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The collection constituted Sophie Gimbel's conception of the New Look. As head of Saks's famed Salon Moderne, its custom dress shop, Sophie is one of the top U.S. designers. Moreover, as the U.S. dress industry is well aware, she has a razor-keen sense, as sharp as any other designer's, of what U.S. women will finally choose to wear out of the hodge-podge of new styles. As far as the great mass-producing dress shops of Manhattan's Seventh Avenue are concerned, that makes Sophie a fashion chart. What she displays one week—at $255 a dress and -up—is often what the Seventh Avenue lofts will be busily making into a reasonable facsimile a year later, for $49.50.
As Sophie's slim-waisted models swept about her salon last week, the carefully curried audience of women (and one sad husband looking like a Displaced Person) cooed with pleasant surprise. Nowhere was there a sign of fantastic extremes that had given the New Look its painful expression. Sophie had simply gone her own, independent way and created a New Look that was an easily recognizable alteration of the Old. Shoulders were padded slightly less than before and waists were narrower, but few were corseted, and daytime hemlines, only slightly lower, were still a long way from the ankles. ("Everyone," said Sophie, "knows that dresses were too short.")
In a word, Sophie was reassuring: she was telling the world that the New Look could be acquired with comparatively little pain to either torsos or pocketbooks. "After all," said she, "our girls have beautiful figures. Do you think they'll want to spoil them with padded hips? Even if they do like this tight waistline, how many are willing to go through the agony to get it? I put on one of those new corsets and after 15 minutes I had to take it off. I've never been so uncomfortable in my life."
Conservative Manifesto. Sophie has always been content to let more flashy designers go their own gait, and doesn't worry about trying to set a trend. She believes in the maxim that the best-dressed women follow the fashions at a discreet distance. Her style is to be simple and unaffected. Says she: "I try to make a woman look as sexy as possible and yet look like a perfect lady." Many women want to look like that. Consequently, Sophie probably sells more clothes than any other designer, with the possible exception of her archrival, Hattie Carnegie.
At 49, her tall (5 ft. 8½ in.), slim figure is still a fashionable model's size (35 in. bust, 26 waist, 36 hips). She keeps it that way by calisthenics, by often walking to work from her Manhattan house, by dieting and by plenty of golf, which she plays in the high 80s. (She wears a girdle, as thin as possible, only because she doesn't think it's "nice" to go ungirdled.) Her working dress is usually one of her own simple black $300 daytime dresses.