Creators of Parisian Style

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 100, 23 May 1941, Page 5

Creators of Parisian Style

HERE are some 50 dressmaking houses in Paris which may be considered as in the front rank. Madame Vionnet, goddess of the bias cut, and gteatest of them all, is the little grey-haired woman who began her career as a pin-girl. She is a woman of obstinate artistic integrity, with small, vital hands, who was the first to throw whalebone and linings into the dust-bin. Madame Schiaparelli is a Roman, the most daringly modern of them all. She will go down

in history for her influence on fabrics -- who but Schiaparelli would have made a dress of glass? Captain Molyneux is English-Irish -a captain in the last war, he was with Lucille, that is, Lady Duff-Gordon, before 1914, and started his own business after the Armistice. A quiet. reserved man, in dressmaking he makes a fetish of fine simplicity. Worth’s are the Royal dress-

makers of Europe, Their house is the oldest couture establishment of the present day. It was founded under the second empire by a Lincolnshire Englishman who became Court dressmaker to the Empress Eugenie. They have dressed 20 queens, the late Spanish and Russian Royal houses; they made the court trains with real emeralds and pearls for the murdered T'sarina. They dress some of the noble cousins of English Royalty. The present house is run by the third generation, and its lofty standard has never varied.-("Leadership in Dress Designz: Paris-The Home of Dress Design," by Miss Bows byes, 2YA, May 5),