Slack Times
Lipez, Richard
SLACK TIMES RICHARD LIPEZ Sudden shifts in fashion and taste may seem to most Americans unimportant in the grander scheme of things, but they are a very serious matter for the manufacturer of a...
...One ad gives an illustrated history of pants that shows how the development of pants is inextricably bound up with the evolution of our most cherished Christian-Judaic customs and institutions...
...Common stock at General Pants plummeted twelve points just after Time and Newsweek came out with big stories on streakers...
...Many of these giants of industry survived 1929, but it will be a miracle if they get through 1974...
...Just about everybody in the country could come up with some sort of rational argument showing that it was absolutely necessary that he or she wear pants...
...Bra makers panicked when feminists quit wearing them...
...After 12,816 consecutive years of record profits, pants makers are concerned for the first time...
...And if they had paid any attention at all to what was happening in this country in 1973, they would have seen it coming...
...Nor are the international implications reassuring...
...The pants makers are doing what little they can to fight back...
...There wasn't a streaker among them...
...People with funny legs...
...And General Motors went into an awful slump when the fuel shortage suddenly made big cars more easily resistible...
...The effect on the pants industry could be devastating...
...Streaking has started to spread through Europe, and pants manufacturers there are reported to be plenty nervous...
...The NAPM has run several full-page ads in major metropolitan newspapers pointing out the benefits of pants...
...A possible outcome could be an embargo by the world's pants-producing nations of any pants-wearing nation whose government fails to take strong action against streakers...
...Most Congressmen probably would demand the right to wear pants...
...And now that the streaking fad is sweeping the country, manufacturers of pants are deeply worried...
...They contribute to the image that you want to project—qualities like style, neatness, discretion...
...Some of the giants of the pants industry are starting to feel the effects too...
...It now appears that the long-time boom is about to bust...
...SLACK TIMES RICHARD LIPEZ Sudden shifts in fashion and taste may seem to most Americans unimportant in the grander scheme of things, but they are a very serious matter for the manufacturer of a suddenly unfashionable product...
...It's a thorny question that probably will never have to be resolved...
...Stan Musial, Hubert Humphrey, and Greer Richard Lipez is a columnist for the Amherst Record in Massachusetts and a regular contributor to The Progressive...
...Political realists say talk of an international pants embargo is just so much whistling in the wind...
...Part of the pants makers' difficulty can be traced, of course, to their lack of foresight...
...But what about the clergy...
...Many persons would be forced to go without pants even if they didn't want to...
...We just wanted you to know...
...Harold Wilson, for example, could never be expected to risk cooperating...
...Wall Street analysts now say that smart investors are putting their money into companies that make tennis shoes and Halloween masks...
...The streaking craze continues unabated from Los Angeles to Cambridge...
...So far, the NAPM campaign has had no discernible effect...
...Garson, among others, offer their unqualified support of pants...
...Undoubtedly, many persons would consider themselves special cases and insist on exemptions...
...Already one small, family-owned pants factory in Niles, Michigan, has been forced to shut down, putting fifty-eight people out of work...
...Yet they confidently—some would say smugly—went on knocking out pants as though there was no tomorrow...
...School crossing guards...
...Like pants...
...In some countries any attempt to stop the streakers would inevitably end in the government's collapse...
...The hat manufacturers went bananas when President Kennedy started a trend by going around without one...
...When the manufacturers should have been diversifying—getting into plastics, or convenience foods, or hand guns—they just kept on making pants...
...They should have realized that any fashion is bound to run its course...
...A third ad goes right to the point and mentions how pants are "safe, reliable and deeply American...
...The tragedy is that all of those workers were wearing pants when they suddenly found themselves unemployed...
...The innocent, as usual, would suffer the most from any general embargo...
...One representative of the National Association of Pants Manufacturers predicts that if the present trend keeps up, by mid-summer a quarter of the people in the country will be running around without pants two or three per cent of the time...
...The horror of pants rationing is not a subject that Federal officials are yet willing to face up to, but the headaches of administering such a program are apparent...
...Another ad presents endorsements from famous people who wear pants...
...Rationing—voluntary or otherwise— might have to be introduced...
...There has been some talk of setting up an emergency international conference of pants producers in Vienna this spring...
Vol. 38 • May 1974 • No. 5
