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This Month...
- Check out the latest jewelry from Jewels By Christine







Camouflage finally went away, sort of. I do know one story of a flamboyant, well-known Vogue associate editor who advised a couturier in Paris last January, "Camouflage, darling! It's all about camouflage. Your collection needs camouflage!" But basically, the closer we get to war, the less pronounced we want our fashion wartime statements to look. Hence, the girly girl in the flouncy short skirts and clunking boots.

And that's for the "thinking woman". The rest of the consumers will get boxy jackets a la the fifties, forties style high heels with peek-a-boo toes, and for our tragic intellectual sisters in Europe, more drab black shapeless wardrobes.

Fashionlines Features Editor Ann Seymour reports that San Francisco fashion doyenne Dodie Rosekrans, now a Paris transplant, wore the following to a recent Bay Area party: "...a Dior Couture jacket in yellow silk, hand embroidered with typical French vegetation and scroll motifs in raspberry, turquoise, lime and coral, and the hand stitching rivaled the robes of the last empress of China that are in the Asian Museum." Dodie has always had the means, the taste and the foresight to buy the best. I can't help but think of a comment my first boyfriend's father made back in the early seventies: "Young people should each be given a million dollars when they're 21, to use as they like. They can spend the rest of their lives paying it back." How many of us would use some of that million on a Dior Couture jacket? Or are the rest of us stuck with the "tragic-sexy look"? Because that, my friends, is what we've got for ready-to-wear. Fashionlines New York Editor Marilyn Kirschner has been preaching the joys and the beauty of vintage clothes for years. It is truly the way to obtain an authentic, beautiful, and refined look.

But whether you are buying the current ready-to-wear girly look, or like Marilyn, swearing by vintage, or like me, sticking with last season's clothes, you will be thinking about the times we are living in, and about the things that really matter. Fantasy places an important role in our lives, especially when times are tough. So do amulets, be they diamond crosses suspended from little chains around the throat or dyed shocking pink lucky rabbits' feet dangling from a purse.

In fact, fantasy is so important that I will leave our readers with a true story of a man who fell in love with another man's wife. He went to the husband's office to declare his feelings and ask that the husband relinquish his wife. The husband, a doctor known for his rationality, told the impassioned would be suitor, "There is one thing you should know about my wife. She lives in a fantasy world." The husband thought this would surely deter the suitor, who was a commanding officer of one of our armed forces. Apparently, it did not. The general replied, "I live in a fantasy world too."


suppes@fashionlines.com