Word: guild
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Many of these restrictions were embodied in the Dress Code under NRA, and department stores were content to abide by them until last year when the Guild began to operate in the field of low-priced dresses. For some time conscientious retailers had been returning dresses to manufacturers in the $10.75 category, alleging copies in violation of Guild rules. A number of manufacturers of these dresses, hitherto generally committed to copying higher priced dresses for a good proportion of their styles, decided that it was time to originate. They accordingly began to register their dresses with the Guild and were...
Retail merchants were disturbed by this addition to the Guild's activities. It was one thing to guard against copies in expensive lines and another thing to give the same attention to lower priced dresses, which are bought in greater quantities and sold to people who cared not at all whether they were copies or not. The retailers did not like the prospect of competing in these lines under Guild restrictions with the chain stores, which were selling the same lines under no restrictions. They were also irritated by what they regarded as a dictatorial tone in the latest...
Early last month their irritation rose to a rage when the Guild sent out a new "declaration of cooperation" full of whopping additions to the original. Retailers who had agreed merely not to sell any dresses they knew to be copies in the upper price ranges were required not to sell any copies at all and to give the Guild's 40 professional shoppers authority to determine what was and what was not a copy. Department store managers either shook their heads or got hopping mad. Following the Strawbridge & Clothier incident war was openly declared...
...general position of retailers is that co-operation with the Guild is only possible on the original basis; that they cannot compete with chain stores if they have to return $6.75 dresses copied from $10.75 ones, and that the present Guild policy would make it practically impossible to produce and sell low-price dresses, since many manufacturers of these lines cannot afford either to hire designers or to buy original designs...
Chairman and guiding spirit of the Guild is diminutive, elegant Dress Manufacturer Maurice Rentner. Mr. Rentner writes most of the descriptive copy for his own little fashion magazine, Quality Street. Born in Poland, he started his career in the Manhattan dress market as an errand boy carrying thread to shirtwaist makers. He now owns a manufacturing firm with six factories, makes dresses retailing from $55 up. Mr. Rentner says the court fight now threatening his Guild is at bottom an effort by retailers to escape the Guild's stabilizing policies on discounts and returns, that the question of style...