A suspicion which has for some time been crescent in the mind of this department whenever it has occasion to peruse one of the several stylish, coated-paper periodicals devoted to women's fashions as well as the daily papers with women's departments, has been that a preposterous discrepancy seems to exist in their editors' minds between their readers' taste in food and wine and their taste in apparel. This suspicion has been altogether confirmed by Mrs. Jeanne Owen, secretary of the Wine and Food Society and New York's most notable lady gourmet, who is frequently called on in her professional capacity as a table arbiter to help out fashion editors in matters beyond their own knowledge or experience.
It seems a fixed and immovable thesis in the minds of style reporters and fashion editors, as well as of the minor functionaries charged with photography and make-up details, that although a woman's taste and means may allow her to wear a ＄1,000 evening gown, a ＄20,000 sable wrap, and an incalculable quantity of diamonds, cabochon emeralds, and other trifles of ornamentation, she makes a practice of dining on warmed-over dishes, ragouts, and entrails and wouldn't consider paying more than ＄1.50 for the house dinner, although she is constantly depicted as dining at Jack and Charlie's, the Colony, or Henri Soulé's.
For the enlightenment of fashion writers, the information might be gently relayed that a light supper with wine can be had at any of these places for ＄75, but that if the paradigms of fashion about whom they write want the full dinner treatment, the check for two will come much closer to ＄100.
Mrs. Owen reports that it is a fetish with magazine editors that the dreamy creatures who are depicted in their pages wearing garments and jewelry whose total may be a cool ＄100,000 in retail cost, must always be photographed for their color spreads munching on cottagecheese salads, sipping wines at fifty-nine cents a quart, and eating tasty, warmedover dishes that Hilda can run up on the basis, presumably, of last night's warmed-over dishes. The notion that a woman who can afford ＄100 for her Delman evening slippers will not pony up with anything better than a salami sandwich with mediocre sherry for her guests would be so fantastic as to be merely humorous, were it not that this complete delusion gets passed on to readers who take it as gospel.
It is about as reasonable to believe that Mrs. Harrison Williams wears twenty-cent cotton stockings with her Worth evening dresses as it is that she and her guests, wearing the most beautiful clothes known to the Rue de la Paix or Fifty-seventh Street, sit down to dinners of Spam and sauerkraut.
A stunning example of this technique of cheapening the subjects of their supposedly flattering articles by coated paper magazines was the pictures and story in a recent issue of Vogue detailing one of Mme. Valentina's fabulous Russian Easter supper parties. The photographs showed the guests to be about as sumptuously attired as the ranking professional people of New York can afford to be, which is not hay: Valentina in a little number of antique lace insured for ＄25,000, the masculine guests in full formal evening attire, the buffet laid with priceless china and a profusion of crystal to shame a Lord Mayor's dinner. But the reporter inserted a sly note to the effect that supper itself featured hot dogs, a mendacity which any slight study of the pictures would prove abundantly, but which, nevertheless, is part of the cheapening technique of fashion magazines in the hope of establishing some sort of spurious bond between the Colonel's Lady and Judy O'Grady. They don't dare to do it in the realm of clothes, from which their entire advertising revenue derives, so they contrive a democratic slant by depicting the aristocracy as habitually entertaining formally on a menu of liver and onions.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that good taste in apparel is almost invariably complemented in women of fashion by sound and luxurious taste in food and wine. If this is not the case, why, then, the acknowledged dominance of such celebrated luxury resorts of gastronomy as the aforementioned Jack and Charlie's, Colony, Soulé's, et al, as the world's foremost parades of fashion as well? The menus of these establishments fail to reveal any sign of the fish-and-chips diet which fashion magazines advertise as the exclusive fare of the well to do.
In any sensible and ordered way of life, a woman will go to as much trouble, if not more, proportionally, over what she eats as over what she wears, and it might crudely be hinted that there are even women who don't give a hoot about whether their slip is showing who will spend a whole day in the kitchen seeing that cook gets the pheasant Souvaroff just right for her company.
Ever alert to acquire for the legend any anecdote concerning the Palace in San Francisco, a hotel which has long and not too secretly exerted a fascination for him, your reporter encountered a new and to him agreeable fragment about the old Palace in the days before the Fire. One of the most distinguished permanent residents of Senator Sharon's property in the eighties was Mrs. Lilly Hitchcock Coit who, at a later date, built the Coit Memorial Tower, now one of the less unobtrusive sights of San Francisco atop Telegraph Hill. In her youth Mrs. Coit was an individualist of exciting proportions, “fast” it was called then, and among other alarming things, a female fire buff of wide repute. One evening, when down on the Peninsula, she permitted two gentlemen of her acquaintance to occupy her apartment at the Palace for a quiet game of bridge whist, in the course of which words were passed and one of the gentlemen became shot—fatally. The next day Mrs. Coit, her wig reportedly askew for the first time in recorded history, appeared at her solicitor's office demanding damages against the Chronicle, a then somewhat racier sheet than it has since become. The old gentleman was amused by her tones of outrage and remarked that she never seemed to have resented publicity before now, even if it were of a somewhat audacious nature. “Certainly I don't mind being in the papers,” screamed the lady in you-can't-do-this-to-me tones, “but look what the wretches have said: `Shooting in the apartment of a Mrs. Coit!' Doesn't everyone know who I am?”
Pinterest
