Revolution

For two decades, U.S. women had been striving for what fashion writers called the "American Look." This called for a certain litheness, a casual jauntiness, a healthy complexion, broad shoulders and, above all, slim hips. In pursuit of such lean, athletic elegance, women zipped themselves into elastic girdles, consigned themselves mercilessly to seven-day diets, rolling machines, long walks and meditation over calorie charts. At the same time, they luxuriated in what was known as "freedom of movement"; no joke tickled female audiences quite so much as references to corsets and the Victorian practice of lacing.

Last week, this whole painfully erected concept of fashion was tumbling down so fast that whole generations of window dummies were beginning to look selfconscious. The fashion world was engaged in a furious "circular advance--back to lines from which it had marched after World War I. It was a counterrevolution as drastic as a full-scale revival of the 1914 Pierce-Arrow, the buttonhook and the mustache cup. The summer's furore over longer hemlines was nothing but a skirmish. Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, imperious oracles of the dressmakers, sounded the call. Unabashed, they now cried that what was black had become white, that there was no figure but the hourglass figure and that salvation lay in what Harper's called the new "Mold of Fashion" .

"You can't be a last-year girl," explained Harper's Bazaar. "You can let the clock stop, of course, if you want to ally yourself with women who hold off until a new fashion is on everyone else's back. . . . Put your hands around your waist, just above your hips. This is your waistline. The line goes up, rounded and small, to a defined and shapely bosom." Harper's, having first proclaimed in a kind of hypnotist's monotone that "already you are noticing [that] heavy, bulky shoulder pads are annoying you," now went unconcernedly on: "You may add to your hip-periphery by tying on extra hip pads." The real thing, it explained, "is to clear your mind of all silhouette fixations."

This, of course, was the kind of soothing lingo in which cowhands indulge just before they press down the branding iron. The real fashion message for fall appeared in bolder type. It said, quite simply: GET YOURSELF A NEW SHAPE. And if they wanted to buy the new fall dresses, that is exactly what U.S. women would have to do--with the help of pads, laces, stays and whalebone, if necessary.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.