The Season of Sparkle Plenty

With a nod toward Capitol Hill, where Montana's Mike Mansfield and other Senators have recently been debating the nation's dwindling silver resources, Washington Star Fashion Editor Eleni last week observed, "They keep wondering what's happened to the silver supply. Well, I could tell them. It's all on women's backs."

And on their feet, hands, necks, heads, legs and ears, she might have added, combined with anything and everything else that glitters, including gold, sequins, paillettes, mirrors, foil, beads and crystal. From one end of the nation to the other, the bestselling look in women's evening fashions this year is sparkle plenty, and then some. It can be seen in silver and gold lame shoes, hats, bags, evening pajamas, raincoats and even bikinis; it comes in sequined and jewel-encrusted and beaded dresses, and in silver mesh and see-through dresses with dazzling bras to go under them.

Foil & Flashlights. Gold and silver pantyleg stockings (at $4 each) are selling so fast stores can't keep them in stock. Paper silver-foil dresses, priced at $7 and $10, are even more popular in small towns than they are in the big cities. Luminescent gigantism in earrings has reached the stage where girls are turning themselves into Yule trees, dangling oversize baubles, including some with flashlight batteries that turn on and off. There is hardly a hostess going who is not somewhere aglow or aglitter.

When on the town, Lee Radziwill wears a white lame and silver-sequined dress. Barbara Howar, Washington's high priestess of mad mod fashion, showed up at the International Ball in a strapless tent dress of silver lame ribbons on net, while her best friend, Yolande Fox, came wrapped in silver tinsel threaded through ice-blu lace.

Snagged & Blinded. CaterineMilinaire wears a mirror-top dress; Charlotte Ford was last seen wearing silver-embroidered ivory lace with matching boots. Chicago Socialite Fay Peck owns at least a dozen pairs of Christmas-tree-ball earrings, plus three short glitter dresses, which, she says, "I haven't taken off since the time I bought them." To the San Francisco Opera Guild's annual Fol de Rol ball, Nancy Adler, the conductor's wife, came in a silver and white plaid dress, and Pia Lindstrom (now a local TV hostess) wore a silver brocade pants suit. Three of the city's prettiest partygoers, Lola Prentice, Maryon Davies Lewis and Judy Ludwig, arrived in Donald Brooks pailletted or sequined outfits.

There are other hazards to the glit glut. Manhattan jet-set Travel Agent Susan Stein recalls with a shudder the time recently when her sequined dress got tangled in the sequins belonging to Marie Edith Legendre, the French consul general's wife. "I took a small loss at my hem," says Susan, "because I thought her whole dress might unravel." More serious still, there are signs that all the glitter is leading to snow blindness. Snaps the Boston Globe's Marjorie Sherman: "Frankly, I don't think I'm going to put any glitter on my Christmas tree, I'm so sick of it. It's everywhere. In everything. On their shoes. On their eyelids. It's a treat to see a woman in a plain, unembellished dress."

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