Novelty Tunics And Two Madcap Designers

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30977, 5 February 1966, Page 2

Novelty Tunics And Two Madcap Designers

Paris spring and summer fashions got off to a crazy start with Jacques Esterel’s collection of “hellzapoppin” tunic dresses and scroll hats, Marcelle Poirier of the “Yorkshire Post” reports from Paris.

The clothes were shown id a film set of a town in AD 2000 created by Jacques Tati for his latest satirical film “Playtime”.

To end-of-the-century bang and squeak music, the girls flounced on to a zig-zag runway in sandwich board tunics over shorty (very shorty) dresses or long wide-legged pants in two, three, four or more violent colours.

Their flat, crownless hats, a couple of feet square, were rolled up at the front and down at the back like an heraldic parchment scroll.

Holes In Tunics Shoes of transparent plastic were like topless sabots held on by a band over the toes. The foot looked as if it were walled around with plastic. Poncho-style tunics were punched full of holes of different shapes and sizes through which the innumerable colours of the dress underneath could be seen. The girls kept slipping their hands through slits in the side to swizzle their strapless dresses around so that different colours were constantly coming up in front of the peepholes. Mannequin Jenny was accompanied by her three and a half year and five-year-old daughters, Isabelle and Katy, in pephole dresses, too. The baby’s dress had a slate embroidered on the front, and as the dress beneath revolved, different sums and their answers appeared. Esterel has also introduced “cook art” into his op art fashion show by using nickelplated kitchen implements for jewellery. Astonishing earrings made of saltspoons hanging on long chains or of handle-less fish slices were

unexpectedly very attractive as were two fork ends hanging from a chain as a necklace.

Mid-Thigh Hems

A few hours previously I had watched another crazy show with mannequns dancing a frenetic monkiss—the latest Paris dance—to wild beat music and in dresses whose hemlines stopped at mid-thigh level. The show was a curtainraiser to a preview of “What’s New Pussycat,” the latest Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers comedy. The organisers were 21-year-old Mia Fonnsagrives and Vicky Tiel, who designed the dresses for the film.

In addition to showing those crazy, snaky leopard leotards worn by Ursula Andres in the iilm and the snappy models which Romy Schneider nearly fell out of, the two mad young designers showed the models which they have designed for sale in the “snob” shops in Paris. Dresses in frantic colour mixtures, blue jean fabric shorts and tunics embroidered with glitter, an orange dress with the bosum outlined by a purple applique bra, and a dress with peepholes showing bare flesh this time, undulated in front of

the cinema screen to the hottest of the latest pop tunes. Vicky and Mia met in a designing school in New York where their designing was considered too insane to be taken seriously. They broke ihto Paris last January with one of the maddest shows seen until then, modelling and commenting on their dresses. If Kim Novak had not hurt her back she would have worn Mia/Vicky styles in the film she was to make. Then the girls were commissioned for “What’s New Pussycat” and now Paramount are preparing a film about the girls’ meteoric rise to fame.

The girls will not play their own roles, which is a pity for they are glamorous and fun, but they get paid for the story rights, design the dresses and act as technical advisers. Vicky’s adored and tiny Yorkshire terrier bitch has also a Paramount contract, and it was dramatic when she had to go to hospital two week; ago in New York with a bad cough. Wuffles is now appearing in Paris in her newest handknit tubular coat with contrasting revers and a tiny muffler. Wuffles always models a few of her own clothes along with Vicky and Mia and just loves to wear roses in her hair.