critical eye, which was always whimsically weak, is now rolling toward astigmatism. "It never occurred to me," he groans of Lady Elsie Mendl, ". . . that she, poor darling, was relatively destitute. She left a million . . . but it's peanuts, considering her fashion of living, her travels . . . artisans . . . servants . . . hospitality." Too many cosmopolitan sleeping pills, perhaps; but Bemelmania, while still fun, is not nearly as wonderfully crazy as it used...