Transvestia

The only blasts so far have come from buyers of men's wear fashions for retail stores, who feel they have fought and bled to make men accept even a few minor changes. Heaven forbid they should take up the cause of skirts.

"It's ludicrous," says Danny Zarem of Bonwit Teller, the store with the first Pierre Cardin men's shop in this country.

"Absolutely not," says Ohrbach's buyer. He has invited lots of celebrities like Henry Fonda, Hugh Downs, and Guy Bourgos to a men's international fashion show Tuesday. Already he has nightmares of their looking around the place and saying, "All very nice, but what do you have in skirts?"

Hawes' first telephone call came from the Eng- lish press that is already taking the skirts-for- men boom seriously. England now has a far-outness record in fashion to keep up. Besides the English are broken in to the idea by their handsome High- landers in kilts.

the aes-

On Dec. 5, 1966, London's Daily Telegraph pub- lished an interview with American designer (for women) Bonnie Cashin. It was headlined "Men Should Wear Skirts." Bonnie mentions comfort first. "I've always felt men are constricted in men's clothes." But she develops a more important reason thetic pleasure a woman gets from looking at a man's legs. "What can be more vigorous looking, tougher?" she queried the English reporter. "Look at the High- landers and the Greek Evzones. We're in a gray flannel rut.'

Though English men's wear designer, Hardy Amies simply said, "More power to her," when he heard of the Hawes crusade, in London the skirt for men is very much in the air.

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