The latest fashions

"This year....fashions are bizarre and common, simple and full of fantasy. Any material from nature's domain can now be introduced into the composition of women's clothes. I saw a charming dress made of corks....


A major designer is thinking about launching tailor-made outfits made of old book-bindings done in calf....Fish bones are being worn a lot on hats. One often sees delicious young girls dressed like pilgrims of Saint James of Compostella; their outfits, as is fitting, are studded with coquilles Saint-Jacques.

Steel, wool, sandstone and files have suddenly entered the vestementary arts....Feathers now decorate not only hats but shoes and gloves; and next year they'll be on umbrellas.


They're doing shoes in Venetian glass and hats in Bacarrat crystal....I forgot to tell you that last Wednesday I saw on the boulevards on an old dowager dressed in mirrors stuck to fabric. The effect was sumptuous in the sunlight. You'd have thought it was a gold mine out for a walk.

Later it started raining and the lady looked like a silver mine...Fashion is becoming practical and no longer looks down on anything. It ennobles everything. It does for materials what the Romantics did for words."

- Guillaume Appollinaire, Le poete assassine, 1916