Word: gossard
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This was a new sales tactic in the corset industry. But Gossard was in the midst of a $600,000-a-year ad campaign (double last year's), which it hoped would make it the biggest company in the field. With a potential market of 55 million women over the age of 15, U.S. corset & brassiere makers now sell $400 million worth of goods a year, are heading even higher. Of the more than 350 companies in the industry, almost half have been started within the past ten years...
...help Gossard cash in on this huge boom, the directors fortnight ago elected a new president: Gonzague Alexander Savard, 47, a plump, hustling French Canadian who had climbed from office boy to president in 31 years by his talent for production and labor relations...
...When Gossard was strikebound last summer and the garment workers could not come to terms with President Lee Varley, who has now retired, it was Savard who stepped in and settled the trouble. The strike, coupled with reduced promotional activities, had clipped Gossard's profit 82% last year. When Savard moved into his new job last week, a bunch of roses from the garment workers' union was on his desk. Said Savard: "Our competitors ran while we stood still, but now we're going...
Curves & Kangaroos. Gossard was founded on a corset-string in 1900 by a Chicago buttons & bows dealer named Henry Williamson Gossard. At the time, corsets were laced from the rear and the agonized, swaybacked "Kangaroo figure" of the Gibson Girl was the vogue. In Paris, Gossard bought a dozen corsets which were not only straight and more comfortable than U.S. models, but which laced conveniently up the front (thus obviating the need for a maid or husband at the other end of the drawstrings...
...Gossard dubbed his model L'lrresistible, sold the first dozen fast in the U.S. for a whopping $50 apiece (v. the average price of $1.50 for American corsets), and soon was producing a simplified $5 version of his own. He standardized for the mass market by classifying the female body into nine "ideal figures"-which weren't so much ideal as they were all-inclusive. Samples: "The Ideal Curved-Back Figure," "The Ideal Large-Below-the-Waist Figure." He also shrewdly marked his corsets two inches smaller than they actually were so women wouldn't squeeze themselves...