Roundabout
Press v. Buyers
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN
Big wholesale houses have characters .almost as distinct as the maisons de couture in Paris, and usually an age-group as well. Polly Peck is for little girls and those who can get away with look- ing like little girls; Frederica is a slick chick of twenty-five; Dorville a sophisticated thirty; Susan Small the same, except that a woman of uncertain age can look more continental in their light-coloured casuals. Marcusa clothes are for the over-thirty-fives : at best, the clothes one wishes one's mother would wear; at worst, the clothes one's aunts do.
Not liking to have those little gold chairs broken up in a series of free fights, all the houses tend to show to buyers and press at different times. The reason for the well-known disgust with which buyers and press regard each other is not far to seek : the press, seeing some gay little number in pink swansdown with orange spots, gleefully photographs it, only to find that outside Soho there is not a single shop in which their readers can buy it. The buyers, having bought their usual quota of a hundred beige classics, a hundred maroon clas- sics, and 500 black outsizes—with perhaps one fashionable dress to put in the window—are furious when a magazine illustration sends dozens of customers into the shop clamouring for the fashionable one. They then order the dress in quantity, but by the time it arrives, the magazines are on to something else.
This year, for one reason and another, I found myself at several buyers' shows, and very different from press shows they are. At a press showing there is a feeling of excitement, of waiting for something new. At a buyers' show all is caution.
At the Frederica show I found myself opposite a dismal trio from the Midlands: two solid women in frightful and identical cream hats (their suits raspberry and royal blue) flanked a man who yawned repeatedly above a parti-coloured shiny tie. Next to me, however, was a smart and perky buyer from Sheffield who actually seemed to like clothes. I asked her if she tried to stock the dresses that were 'featured editorially' in the maga- zines, but she said not.
'I like to go safe at first,' she said. 'Just order one or two things till I see how it goes. Besides, look at the things they choose!'
We watched some starkly simple shirtwaisters go by, and everyone nodded approval. We looked at a simple straight silk dress featured by Vogue —and e'en the ranks of Huddersfield could scarce forbear to cheer. Then the model swished out in a delicious Ascher print of greens and peacocks, featured by Woman and Beauty.
'Fancy featuring that,' said my buyer in aston- ishment. 'I wouldn't look at it, would you?' And a loosely bloused dress provoked an equally disgusted reaction from a store manager on my left : 'Dual purpose dress,' he muttered. 'You can be pregnant at the front or at the back.'
They both had strong views about what people do not like to buy : 'Cross-over necklines are fun for the men and all right for London,' said the store manager. 'Not for us.' And Chanel or no Chanel, it seems, it's waist not, want not in the provinces. But they weren't prepared to say that they couldn't sell these things : 'There isn't a dress in the country but some cripple will buy it.'
I suggested that perhaps the press might be good for trade, if they made people change their ideas faster, made them more quickly discontented with the clothes they already had. But they would have none of it. 'Good, wearable clothes,' they said, 'you can sell all the time. The press ought to feature those.' And at Marcusa, where jacket and hem lengths, colours and shapes never much from year to year, this is proved true is nothing the press can choose that `extreme' for the buyers. So that's the all for those who always like their clothes tlic Frederick Starke, the designer of the I=I' collection, is convinced that women in don't want their clothes this way. 'The underestimate the taste of the public over ',11 again,' he says. 'They keep saying, "01 we're six months behind in the province' who keeps them behind? They'll always F1 and just order what went well last year Peck said the same thing—that often a der dress finds not a single buyer who will 111 In America the shops follow the magi" great deal more, and an editorial in, say, Al is enough' to guarantee a manufacturer order. Whether you think that would improvement here, depends on whether yo'l buyers or press have the better taste. To 01) the press have it, for two rather obvious re the press do see the sources of fashion—tW and Rome collections—the buyers do not you want a monument to the buyers, look 3 you—in Wigan, say, on a Saturday afternoo Actually a lot of this trouble between tV and the buyers would never happen if 01' buyers could re-order quickly on a line 111 going well. There are, the manufacturers me, a number of interminably complicat iron reasons why re-ordering must take seven weeks (or be impossible altogether middle of a season).
Maybe. All I know is that the pair of who runs Wallis shops can get Paris co their windows in a matter of weeks—and just mean, as more 'reputable' manu imply, some tatty gimmick-ridden rag materials; but excellent coats with the Dior, Balmain dresses worked from the toile or cotton working model. They do say, by having their own factory. Dory have their own factory, but seem to thi4 gentlemanly to hurry. And Sambo, a firm turn out an excellently pretty frock when I are showing in the spring collection a Brigitte Bardot's wedding dress, They act!' the toile in their possession when she was' last June. But did they rush it into the sh. July? No. Or as a Christmas party dreg'' Next spring will be time enough.
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