Evening Star Newspaper, February 16, 1930, Page 94

10 THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D.- C, FEBRUARY 16, 1930, e Betrayed Into Fashion Pirate Hands | I'ragedy of the Poor Little Parisian Seamstresses Who Smuggle From - Ateliers the Priceless Patterns of Their Firms’® Latest Models Only to Pay in Jail for Trickery of Their Plotting Romeos. BY R. S. FENDRICK. . - PARIS. AGIC! Beauty! Glamour! Wealth! Elegance! Clothes! Jewels! Lights! Romance—and Drama! Seven o'clock-in the heart of 1 Paris! A procession of chic, stunning, marvelously dressed girls, the seam- stresses from the aseliers of the great dress- making shops, came laughing and dancing from the service exits. The needles that skip like lightning through fine silks all day long had all the evening to eat, dance, skate and make merry with the beaux walting for them along the curb. Suddenly, in the midst of the laughing, chat- tering voices, thére was a sharp cry and a girl burst into hysterical sobbing. “What have you got in this package, Rosine?” the shop's detective asked as she tried to pass sut. “Just a soiled apron, M. Louis,” she laughed nervously. “Do you want to see it?” “I am sorry, mademoiselle, but you know . the rules——" Before the detective had ;;en commenced to open the package, the pretty young Rosine, looking. like a princess in a homemade outfit that cost her only $10 for the material but many nights of fatigue for her clever little fin- commenced to shriek and dashed out into the street, never to return. ; Opened up, her package revealed a veritable treasure—the priceless pattern of the firm’'s most successful gown. Rosine could have sold it to a pirate for $50 or $100, a tremendous sum for even a “frst hand” in an atelier. But from the moment she fled to escape a slashing rebuke, she was an outcast from her guild. It HHGH * All Autumn and Winter long the artists and designers of each house have been working in the deepest secrecy to produce a hundred:or more outfits. A big house will spend $100,000 - alone in making a single sample of each one of their new models. % A few days after the new collections are first like wildfire from atelier to atelier that a cer- tain new evening gown of one house—"“A Kiss in the Night,” for all dresses have sweet names nowadays—is the most stunning thing in town; that a certain afternoon frock of another house is the prettiest thing of its kind. The whole dressmaking trade will be buzzing with these It is at this point that the pirates appear. Where are at least & hundred of these estab- ments hidden away in cheap streets in Mont- martre and elsewhere, but being illicit, boot- legging affairs, they have no sign of m outside. In fact, a password is often n for permission to enter. ‘The reason ‘for their existence is that poor little dressmakers and buyers from cheap department stores, all the way from Timbuktu to China, are unable or unwilling: to pay the big prices demanded by the fashionable Paris houses for the right of repro- duction. This class of buyers prefer to pay a third or a fourth of the price for a copy of the original made up in cheaper materials, - The pirates’ problem is to procure the pat- terns of the successful new models very early in the season. This is not easy. It is about as difficult to get into the early trade showings of the big Rue de la Paix houses as to break into the gold vaults of the Bank of France. Even if a spy does see the gown he or she wants to copy, of what benefit is it? With a hundred mannequins flitting about, how can one remem- ber the details of a single dress? The tales of the copyists with a photographic mind are un- e. The people who try to make an outfit memory simply make a mess of it. The pirates must have patterns, but these fire locked up in a safe when they are not being msed in the ateliers. Even the seamstresses who Mse them are closely watched and have no op- portunity to copy the patterns. “These patterns are not so easy to hide. Made of a sort of heavy canvas, of ecru color, they take up considerable space. They are much toeo large to be carried In handbags or stuffed into stockings. - Ii is here that romance and tragedy enter into the intrigue. The pirates, sometimes men, sometimes women, employ good-looking young men as Romeos to trick the .seamstresses into . stealing the patterns from their ateliers. The average seamstress—call her Rosine— will not betray her employer if the business is put up to her in a crude, commercial way. Even if she is only earning enough to keep body and soul together, she will indignantly scorn any such offer. But Georges, the pirates’ young scout, ‘'has .a way of getting around Rosine. Knowing the cafes where the girls go to get their coffee and sandwiches during the noon hour, he drives up to one of them in a smart little roadster and orders a drink. Within a few minutes he has found a pretext to start up a conversation, discovered which dressmaking shop they come from and picked out a “first Hand” from the atelier who seems impressionable. “A little promenade in my car through the Bols after work this afternoon?” he whispers finally, and Rosine generally agrees. FTER an intense lightning courtship last- N ing two or three days and. vague talk of masriage, Georges come out in the open. “I am -a partner of Letulle, the big pirate dressmaker,” he confesses. Rosine fgels & funny little shiver run down her back, and her intuition tells she had better watch her step. She of other young dressmakers being steal patterns, but she has a grea Georges, for his snappy little car for getting away from an unhapp: She is too excited to listen to th voice during a gay round of moonlight promenades, kisses and “If we could only get a couple of ning gowns,” Georges sighs, “the morning with grim determination. will smuggle a pattern out, let Georges y it and then smuggle it back into the ate- T the next morning! Marriage or bust is T motto! And she succeeds. “What have you got there, " the house detective asked as she passed “Just some scraps of mafne gave me, her package . eno wrapped around : her past and she rushed %o haye Georges copy it The next morning the detective asked what she was bringing in. “It’s a special bread the doctor ordered me to eat,” she explained and showed the end of a loaf that had the pattern around it. o \iiscuier warrants. “I warn you that you commissioner snorted disgustedly. “I beg pardon,” the pirate smiled slyly. “This new - collection.” chers invaded the cutting and sew- atelers. . Here surely they would find- the en robes being copied, but instead several Designers of such wraps as the one shown here take every precaution to prevent their seamstresses Jrom taking out _copies or patterns with them wken they leave the work