Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 20, 1994 TAG: 9407200089
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Men, of course, cannot be trusted to shop for women. This is a known fact.
Send 'em out to look for something romantic, and they'll bring back a toaster.
Look at this, dear, it toasts six slices at once! You can make the whole family breakfast in bed!
Send 'em out to look for a fancy party dress and they'll bring back .. . well, that depends. If they go to Tanglewood Mall any time soon, they might bring back a box of cellophane and announce it's the latest fashion from Paris.
The newest evidence of male ignorance of fashion is on display in the front window of Colors & You.
There stand four mannequins, each attired in a cellophane party dress. They're quite stunning, to be sure. Some bold ruffles on this one. Dramatic puffed sleeves there. A flattering off-the-shoulder gown in the corner.
Stylish, yet understated.
Subtle, yet distinctive.
A joke, actually.
A few years ago, store owner Carolyn Allie dressed her mannequins in paper as an attention-getter. Last week, with a summer clearance sale coming up, she had them decked out in cellophane.
Since then, her eye-catching window display has become the biggest tourist attraction in town since Miniature Graceland.
"It's phenomenal,'' Allie says. ``We've had 300 or 400 or 500 comments since they went in the window Friday evening. People come by and say, `Look, there it is,' so they must have been telling their friends about it.''
But that's not the best part.
Shoppers think they're for real.
"I wish I had a movie camera to record their reactions," Allie says. ``It's unreal. They stop and ask each other: `Is that what women really are going to wear in Roanoke?' `Is that what women are wearing in Paris?' I don't think there's anyone who hasn't thought they weren't real.''
Allie doesn't tell them otherwise.
Unless they actually try to buy one - as some shoppers have.
The most frequent inquiries come, naturally, from men.
"Saturday night I had two men come by, one with his wife," Allie says. ``He said, `I'd buy you that in a heartbeat.' The other man said, `I'd like to see my wife in that.'''
Maybe, just maybe, those men were joking.
Or perhaps they're remembering the scene in "Fried Green Tomatoes" where Kathy Bates tries to spice up her marriage by greeting her lazy slob of a husband at the door while dressed in nothing but hot-pink cellophane.
Or maybe not.
After all, Bates' husband thought her cellophane get-up was the most ridiculous thing he'd seen in his life.
The window-shoppers at Colors & You have just the opposite reaction.
"Men, especially," says clerk Anne Thacker. "They say they want to pick it out and take it home to their wives. They really have thought those were real dresses."
Staff members Mimi Eubank and Nancy Gleiner served as fashion consultants on this story, assisting a fashion-impaired writer who thought ruffles were a kind of potato chip.
by CNB