The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  She stopped. They’d both laugh at her. She’d known them for hardly any time at all and, at best, they’d think she was foolish and overconfident. But her mouth opened again, the enthusiasm that had so infuriated Marie at the atelier—the enthusiasm that always drove her to speak up and to deliver deadly maps and dance tangos with bolts of gold satin—as unquenchable as ever.

  “Once I have enough money,” she added. “It wouldn’t be straightaway. But when I’ve saved enough, I could design, Sam could cut, and Janie could model. If you like my designs, that is.”

  “Are you kidding?” Sam replied. “Have you seen the gold dress?” he asked Janie.

  Janie nodded; Estella had hung it in Janie’s closet at the Barbizon and Janie’s eyebrows had arched so perfectly high in astonishment that they wouldn’t need tweezing for at least a year.

  “Sounds like a bloody good idea to me,” Janie said. “At least I know you won’t grope me in return for my modeling services, Estella. Although I don’t mind if you do.” She winked at Sam.

  Sam exploded into laughter. “With a model like you, designs like Estella’s, and cutting like mine, we’ll leave New York speechless.”

  Clarice smiled and lifted her glass. “What would you call yourselves?”

  “Stella,” Janie said without hesitation. “Because we’re aiming for the stars.”

  “Stella Designs,” repeated Sam.

  “Are you sure?” Estella asked at the same time as Janie said, “Brilliant! How can that fail?”

  As she looked at the faces of her two new friends, friends who were also foolish and daring enough to want to throw in their lot with her, Estella laughed delightedly. She raised her glass. “To Stella Designs,” she toasted.

  Chapter Five

  Estella found her next job with relative ease. Even though America wasn’t fighting in the war, it had called up men for military service and so women were needed to fill positions in the fashion workrooms of Manhattan. She started at Maison Burano, an upscale New York couturier where she thought she’d be in the thick of things, rubbing up against ideas she could admire. But the couturier was so derivative in its styling that Estella thought they might as well hang up a sign out the front that read: “The American Home of Chanel.”

  Still, the work was easy, sewing dresses she’d sketched two seasons ago. Maison Burano made variations of the best-sellers, altering a neckline a quarter of an inch or changing a cuff, never straying from the basic shapes all American dressmakers had deemed were in fashion—based on what they’d seen in Paris—never once considering what women actually wanted to wear in New York City.

  After only a month, the première was so impressed with her work that she allowed Estella to help at the client fittings, which was how Estella got into trouble. The première had been called out of the fitting room for a moment and, as Estella studied the tall woman in the dress before her, she couldn’t resist making the sleeves less roomy, more sculpted, pinning them in, changing the line. Chanel had always wanted the woman to come first, to be noticed before the dress, and Estella believed that now, with the sleeves molded to the woman’s elegant arms rather than camouflaging them, she’d achieved just that.

  She stood back with a satisfied smile until the première returned, took one look at the sleeves and hissed, “Excuse us,” to Estella.

  “You seem to have made an error with the sleeves,” she murmured once they were out of earshot of the client.

  “Oh no,” Estella said with genuine enthusiasm. “I’ve made an improvement.”

  “It’s not your job to make improvements.”

  “But it looks so much better,” she pleaded.

  “It’s not the fashion,” the première snapped back. “You’re a seamstress. How would you know what the ladies of the Upper East Side want to wear.”

  “I live on the Upper East Side,” Estella retorted, which was true, even though she knew very well that the Barbizon Hotel for Women was not the kind of accommodation the première was referring to.

  “I hope you have some money tucked away in your Upper East Side home because you no longer have a job here.”

  Just like that, Estella managed to get herself fired again. Nobody in American fashion had foresight. Nobody wanted to give anything new a chance. As she packed her things, she could hear the exclamations of the client. How much she loved the dress. Especially the way it flattered the arms, made them look so graceful. Could she order one in black and one in red?

  “Of course,” the première purred.

  Estella waited for ten minutes for her to come back and apologize. But that didn’t happen. Maison Burano sold two dresses with Estella’s sleeves and Estella walked out the door with nothing.

  Later, at the Barbizon, Janie was sympathetic. “Perhaps it’s a blessing. Maybe now you’ll find a place that appreciates your talents.”

  “I hope so,” Estella said, although she doubted it.

  That night, the night of her twenty-third birthday, she wrote to her mother again after Janie had fallen asleep, the tenth letter she’d written, all of them unanswered. She’d asked at the post office and they’d told her that letters might be getting through to Paris but they certainly weren’t coming out. The Germans didn’t want the world to know what they were up to. All she could do was curse the man she’d given the maps to in Paris for separating her from her mother and then spin a story of how happy she was, hoping that with every word she wrote, she might sustain her mother through whatever she was facing.

  Janie had been lucky enough to gain employment as a house model at Hattie Carnegie, a made-to-measure salon, and Sam was cutting for a ready-to-wear establishment at 550 Seventh Avenue and seemed cheerful enough about it.

  “It’s a different set of skills to the House of Worth,” he said to Estella and Janie one night when they all went out for a drink together. “I’m enjoying it. The clothes are awful, but I wonder if it’s a better skill to have for the future.”

  “What do you mean?” Janie asked.

  “What do you wear to work?” Estella asked her, knowing just what Sam was thinking. “It’s not like twenty years ago, not even like last year, before the war. So many women work now. We don’t have time to dress for the day, to dress again for home, and then again for dinner. We need clothes to wear to work, to wear out for a drink afterward; something that can be as wearable behind a desk as it can be on a date after work.”

  “Because you go out on such a lot of dates after work,” Janie said dryly.

  Estella laughed. “Married men and elderly tailors are the only men I meet at work so I don’t have much opportunity for dating.”

  So she went back to Seventh Avenue for her next job because she thought Sam was right; ready-to-wear was a business that suited the times more so than couture which now seemed as much of an aberration—given that across the ocean men were dying—as newspaper pictures of Germans at the Ritz.

  In a clothing factory, working with the seamstresses, she began to see that it might be possible to marry America’s talent for mass production with her own original designs. She learned a hell of a lot about the need in ready-to-wear for fewer pattern pieces and cheaper fabric. She learned what each machine was for—the spreader to lay out each piece of fabric atop the other without stretch or wrinkles, the grader for changing the pattern to each different size. She heard about factor banks for the first time and began to understand the risks of a ready-to-wear business—that she would need loans from a factor bank based on an order from a retailer because it was usually ten weeks from the time an order was placed until the time it was paid for. An enterprise like Stella Designs would require her to save up a lot more money than she’d first thought.

  She held her tongue for longer than she’d managed to at Maison Burano but when she was asked to sew a bias cut in a way that made the fabric stretch over the tummy and wrinkle at the hips, the ache in her jaw reminded her that she couldn’t possibly swallow any more words.

  Fired from thre
e jobs in five months. Her résumé was so bad that, after being unemployed for a fortnight, she took the only job she could get: at a furrier, so far below 550 Seventh Avenue that it might as well have been Battery Park. The Fur District. And Estella’s job was to be the drudge who swept the floors and hefted the furs and did nothing skillful at all.

  “I worked in an atelier in Paris,” she said sharply to Mr. Abramoff, the workroom supervisor. “I can probably sew better than you can.” As soon as she said it she wanted to stuff a handful of fur in her mouth. Why, why, why couldn’t she learn? “I’m sorry,” she apologized.

  In response, Mr. Abramoff passed her a broom. “Now you sweep.”

  Sweep the damn floor, she ordered herself. It’s a means to an end. Money, which she needed if she was ever going to do anything about the dream that she and Janie and Sam had toasted to months before. Real life began at six o’clock at night, she reminded herself, when she worked on her own sketches, between smoking cigarettes at the Barbizon and chatting to Janie.

  The furrier was even viler than she’d thought it would be. Workers doing one thing only: sleeves, or collars, never the whole garment. A head bent over a sleeve until it was finished, then another sleeve and on again, an endless parade of something more boring than any sheep on a sleepless night could ever be.

  By the end of the day, Estella’s arms ached from the weight of the furs and the constant sweeping but she still had a job and she just smiled at Sam and Janie when they went out for a drink that night. But after only a fortnight, she caught Mr. Abramoff looking up her skirt when she was bending down to collect scraps of fur and she suddenly understood why he was always so desperate for her to sweep.

  She pushed the broom across a worktable laden with cut sleeves and collars and swept everything—pattern pieces, fur, and pins, onto the floor. Then she passed Mr. Abramoff the broom. “Since you enjoy watching the sweeping so much, you can have a turn yourself.” She picked up her purse and stalked out.

  “Four jobs in six months!” she moaned later to Sam after she double-kissed his cheeks—a habit Janie had now decided to acquire too, especially when handsome men were around—and sank onto the bed in Sam’s new apartment at London Terrace in Chelsea.

  A large, modern building of identical apartments that was really too square and angular and ordinary for Manhattan, its facade reminded Estella of the boulevards of Paris, all lined with symmetrical apartments too. She’d met Sam on his lunch break and he’d given her the key, told her to let herself in, that he and Janie would meet her there after work.

  When Sam arrived, he made her a sidecar and sat on the chair while she lay on her stomach across his bed, as if she were in a sorority house, and bemoaned her fate.

  “Do you regret walking out?” Sam asked, sipping a whiskey.

  “Not for a minute!” Estella said emphatically.

  “Then I have no sympathy for you.”

  Estella threw a pillow at him. “You could at least pretend.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have to trudge around tomorrow looking for a job. Again. At this rate, I’ll have worked everywhere there is by the end of the year.”

  “There’s one place you haven’t worked,” Sam said.

  “Where? The moon?”

  “No.” He paused dramatically. “Stella Designs.”

  “But that’s for later. When I have the money. I can’t do that right now.”

  “Why not?”

  Janie burst through the door with a grin on her face, arms laden down with magazines that they’d planned to spend the evening poring over, before they went out for a drink. “Get your glad rags on. We’re going to a party.”

  “What party?” Sam asked.

  “A proper get-dressed-up, swanky, putting-on-the-Ritz-style Christmas party down in Gramercy Park,” Janie said triumphantly. “One of the ladies I was modeling for today left her bag unattended with a bunch of invitations sitting prettily on top. I helped myself.”

  “You stole party invitations?” Sam asked incredulously.

  “Only three, so you can’t bring a date. But you’ll have us to escort,” Janie said as if that should make Sam perfectly content. “I’ve been in New York more than a year and despite my best attempts at flirting, I haven’t been anywhere near a society party. So we’re going. I stopped off and got our clothes,” Janie said to Estella. “I came to New York to find myself a husband and this will be the best place to do it.”

  “I thought you came to New York to be a model,” Estella said in surprise.

  “I don’t want to model forever. A husband with an apartment on Park Avenue, a summer house in Newport, and the ability to start up a trust fund for our four children would be just about perfect.”

  “Really?” Estella said. “I had no idea…” Her voice trailed off. That your ambitions were so conventional, she didn’t say.

  “You don’t plan to get married sometime soon?” Janie asked.

  “No,” Estella said. Truth be told, she’d never thought about it. Marriage seemed meant for others, not for her, not now. Not when there was so much to do, so much that she wouldn’t be able to do if she married herself off to a man. “Would you really prefer that?”

  “Who doesn’t?” Janie said. “Mademoiselle magazine’s latest survey said that only seven percent of women think you can actually have marriage and a career. It’s one or the other and I’m planning for a wedding.”

  Estella didn’t know why she was so surprised. After all, many of the women at the Barbizon who she talked to in the dining room were all looking for the same thing: a man to marry. And, she supposed, Janie was the epitome of those women, always wanting to dress well, always on the lookout for an opportunity to smile at a man who might ask her out to dinner, and coveting, apparently, the natural finale: a ring on her finger.

  “If I started making my own clothes, where would I do it?” Estella mused, in a tangential leap back to her earlier conversation with Sam.

  “Right here,” Sam said. “What’s the point in having a perfectly good space in Chelsea, right next to the Garment District, that’s empty all day long?”

  “I can’t work here,” Estella scoffed.

  “Why not?” Janie asked, lighting a cigarette and lying down beside Estella on Sam’s bed. “You draw, Sam can cut for you at night, then you can sew during the day. When you’re ready, we just need to hire a room for a private showing where I’ll model everything and you’ll have so many orders that you’ll be able to take out your own lease at 550 Seventh Avenue.”

  “You wouldn’t want me cluttering up your apartment,” Estella said to Sam.

  “Course I would. Besides, I have selfish reasons for wanting you to do it,” Sam said cheerfully.

  “Which are?”

  “I want to cut that gold dress the way it should be cut.”

  “Do you really mean it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So simple.”

  “I don’t want to rain on your gold silk parade but,” Janie searched through the magazines she’d brought and extracted one, “last year, Vogue ran a spread called ‘Fashions America Does Best.’” Janie passed the magazine to Estella. “Play clothes, knits, and prints are, apparently, all we can do here.”

  Estella flipped through the pages. “But who designed these?” she asked. “There are no names.”

  “Nobody bothers to name American designers in the magazines. They’re not important enough,” Janie said.

  “They don’t name the designers?” Estella repeated.

  Sam shook his head. “Nope. Claire McCardell has to see her clothes bear the name Townley Frocks. Ask anyone on the street and they’ll tell you Chanel makes clothes. I bet they couldn’t name a single American who does.”

  Estella stood up and began to walk in a semicircle around the bed. “Which means it’s not just about making clothes. It’s about making people believe that clothes made right here are every bit as good as Chanel’s and deserve to have the designer’s
name attached to them.”

  “And it’s about making them cheap,” Sam added.

  “Affordable,” Estella corrected. “It’s obscene to make clothes that cost hundreds of dollars when there’s a war on anyway.”

  “Janie,” Sam said, “have you got the one you were telling me about, where Vogue says there are four types of women? Leisured Lady, Globetrotter, Limited Income, and Businesswoman or something like that?”

  “Here it is!” Janie said triumphantly, producing another magazine. She put on an exaggerated Upper East Side accent and read aloud: “The Businesswoman works at the office with concentration and efficiency from nine-thirty to twelve-thirty. Twelve-thirty to two: has her hair done at Charles Brock’s because she believes that a smart coiffure is one element of her success. While her hair dries, she has a manicure…”

  Estella snorted. “It doesn’t sound like the Businesswoman has all that much work to do if she can take the afternoon off to get her hair and nails done. Are any of these people real? How many Globetrotters exist now there’s a war on? I want the women who actually work. Like we do. Real Women, they should be called. I want to make clothes for them that are comfortable, stylish, and have a little unexpected beauty.” Estella’s thoughts tumbled out, forming as she spoke them. “The flowers I used to make, I want those to somehow be a signature of the label.”

  Janie raised an eyebrow. “That could work.”

  Maybe it could. All she really needed was her sketchpad, her sewing machine, and a whole lot of bravado. With Sam cutting for her, she’d be better able to reduce the number of pattern pieces, to work out how to get them off her drawing paper and into finished form affordably. And if Janie modeled them—well. Nobody would be able to resist. She just needed customers.

  “I need to make it work pretty damn quickly though,” Estella said. “Otherwise I won’t even be able to afford my cot in your room at the Barbizon.”

  “That sounds like something we should toast to.” Janie’s eyes twinkled. “And the best thing about a party is the drinks are free.” She brandished her stolen invitations in the air.