The Glass of Fashion

by Cecil Beaton

  UNIFORMS-RIGIDLY SUBJECT TO TRADITION

  Unfortunately tastes and values cannot escape a certain vulgarization when filtered down through a great number of people. One has only to examine the appalling styles and tastes displayed in the shops where cheap furniture and household objects are sold. The average person still accepts the most hideous designs in wallpaper, cretonnes, linoleum, and crockery, and one wonders if public bad taste imposes itself on the manufacturers of furniture, clothing, china, and moving pictures.

  If you are a poor man in England, even presuming that you have good taste, it is hard to buy anything which is not inevitably of bad design. By contrast, in any European country (Italy or even France) you can go to any village, and though bad taste has already infiltrated even the smallest shops, there are still to be found good, simple designs in pure colours, the product of an artisanship, of a craftsmanship, which even today persists in Europe. In England carpets, curtains, furnishing materials, and other merchandise are nearly always in off colours: one can never buy a clear blue, but rather a grey-blue or green-blue: pinks are seldom clear but are called cedar or squashed strawberry, and seldom can one find a rich crimson red.

  There is no reason why a miner’s house should not be attractive: but the miner’s wife seldom has access to anything but the hideous. It is the manufacturer who has the bad taste, it is he who believes that this bad taste is what other people want.

  My Aunt Jessie bought things that could last her for years, and certain suits that I myself bought twenty years ago I still wear today. But the lack of solidity and craftsmanship, the gimcrack way in which things are put together today, is only too soon apparent. Even serious artists today often paint with house paints or cheap colours instead of ground pigments. One such artist replied, when told that a canvas had cracked within a year: “Do you want them to last forever?” This is indicative of the neurotic state of impermanence in which some of us find ourselves.

  Impermanence and conformity seem to be the twin evils of our day, and fashion, as it was once, can ill exist between such poles. That it can exist with impermanence is a well-known fact: the Balinese have one of the most impermanent cultures the world has ever known, one that must constantly be remade and rebuilt, but they have lost neither their craftsmanship nor their inherited æsthetic traditions. We, on the other hand, live in a kind of impermanence which destroys tradition and replaces it with nothing. Slowly but inevitably our values have deteriorated.

  It seems odd that Americans, who adore individualism and are quick to realize it, should have a drive towards conformity comparable with their urge to be different. Certainly both in America and in Europe we have lost much of the innate sense of culture that we once possessed. In this respect we are far less fortunate than what remains of the so-called “primitive” peoples, who in a few rare parts of the world are in harmony with their arts and their heritage. An Indian woman combing her hair reveals more “culture” in the gesture than most Western women are capable of expressing today. When we watch a Venetian gondolier, his gestures of rowing are so beautiful that we know they have come down to us through hundreds of years. What is culture but a sense of the past continually revivified in the present act?

  In this century of “the average man,” even those who have persevered or accumulated wealth have become wary of display and are withdrawing from the public gaze. Nor can one blame them. The political and social ideas of our day have created as much sense of guilt as common sense and have inhibited any enjoyment of luxury. A society without a luxury stratum is one that loses nearly all of the important cultural values.

  Fashion, as it once was, is now almost nonexistent. Ladies of leisure have neither the breeding nor the daring to become leaders of style as they once were. Nor have they the opportunity. Try as one may to avoid the conclusion, the truth presents itself that somewhere there has passed a little glitter from the earth. The mystery of clothing itself—a scarf worn by an enigmatic woman, an aigrette in a tart’s hat, or a ribbon on a stocking—has faded into the hard realistic light of today, has dissolved into the image of a bus boy running along Seventh Avenue with a trolley full of identical ready-made dresses. Lina Cavalieri has been transmuted into the Gabor sisters; Forzane has faded before the picture of Marilyn Monroe; and those ladies of Poiret who strode the lawns at Longchamp like fine Flemish horses have been replaced by a line of starlets, pin-up girls in bathing costume, and calendar art.

  Yet suddenly, here and there, individuality and glamour, mystery and beauty, flicker magically like will-o’-the-wisps in some unexpected place, to hold out a promise that nothing is ever quite dead and that all may yet be revived.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sir Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) was a photographer in the 1920s for Vanity Fair and Vogue. As a portraitist, he photographed the stars of fashion, society, and the art worlds, and was considered the unofficial court photographer of the British royal family. He was also an Oscar-winning stage and costume designer.