The Pittsburgh Press (March 29, 1947)
Ruark: Last Easter’s dress
By Robert C. Ruark
WASHINGTON – The woman in my life has taken a long look at the new fashions and decided to wear last Easter’s dress tomorrow week. Hear that, storekeepers?
My advice to you is rip up the frocks you’ve got in stock and turn ‘em into pen-wipers or sachet bags. Then get off a sizzling cable to Paris, telling those dress-designing lads to try again on something not quite so cock-eyed.
As you gentlemen well know, the Easter clothes business country-wide is a grave disappointment this year. Many a shop, stuck with a stock of dresses nobody seems to want is holding pre-Easter bargain sales. Others have canceled some of their orders. Some have sought to return dresses to the wholesalers.
Most merchants agree with President Truman that costs must come down. The chairman of the National Retail Dry Goods Association says prices either drop or disaster is the word. That’s part of the story, all right. My bride says she was shown a dress priced at $135, which wasn’t worth $50, but she wouldn’t have worn it if it had been $2.98. She didn’t want to look like a fugitive from a harem in the Casbah.
Gets first inkling of horrid truth
That’s the real trouble, gents. The ladies don’t like most of this Spring’s fashions. Neither do their husbands I got my first inkling of the horrid truth the other night when we were invited to a flossy spot to dine and dance. Some of the females were wearing the last word in fashionable clothes and they weren’t happy.
The one for whom I felt sorriest had a black dress, with a slit in it reaching to her left knee. This slit was bound in bright blue ribbon. At the top of the slit was a bow a foot and a half long and six inches wide, made of blue velvet. It had cast-iron stuffing in it to keep it from drooping.
So she danced and every step she took, bang, her knee hit that bow, which was so heavy she seemed to favor her left leg. She didn’t exactly limp, but she almost did and I don’t think she’ll ever buy a dress like that again. My guess is that she’ll cut it into strips to tie up her tomato vines.
Third dress clinches argument
Another beauty for whom I have a high regard wore a dress so new you almost could smell the salt air from its trans-Atlantic voyage. For a skirt it had a series of overlapping petals attached to her waist like aprons. When she stood still, the bottom of her skirt looked scalloped; when she moved, she couldn’t keep her knees covered.
Pretty knees, too, but she felt uncomfortable. Those Parisians don’t seem to understand about ladies and their knees. When ladies wear bathing suits, they have no objection to displaying these joints. When they put on stockings and a dress, their knees are unmentionable and must be kept hidden.
This does not make sense, but that’s the way the girls are and I am surprised the dress makers didn’t know it.
A third dress, which clinches my argument, made another lady’s skirt look like a series of fringed lamp-shades, telescoped one on another. Above her waist she wore a bodice, from which some genius with the shears had cut a large, kidney-shaped chunk. Her waist was bare in the back and on both sides. Every time a man danced with her and put his sweaty paws on her raw middle she cringed. So did he.
See what I mean, storekeepers? No new dresses in Mrs. O.’s closet this Easter. She doesn’t want to be embarrassed.