Madame Had a Pretty Dress!
THE little fitter had been kneeling on the floor, mouth full of pins, hands busy with seams and folds, as she pinned the customer into a new spring frock. At last I saw her lean back on her heels and look up admiringly at the dress and its wearer. Patting a seam almost lovingly, she said with breathless enthusiasm, ' Madame has a pretty dress!’
The customer wore that expression seen only on the face of a woman who has just bought and is wearing a dress which she knows is completely becoming. But as I watched the little scene I thought a trifle sadly of all the women everywhere who would be buying ‘pretty’ dresses this summer only to find that they must change verbs in the middle of a dress. So many times it would become merely the unfortunate truth to say, ‘Madame had a pretty dress!’
A year or two ago, while preparing a fashion show that was to travel to a number of women’s clubs, I made inquiry of a hundred representative women to determine what they expected of the dresses they bought, I learned that not a single woman felt she would have bought all or even half the dresses she currently owned if some sort of magic projection into the future could have shown her how they would look and behave after a short period of wear. Each woman had some favorite dresses which were obviously being overworked because so many others had failed to retain those qualities for which they had been bought. The delinquent frocks were accused of changing color after cleaning or washing, of shrinking or stretching out of shape and fit, of altering in texture, and of otherwise performing in such a way that, although they might in every case be still wearable, they were being worn with resignation, not satisfaction.
Now if women kept ‘books’ on their dresses, checking against the first cost the number of truly satisfactory wearings obtained from each, the results might prove definitely disconcerting. It is a fact, not merely a vague platitude, that any dress, regardless of its cost, is too expensive if its owner receives merely two or three wearings, perhaps only one, before its fit and appearance are altered, however subtly. A woman buys a dress, normally, for the qualities she sees reflected in the mirror of the store where she tries it on, but she presumes, also normally, that those qualities are to be retained indefinitely. Yet frequently the pleased smile worn at the time of purchase fades into lines of dissatisfaction.
Of course every woman makes occasional shopping blunders, such as being pursuaded to buy the wrong color, the wrong style, an unneeded costume, and so on, but aside from these there are a number of quite definite factors which largely account for this curious dissatisfaction with clothes purchases. And these factors become important as a part of the problem of general industry when it is recognized that the feminine restlessness which comes from subtle dissatisfaction causes two related buying trends which do much to disorganize the stability of garment production and sale.
The first is the demand for cheaper and still cheaper dresses. The second, equally bad in its effect, is the demand for more expensive dresses — not, please note, better dresses, but costlier ones.
At the heart of the difficulty is the great fault of the American consumer public — buying to a price. As consumer buyers, we like to stick to familiar prices. A man decides that a $2.95 shirt is his shirt, and forever after, unless jarred by dramatic depression emergencies, he buys a $2.95 shirt, not a shirt with certain qualities and characteristics. A woman finds that $19.75 fits her clothes budget and offers her a dress of the type she wants; and forever after she expects the expenditure of $19.75 to provide the same qualities and results. It works similarly all along the way. We buy a ‘$5000 house,’a ‘$10 pair of shoes,’a ‘$5.00 hat,’We have fallen into the pernicious habit of buying a price, not a product.
The dangerous fallacy of this habit may be sharply recognized if one understands that all of production and selling to-day takes place in a fluctuating market. Some raw materials rise and fall more rapidly and emphatically than others, some labor and transportation costs alter more conspicuously than others, but they all change, from month to month, season to season, and year to year. In some fields the slack can be adjusted and the retail prices stabilized over a period of time, but in others the spread between manufacturing costs and a static retail price changes the content of the product itself.
In the dress market the mechanics of the matter are very simple. A dress which, let us say, wholesales to-day for $10.75 may have four dollars’ worth of fabric and four dollars’ worth of labor and incidentals. The retailer marks that dress up to, perhaps, $16.75. But next month, or three months later, costs may have shifted so much that to obtain the same results in fabric and workmanship the wholesale price might have to rise a considerable degree. Still the retailer feels he must have a $16.75 dress for the woman who buys to that price, and consequently there is nothing to do but. substitute inferior materials and workmanship to allow the retailer the markup he thinks his overhead requires while holding to that popular $16.75 price.
In like manner, when the psychological trend is toward buying costlier dresses, usually traceable to an effort to assure greater satisfaction for the purchaser, consumers are still buying to a price. This concentration on a price, especially a high price, permits some extraordinary activities in the dress market. It does not necessarily mean that all dress manufacturers and all dress retailers suddenly begin to make better-quality dresses. A store, for instance, with a reputation for selling expensive frocks may buy six dozen dresses wholesaling, let us say, at $12.75. Of these a few will be so smart and handsome in appearance that the department buyer believes they will stand a heavy markup, and they will be priced at $49.75; a few more will be marked $39.75, still others $29.75, and the balance may be offered the consumer at a ‘special price of $19.75, although made to sell for much more.’ Now every one of these dresses may be excellent, but the purchaser’s satisfaction is not, obviously, going to be in direct ratio to the price she pays for them.
The safe way to buy a dress is to discard, first of all, the habit of buying to a price. The next necessity is to abide by a sort of insurance programme which calls for a reasonable amount of wear, minimum wear, as a return on the proposed investment. Style, of course, is one factor that is not insurable, concerning which information in concrete form cannot be given and for which each woman must make herself responsible. Other factors, however, can fortunately be weighed.
There are three simple points which a woman should check against every dress she buys, regardless of its cost. They are, in the order of their obviousness, trimmings, fit, and fabric. In each case the gauge of measurement for these factors is activity — how much and what kind of activity can they endure, and how will they behave under the activity of the washtub or dry-cleaner? The day of fragile cobwebs for summer clothes appears to be past, except for occasional festivities or for the charmed lives of professional beauties. Most women want spring and summer clothes which will stand the tests of daily routine and necessary renovation.
Trimmings are important, especially in the summer season when styles and fabrics become simple and many a frock depends on its trimmings for that ‘new’ look, for its chic, its gayety. So it is only common sense to check the trimmings first of all, to make sure they will stand up under use. Buttons, for instance, can be easily lost at the first or second wearing if they are not sewed on securely; and, childishly fundamental as this sounds, it is a fact that often even good dresses, especially tub dresses, have buttons sewed on with a chain stitch which will unravel almost at a touch. A loose thread end, or more thread on top of the button than appears where it is sewed to the fabric, may be signs of this. One should ask, too, for guarantees that the buttons will wash perfectly, not changing color or shape from water or heat.
Slide fasteners are going to be popular this summer, and in all colors and sizes and places. Again a washing guarantee is vital, and it should be remembered that a slide fastener should always be closed before it is laundered or drycleaned. Besides these and many other trimmings of plastics, metal, or composition, there are, of course, the contrasting colored scarfs, stitching, applique, and so on. Be cautious here, for, while color fastness is one detail easy to provide consumers to-day, trimmings of dark colors are often cut from inferior fabrics and react quite differently from the fabric of which the dress is made.
A seemingly small matter which can spoil an otherwise successful dress is the ‘touch of white’ often found on the dark sheer silks and rayons women like so much in summer for town or traveling. If, to clean them, collars and cuffs, frills and bindings, must be virtually dynamited from their places, one of two things is apt to happen. One is that the white trimmings may be allowed to stay on too long, the other is that the seams may be so altered in freeing them that they never regain quite the professional look they originally had. Again, the fabric used for these attractive white touches may not be washable at all, may not even dry-clean very well. Mousseline de sole, for instance, closely resembles organdy, but, while organdy will tub, water is fatal to mousseline, which does not, as a matter of fact, stand even dry-cleaning very happily. Furthermore, although permanently finished organdy is almost the rule now for dresses, organdy trimmings are not so apt to be permanently stiffened, and not even the cleverest laundress can restore limp organdy to the new-looking finish it once had. So ask for organdy that has been Belmanized — or permanently finished.
The second point on the dress insurance programme is the fit. Most women have learned from experience that size is one of the least rationalized of all buying factors, so it is almost absurd to say ‘Always try a dress on before buying it.’ But too many wash dresses, and altogether too many summer dresses of all types, are still bought by the labeled size. Without trying to go into that story here, I can say only that I have had in my office five dresses all marked size fourteen and no two of them were remotely alike in dimensions.
But, more than trying on a dress to make sure of its fit, move around in it; if you are going to play golf in it, swing your arms and walk; if you are going to drive a car in it, use your shoulders and arms and move your feet as you would in a car; if you like to walk in the summertime, walk in the dress with good long strides. But above all, sit down in your dress. And watch yourself in a mirror while you do it. If the least strain appears at any point, you may be sure of two things: the seams will tend to open at those points, and the fabric will acquire unsightly bulges, regardless of its fibre origin.
Check the width of the skirt, with attention to pleats. Material is often skimped here, although the appearance is of adequate fullness. In buying a dress with a matching jacket, examine the jacket carefully, especially in the seams and in the cut of the sleeve. Since, ordinarily, a dress with a matching jacket retails for practically the same price as a plain dress, and since obviously the jacket requires additional fabric and labor, something is apt to be skimped here, particularly in summer costumes. If the sleeve is not cut to allow for elbow action, this area will either rip or bulge.
Fabrics naturally account for much of the charm of a dress, and unfortunately many of its liabilities. If the trimmings are good, the cut proper, the seams generous and sewed with no less than fourteen stitches to the inch, these are all signs that the manufacturer has probably used good material in the frock itself. But you cannot take this for granted, for recent surveys have shown that the same fabric is often used in dresses wholesaling for $3.75 and $16.75. Again the consumer must make her own check on the qualities of the fabric for the use she will ask of it. In buying cotton or linen, the first factor of importance after color fastness is shrinkage. The wash-dress manufacturing industry has prepared a tentative washdress label which, among other things, offers a guarantee that ‘the fabric will not shrink appreciably (not over 5 per cent).’ Consumers should be warned that this is a practical absurdity. A 5 per cent shrinkage in a forty-five-inch dress length would amount to at least two inches. To presume that any woman would find this not ‘appreciable’ is unfortunate for the consumer. The only shrinkage safeguard commercially available at present is the Sanforizing process, which guarantees a further shrinkage of not more than three quarters of one per cent, which in a dress length of fortyfive inches would amount to about one third of an inch. Some rayons are also being Sanforized, as well as cottons and linens. But rayon is very sensitive to changes in atmosphere and cannot be stabilized as readily as other fabrics, although if treated with one of the processes for water resistance, such as Neva-Wet, it is less affected by moisture.
Finishes for washable fabrics are this season more available than ever. The Belmanized finish — that is, with a permanent crispness — may be had in other fabrics than organdy and is excellent insurance in the direction of retaining appearance. Neva-Wet, AquaSec, and other processes similar to these, add a water, spot, and perspiration safeguard to summer materials. Linen may be treated with an anti-crush process which, while it does not prevent wrinkling, does assist the linen to recover from creasing when hung up.
There are other details that might well be included in this brief analysis of how to keep a ‘pretty’ dress pretty by insuring its ability to resist wearing and washing, but perhaps the most valuable guide a woman could have would be her own record of the performance of each dress purchased this summer.
After identifying and checking the points I have mentioned, if each dress were entered on a simple chart, giving the date and place of purchase, its cost, and then, as the season passed, the number of wearings and washings it received, and finally the cost per wearing for that season, a practical and simple synopsis of qualities to be sought and avoided would automatically evolve against another season’s buying.