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ejecrets of the Fitting Room
THERE'S no such thing as a lady in a fitting room. Picture stars enter the silver doors of the mauve salons of Greer's Maison as they enter a confessional. In that glaring north light they stand literally and figuratively denuded.
You simply can't be a grand lady in your underwear.
And in the shadow of those lavender walls their most sacred secrets are told. Put yourself in their place. You know how you feel when you have a facial? There's not a chance of kidding the beauty expert about those crow's feet that arc beginning to show around your eyes. She knows!
By the same token, you've got to come clean with your dressmaker. The designer already knows that there's a lump of fat on the back of your neck, and the exact measurement of your hips.
After that you might as well go the rest of the way and break down and confess that your husband beats you and your best friend does you dirt and that you're overdrawn at the bank. Such heart throbs are incidental compared with the big secret the dressmaker already holds; i.e., your weight.
Without the aid of that other confessional — the beauty parlor — I might never have learned the gruesome secrets of the fitting room. It was in the disillusioning environs of a Hollywood repair emporium that I encountered one of Howard Greer's fitters.
By
Lois Shirley
Talmadges three — Natalie, Constance and Norma —
in the graceful pastel chiffons they wore at Connie's
wedding to Townsend Netcher
32
A Hollywood miracle. Greta Garbo, in the
pre-Greer period when she first arrived in this
country. And then Greta the glamorous,
gowned by Greer
Now, a fitter having a facial is just so much human flesh — and the flesh is weak. Under the gruelling onslaught of hot towels, cold cream and rubber patters, the apprentice of the Great Master broke down and told all.
Greer, you will remember, is the fashion expert who molds the lines — and sometimes the lives — of the cinema elite. In the November Photoplay, Mr. Greer confessed that Hollywood leads Paris in fashions.
HE explained, at the cost of some pain, that the new Paris line which is causing such a furor wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of Clothes, is no more than an adaptation of the familiar Hollywood body line — the revealing line long beloved by the "it" girls and despised by the dressmakers.
Howard Greer's fitters have seen the cinema queens in the raw. Colleen Moore, Norma Talmadge, Mary Pickford, Marion Davies, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Evelyn Brent, Laura La Plante, Sue Carol, Bebe Daniels, Pola Negri, • Renee Adoree, Aileen Pringle and more, still more — they're just flesh and bones to the pinners and drapers, the framework for the gorgeous gowns being created. The fitter is not fooled by their figures nor their personalities.
Pola Negri is a real princess. When she swept through the outer rooms, mannequins gasped, secretaries bowed low and little dark-skinned serving maids made genuflexions. That was when she was fully clothed in lace and sables. Once inside the fitting room, she became what she was — a peasant in step-ins.