The March of Time: Fashion Means Business (1947)

Fashion Means Business (MARCH OF TIME) compactly investigates that heavy, nervous industry which whets woman's desire to improve, with various fabrics and gewgaws, upon the pelt God gave her. The film ranges, within 18 minutes, from the elegant fountainheads of Parisian and U.S. design, to those frenetic dress foundries along Manhattan's Seventh Avenue in which as many as 100 identical garments are cut in a few swerves of power-driven super-scissors. There are also instructive glimpses of the machinery which stamps a season's fashions upon a whole continent at once: the fashion magazines, the provincial fashion editors, the out-of-town buyers. Respects are also paid to I.L.G.W.U., a strong, shrewd union which realizes that management's Golden Goose needs feeding as well as bleeding.