COLOUR RIOT IN SUMMER CLOTHES

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31111, 14 July 1966, Page 7

COLOUR RIOT IN SUMMER CLOTHES

Fashion designers must have been shaking their kaleidoscopes like maraccas to produce the bewildering range of colours and patterns planned for beach and casual clothes next summer.

This is going to be a big year for surfies. They will be able to buy from a range probably unequalled anywhere else in the world except Australia.

In the United States, France and Britain, the beach-wear available is nearly all of local design and manufacture, but New Zealand and Australian fashion scouts roam the world seeking ideas and fabrics.

Combining high standards of manufacture with International fashion ideas, they are providing the New Zealand shopper with a far greater depth of range than he would find practically anywhere else. For beach wear these days, anything goes, and men’s wear stores are going to be crowded with the widest range of merchandise they have ever had. There will be short shorts, long shorts, tight shorts and baggy shorts—in stripes,

prints will be popular in a new sort of beach short called “jams.” Their cut is the same as that of the Army’s old “Bombay bloomers,” and they look like amputated pyjamas or baggy Bermudas, whichever comparison strikes you first. Another pattern which will be featured strongly in shirts, shorts and swimshorts is the Madras check. There will be matching or

checks, quarter - checks, flowers, Paisley, and every imaginable pattern. A popular pattern is expected to be “competition stripes,” which hark back to the 1920’s and 1930’5. They are two or three thin stripes of bright colour on a solid ground, with the stripes in any position—horizontal, diagonal or vertical. More than half of the beach wear ordered by one Christchurch store will be in the “wet look.” Hawaiian