Roundabout
rr was LIKE walking into an orange sherbet, fight.; ing your way out through a lemon soufflé, and find- ing yourself in the middle of a Brobdingnagian cup-
board of petti- coats. Nylon
froth foamed round them all : round the
• men who made the yarn, the red-faced buyers from the Midlands, the chattering girls from the nylon factories, and round the austere fashion hen in the formidable spectacles. It was the trade's Nylon Fair in the Albert Hall.
First, the frillies. Baby doll pyjamas skipped by, on baby dolls of twenty-eight and upwards. Pat- terned peignoirs paraded past on a girl so English she seemed to have her tennis clothes on under- neath. A haughty model swept in under two tons of mauve nylon lace: obviously designed for a brothel madam. There would have been room for all the girls to scuttle under her skirts in the event of a police raid. The fashion hen wrote 'Hellish orchid' on her programme.
It was a curiously sexless parade. 'The trouble is,' muttered the buyer, 'they've got the wrong type girl doing, the modelling. Too respectable. They all wear bras and things, you can't tell what the clothes would do for a girl.' He coughed in sudden embarrassment, and the fashion hen dis- tastefully turned her spectacles away.
Next, the outerwear. But the trouble was' that either it looked just like any other outerwear, so that the audience watched merely a rather miscel- laneous fashion parade; or it looked like nylop, and hoit--evening dresses indistinguishable from nightdresses, cocktail dresses for the girl who drinks cocktails in bed. Astonishingly, there were five nylon bridal gowns--,--for anyone who wants a drip-dry wedding dress that will wear and wear.
Outside in the fair, there were booths displaying more of the same, plus carpets, furs, stockings; with nylon cats that turned out to be stuffed, and nyloii girls that turned Out to be real. One girl was modelling an extraordinary number that seemed to have been made on the same plan as cinema curtains, ruched drape. as it were: presumably you pulled a string, and the curtain rose.
The fashion hen was deep in discussion with a handsome front man on the technical side, making forthright inquiries about . a stiff petticoat. 'I'm sorry, Madan), but what you want is made out of 80 denier nylon. We only do up to 70. The rest,' he sighed delicately, 'is ICU Until the-lion lies down with the lamb, till East meets West and the sun rises in the latter : till ICI and British Nylon Spin- ners join hands in harmony, it seems, there will be no really stiff petticoats for 13ritain. 'A pity, since America has had them for five years.
A cosy housewife, whose connection with the trade was nebulous, looked with misty eyes at the floating nylon all round and sighed : 'If only one could remember,' she said, 'what it was like before.' Before Nylon: DN. When women ironed their underclothes and mended their stockings. When men's socks went into holes as often as they went into the laundry basket. But it is no good : no one remembers or gets a kick out of the time-saving now. One cannot even remember the interim days: the days when nylon garments
dried like a flash—and their cotton and silk trim- mings stayed obstinately wet as usual; the days when there was all that fuss about static electricity. The days when women thought nylon was fragile. Just as a hardened mother of seven hurls her three youngest into the tub, forgetting how she trembled for her first little bundle of breakable heaven, so the housewife knows nylon for a tough baby now, and flings into boiling detergent what she once squeezed in fear, trembling and lukewarm suds.
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