And among his many competitors is Zunino Altman, which employs 10,000 flower‐makers in Hong Kong, requires 250,000 square feet of space to house its inventory and sells some of its output to Woolworth's, reputedly the world's biggest retailer of plastic posies. Today the Corham Artificial Flower Company, Corelli's firm in White Plains, N.Y., sells 30 kinds of roses, a 1,200‐part liatris and at least 469 other varieties of blossom. Fristot, a Frenchman, and John Corelli, an American florist, made the molds for a sevenpart rose.
Its application to plant life was accomplished in 1956 when Lino Bosco, an Italian. Technologically, polyethylene's adaptability to precision injection‐molding processes was a crucial factor. Soon, Constance Spry artificial flowers graced the finest homes, and became not only acceptable, but fashionable, in the upper levels of society.Įven so, artificial flowers did not gain acceptance elsewhere in America, where they have long been considered tasteless, until they were made of polyethylene. Mills-to set up shop across the street from the Waldorf. The palpable evidence of polyethylene plant proliferation has grownĪs it happens, artificial plants have been respectable in Europe, Asia and Africa since antiquity, but it was not until the nineteen‐thirties that Constance Spry, a prominent London decorator ‐ florist, was persuaded by several New York society matrons-among them Mrs. Rothstein, president of Zunino Altman, Inc., a Revlon subsidiary that calls itself the world's largest importer and manufacturer of plastic plants, the annual retail figure is $120,000,000 in the United States and still growing.īut figures are too abstract to indicate the pervasiveness of plastic greenery. Six years later, the plastic plant market had burgeoned into a $50,000,000‐a‐year industry, and this year, according to Joshua A. War II-were virtually unknown to the public. In 1954, plants made of polyethylene-a dense wax developed for insulation in radar sets during World. He doesn't carry plastic plants in his fashionable Fifth Avenue shop, but he owns 50 per cent of Constance Spry, Inc., which does a thriving business in artificialities just a few blocks away.
As recently as five years ago, few florists would have touched a polyethylene pansy with a trowel today, at least half the retail florists in this country not only sell plastics but often recommend them over real plants. He is riding the crest of a wave that has been gathering momentum for the last 10 years. The Old World Fusses, he says, look upon him as Cartier might upon a son who displayed artificial pearls in the family's Fifth Avenue windows.īUT Fuss doesn't mind. Fuss not only makes a comfortable living by renting plastic landscapes to Americans (he thinks of himself as a botanist in plastic) but has converted the entire roof of his shop, on East 53d Street, into a $30,000 garlanded idyll of lush polyethylene greenery. William Fuss, scion of the house of Kasper Fuss, one of Europe's best‐known purveyors of real flora, is almost an embodiment of the trend.
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