The Big Fashion Story
ALAN, RAY
The Big Fashion Story Last Spring, a leading European women's magazine declared that the color this year would be brown. Another opted for mauve. A major European clothing chain spent a lot of...
...For generations, undercover Jews and ex-Jews were faced with the problem of evading the Inquisition and convincing the world around them of their "pure blood...
...a second told girls to dress like their great-grandmothers and wear drab, dreary, fussy, overcrowded flower-patterns (the adjectives are mine, not the mogul's...
...Jerusalem was the capital of the Jews before Madrid was the capital of Spain, before London was English...
...Fig leaves are awkward to wear unless you have a sylph-like figure, and they wilt in winter...
...A New Jew Miguel de Cervantes was a Jew and his elusive heroine, Dulcinea, was Israel...
...A New Truth Who says Communist papers suppress news...
...As well expect high civic standards among Mafia-dominated Sicilian peasants...
...Does this mean that women have at last learned to dress themselves...
...Is the big fashion story of 1978 the news that there is no fashion...
...One of the nice things about my cross section of femininity was that in any street, cate or restaurant even the untrained girlwatcher could distinguish many styles of dress: stretch-pants, jeans and boiler-suits (fewer jeans than last year, though of more varied colors...
...This year The New Leader is again a highly valued and popular teaching aid in colleges and universities around the nation...
...When I asked him why he had leapt to Israel's defense he replied: "Because I dislike propaganda and I am tired of silly people who say the Jews are always in the wrong...
...The elegant executive will generally prefer knee-guards: these may oblige him to adopt a Chaplin-esque stance at times, but he can disguise his security precautions as an amiably idiosyncratic tribute to a great artist by investing also in a walking stick (incorporating an automatic pis-, tol) and a bowler hat (bulletproof, of course...
...In my "EuroVista" column appearing in The New Leader of December 19, 1977,1 quoted some of the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish comments that had recently appeared in the Spanish press, notably in La Vanguardia, a leading daily...
...I am relieved to be able to report that few wore brown or mauve, very few were dotty, few had three-decker undercarriages, and only Spanish girls had fallen, to any noticeable extent, for drab, dreary, etc., flower-patterns...
...Lebanon, he said, had been ruined by "Is-lamo-Palestinian mercenaries of the most fanatical colonels and sheikhs...
...yet the fashion industry is certainly looking shabby, with the big houses (the prison-like echo is not wholly inappropriate) losing money on their rags and keeping afloat by frantic diversification as well as by leasing their names to the manufacturers of tourist souvenirs...
...Feminists should rejoice —and deliver an estocada while this bull is out of breath...
...But let's not be unfair or impatient: That news, too, will be published, I'm sure, in time for the centenary of the event...
...If you are not already using The New Leader in the classroom, take advantage of this special offer now by returning the coupon below...
...It will enable the woman of character to choose clothes that match her personality and mood and affirm her individuality, rather than her subjection to the whim of a commercial clan hundreds of miles away...
...That belief is being so effectively propagated that even writers one had, in the past, considered intelligent are succumbing to it...
...A whole PR machine is devoted to implanting a complex in intended victims who resist fashion's dictates—which is, no doubt, why many a woman capable of behaving like an individual intellectually and professionally cringes and crawls along with the flock the moment Yves or Paolo snaps his tape-measure...
...On the men's side of the store, rich businessmen, senior diplomats and some pop-singers and journalists, worried about terrorism and eager, perhaps, to score a point over old Jones, are buying bulletproof vests and coats...
...I say "relieved" not because I am allergic to brown or incensed by dots, but because I do not like to see supposedly rational human beings, female or male, behaving like sheep...
...He is a lively, imaginative novelist with an especial appeal to people like me who are interested in Mexico but have never been there...
...How can women hope to assert themselves politically and socially so long as they are scared of a handful of ragmongers...
...For obvious reasons, even historians know little about the descendants of the Jews who avoided expulsion, although not only Cervantes but the engaging Santa Teresa of Avila and some other eminent Spaniards are thought to have had Jewish ancestry...
...The paper forgot to add that Trotsky's assassin, Ramon Mercader, has been living in Prague and Moscow...
...Our student rate represents a remarkable value?3.00 per term per student for a minimum order of five subscriptions sent to the instructor...
...You dream it, Europe's girls are wearing it...
...These are some of the conclusions to be drawn from a paper read to the recent international congress on Cervantes, in Madrid, by Professor Leandro Rodriguez...
...I enclose...
...The New Leader College Division, 212 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...The average Spaniard knows little about it, or about the fate of the Jews after 1492 when most of them were expelled by Isabel...
...He requires his readers to believe that a malevolent Israel is intriguing against Mexico because of its oil resources...
...The fashion bosses would be a worthier target: Their aim is nothing less than to condition feminine reflexes and reshape women physically—not by the half-dozen but by the million—and fleece them in the process...
...Inherited from religious tradition, early Falangism and General Franco's diplomatic needs, the fashion has been pepped up by petrodollars, fear of an energy shortage, and the belief of a peculiarly gullible section of the Left that Arab military dictatorships are somehow progressive democracies...
...Sadly, his latest book is marred by the kind of lazy-minded, petty-bourgeois anti-Semitism that used to afflict the more stagnant backwaters of Western-European society (one had hoped Mexico had avoided that kind of rut...
...and he was struck by the great Spanish writer's knowledge of the Bible, unusual in Spain...
...10010 Please send me.................subscriptions to The New Leader for the Fall Term 1978 at $3.00 per term per subscription...
...It may help parents steer their children clear of the sartorial, musical, narcotic, and pseu-doreligious rubbish propagated by the branches of the fashion industry that prey on adolescents...
...IN THE CLASSROOM Every semester scores of teachers and thousands of students use The New Leader as source material in Political Science, Government and History courses...
...Workers in the European and American clothing industry, already hit by recession and imports from low-wage countries, should not be hurt by the decline of the big names...
...He criticized the Spanish Socialist press for fawning on Arab dictatorships that are "more repressive than the Franco regime" and quoted a Spanish Socialist leader who, in a moment of candor, complained of "the damage petrodollars are doing to Spanish Socialism...
...One fashion mogul decreed three-tier skirts...
...Bulletproof trousers are on sale, too, but they tend to make the wearer walk like Groucho...
...Then an Englishman contributed a piece outlining (probably for the first time in the Spanish press) the Arab League's share of responsibility for the Palestine refugee problem and commenting: "The Jews had the same right to recover Israel as Spaniards did to recover Andalusia...
...Professor Rodriguez found some of his clues in Cervantes' use of allegory...
...granny dresses, gypsy dresses, nymphet dresses, dresses like petticoats and ancient nighties...
...Women's Lib has squandered a lot of energy and goodwill directing disproportionate ire at the world's easiest and safest target—the generally inoffensive average man, a modest creature (with, admittedly, a lot to be modest about) who rarely aspires to getting his hook into more than two or three women and ceases to be average if his score reaches half a dozen...
...The French Communist daily L'Humanite has just revealed that Leon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico by a Stalinist agent...
...Name of instructor Same of college or university October 9, 1978 15...
...Minimum order: five subscriptions...
...Desk copy free...
...When they wrote, they had either to be as Catholic as a crucifix or to veil their ideas in allegory...
...The important Jewish contribution to the country's brilliant medieval civilization has traditionally been played down in Spain...
...He wrote to La Vanguardia expressing dismay at his Spanish Socialist friends' ignorance of "the antidemocratic character of the Arab governments and of what Ibn Khaldoun called the domineering and expansionist spirit of orthodox Islam...
...A major European clothing chain spent a lot of money on posters and newspaper advertisements proclaiming that dots were the thing...
...Or is he reserving it for his next work...
...Drop a rock into a duckpond and you will have some idea of the stir he caused in Spain's conservative academic circles...
...During the summer I read a new novel by a Mexican writer who is attracting attention in Spain...
...The passing of the moguls will give greater opportunities to local designers and artisans...
...During the last few months I have seen a sizeable ragbag sample of French, Spanish, English and German girls and women...
...One of the letters was from a Catholic writer and teacher I have met a few times, a fine man whom I knew to be immobilized by a painful illness...
...Don Quijote was searching for divine j ustice in a society that was making a mockery of the concept...
...T-shirts, floppy 1930ish shirts, pre-1920 men's shirts and prim 1940ish blouses...
...Toward the end of the book I was expecting the author to come up with the revelation that Mexico recognized the Spanish Republic and cold shouldered Franco's regime for so long because it was bribed with Zionist gold, as a Francoist group once alleged, but he missed that nugget...
...A Lebanese Christian, who described himself as a Socialist, joined in the fray...
...The headline "cervantes was a jew" broke, if only for a day, with the fashion of anti-Jewishness followed in recent years by several Spanish papers...
...A fashion-besotted mother is as uninspiring a guide for a child as an alcoholic father...
...In fairness, I must now report that La Vanguardia has since published three or four letters and an article or two explaining Israeli points of view...
...The hero despises and sadistically humiliates four of the five Jewish characters in the story: one he murders by locking him in a cold store...
...It's too early to be sure...
...tight skirts, full skirts —knee-length, medium and long?and those ugly split skirts...
...Why must a Moslem conquest be considered permanent...
...Women will still need clothes...
Vol. 61 • October 1978 • No. 20
