LONDONS MANNEQUINS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 170, 20 October 1941, Page 5

LONDONS MANNEQUINS

AND DR. GOEBBELS

SOUTH AMERICAN TRIP

How London fashion designers have annoyed the Nazis is diselosed by the official report of Britain's Department of Overseas Trade on the London Fashion Collection which went out to Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay earlier in the year. "The fact," it comments, "that British manufacturers could design and make such materials and models in the midst of intensive air raids, and moreover that a party of mannequins could travel in safety across the Atlantic, appealed vividly to the imagination of the people, to the serious detriment of the much vaunted 'superiority' of the Axis powers whose propaganda suffered a severe Setback."

O'f the two sets ~of eighty models which were sent to the Argentine and Brazil, the great majority were so>ld before the party returned to England. In most cases, shoes, handbags and hats were sold with them. Shoes and handbags attracted particularly favourable notice, but the hats were not so "acceptable to the taste of the Argentine woman." 1

"It seems clear," the report concludes, "that in all three countries visited the London Fashion Collection succeeded in putting the idea of London as a fashion centre into the minds of South American wo-

men; that a very real interest in, and appreciation of British fabrics was stimulated and that as a piece of national propaganda the showing o.f the collection was an outstanding success."