This did occur. Following that night at Versailles, Emanuel Ungaro declared the American show “genius.” The Duchess de la Rochefoucauld remarked that the “French were good but the Americans were sensational.”‘ The Countess Jacqueline de Ribes was more pointed in her appraisal. “The French were pompous and pretentious,” she said in the press of the day, referring to presentations that included showgirls, space ships and a pumpkin coach. “The American show was so full of life, of color,” the countess added. “Not since Eisenhower,” C. Z. Guest, the American chairwoman of the show, said with typical hyperbole, “have the Americans had such a triumph in France.”

Naturally the models and designers remember things in their own way, recalling mainly the mishaps (all the sets had to be scrapped because the designer Joe Eula had made measurements in inches and not centimeters), the flaming egos and a pointed absence of hospitality on the part of the French. “The French had started to snub us before we even got there,” Ms. Hardison said. “They laughed and said, ‘These are not designers, these are sportswear people.’ We were going into French territory unwelcome and so, of course, when we got there, the Americans all decided to fight.”

The American show was “bound for disaster,” Mr. de la Renta said. “Yves Saint Laurent had converted a white Cadillac and he had Zizi Jeanmaire singing “Je Cherche un Millionaire,” and every French star was working on the French segments, and Cardin had some kind of Sputnik thing with models ready to take off into space. All we had was one tiny image of the Eiffel Tower hanging against a black curtain in the back.”

Yet it came off, Mr. Burrows said, “because the bare stage with no props made it look so modern.”

So, too, did the “exotic” new American unknowns. “Oscar put it so well,” said Alva Chinn, a model whose long career in many ways began that night at Versailles. “He said, ‘You know, it was you girls, the music and just your energy and your presence and the way you work that shifted everything.’ There was a freedom then that doesn’t exist in many realms in our culture anymore, unfortunately.”