Word: garments
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Department stores were already beginning to feel buyer resistance. For the first time in many weeks, sales for the week ending Feb. 14 fell below the corresponding 1947 period. They dropped most in clothing. In New York City the garment trades, which should have been hustling with summer business, were hard hit. Some 10,000 had been laid off or put on part time. "Popular"-priced dress manufacturers reported that their clothes were not popular at all. They blamed the "unreasonable" prices charged at the mills for their cloth. But many mills reported that they were booked solidly through June...
Some fell prey to a great, dull hopelessness. In Manhattan's garment district, where it often takes 15 minutes to go a block through trucks, cabs and darting pushcarts, a taxi driver said: "We're beat. We got expressions just like people in Europe. It used to be you could get into a fight, but now even truck drivers take the attitude: 'If you wanna hit me, hit me.' They don't even get out to look at a fender...
...fashion show was put on with the best of intentions. Each garment was approved beforehand by a secret committee which agreed that it did not want anything silly or sensational. The purpose, said the sponsoring Los Angeles Fashion Group (mostly movie designers), was nothing so sordid as sales or headlines; it was to "improve taste" and "help turn fashion into more channels of sound and dignified progress [and] away from fly-by-night fads...
...digging nearly as much coal in a 40-hour week (12.1 million tons) as they had before in 54 hours (12.5 million). Another note of cooperation came from A.F.L.'s David Dubinsky. who ignored the tactics of other A.F.L. and C.I.O. strategists and advised his International Ladies' Garment Workers locals to continue writing no-strike clauses into their contracts...
...noisy talents have been devoted to proving that life in his native New York City is a rat race between the stinkers and the saps. In I Can Get It for You Wholesale and What's In It for Me? Weidman drew a picture of the garment district so snarlingly unpleasant that his publishers for a time refused to let them be reprinted, fearing that they helped spread antiSemitism. In a collection of short stories, The Horse That Could Whistle Dixie, he boiled a whole gallery of cheap-flash characters in skunk oil. Weidman's people were...