Word: silks
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Silk men say that a silk fad sweeps the world about every ten years. Creeping out of the post-War slump, in 1922 the silk industry was whipped to prosperity by a huge and sudden demand for crepe de Chine. It replaced taffeta, which had clung on tenaciously from the billowy era at the turn of the century, as the standard dress silk. When the good news came last month, silk mills had little rough crepe in stock. So great and so urgent was the demand that silk men last week were vainly trying to buy from each other...
...silk industry, to its intense delight, last week found itself suddenly in the midst of a boom. Unlike cotton and woolen men, silk men are much at the mercy of THEM and last week it was gloriously plain that THEY-the fashion designers of Paris, the style buyers and editors from the U. S., and the 40,000,000 U. S. women who wear dresses-had decided on a style change which would require the U. S. silk industry's most diligent services...
THEY do not decide all of a sudden. The blessed event which now delights silk men really began last February when the U. S. style buyers found nothing to excite them at the Paris salons and bitterly said so, threatening never to come back. Oh, please come back next summer! begged Vionnet, Lanvin, Patou, Schiaparelli, Chanel, et al., and promised faithfully to have something that would surely start a U. S. fad, a wave of buying under the irresistible pressure of Fashion...
...buyers last month went back to Paris skeptically. Sure enough, word soon went around the silk industry's lunch tables that something had been found. It was not exactly something new; it was merely old enough to seem new. It was Rough Crepe, which takes more silk fibre per yard than any other silk dress stuff. Crepe de Chine has not been "in" for years, rough crepes have never been popular. Few wardrobes would contain old crepe de Chine dresses, let alone rough crepes, that could be made over. Silk men know that there...
Rough crepe is an old silk product but the demand for it has always been nominal. All crepes are woven on large looms with some threads highly twisted. When the cloth is removed these threads tend to untwist, giving it a rough or pebbly appearance. Rayon, though not so elastic as silk, is also used for crepes and rayon mills are sharing in the present boom...