Word: fashion
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...long and the next, the quit parade continued to Langlie's tenth-floor office in the magazine's Park Avenue building-John English, managing editor; Jay Stanwyck, director of research; Estelle Lane Brent, fashion editor; Betty Parsons Ragsdale, fiction editor; Marion Wheeler, production editor; Peggy Bell, features editor. By week's end 16 staffers had resigned, and, one by one, McCall's publicity department doggedly issued terse press releases with the news. Some of the departees were so angry that they left without cleaning out their desks, had their belongings shipped home. Shrugged Langlie...
...thereby started a new kind of home sewing boom. In the 1920s women who could not afford to buy even cheap store dresses did most of the home sewing. But no longer. Women are still sewing to economize-but on the fanciest dresses that Paris can design. Inundated by fashion news, furiously taking up and letting down to keep in style, some 35 million women are sewing profits for an industry that will reap close to $1 billion this year. Home sewers will spend $400 million for fabrics, $290 million for accessories, $270 million for home sewing machines, $40 million...
Trading Up. Every calculated change in Paris means more money spent. So fashion-bent have sewing women become that patternmakers have all but junked the simple housedress designs that used to be their bread and butter. What more and more women want is the kind of high-fashion Vogue patterns long sold by Conde Nast. The originals would cost perhaps $600, but-almost any woman can copy them for the cost of a $3 pattern and $50 worth of fine fabric (Vogue patterns even supply a Paris label...
Well below the high-fashion class is Simplicity Pattern Co., No. 1 in the field and the only maker that sells nothing else (expected 1958 sales: $20 million). "We work for the girl next door," says President James J. Shapiro. "We want to sell Fords with lots of chrome, not Cadillacs...
...elements of the sewing industry have combined to launch a huge sew-more campaign. Manhattan's R. H. Macy, boasting probably the biggest piece-goods department in the world, runs home-sewn fashion shows every day for about 14 weeks a year. Singer Manufacturing Co. spends $3,000,000 a year on national advertising, gives free machine lessons at 1,700 Singer Centers to 363,000 women a year, sponsors annual sewing contests with contestants winning $210,000 in prizes. One return prize for the industry is more and more younger sewers: the average home sewer...