Fashion Climbing

by Bill Cunningham

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  EACH MORNING WHEN I OPENED the New York papers, I turned first to the obituary page to see if any of my rich elderly customers had passed away. After all, my millinery business was made up mostly of the elderly matrons, as the young people weren’t wearing hats, and there were few enough of my customers left. Secondly, I turned to the society pages, where I followed the goings-on of fashionable women. Five nights a week I spent observing elegant women from the balconies of the ballrooms, my opera glasses trained on their chic clothes as I mentally rearranged them to what I thought best for the women’s individual types. Of course, I never had a ticket to any of these parties, but I soon learned all the back doors to the fashionable theaters, hotels, and restaurants. Today I can hardly find my way through the legitimate entrance of the Waldorf, but I could take you blindfolded through all the fire exits and kitchens leading to the ballroom. I remember when Queen Elizabeth was at the Waldorf, hundreds of cops were guarding the place, and I just had to get in to see all the glorious women. I was quite nervous about crashing, but by using all my secret doors, I made it to the projection room near the ballroom ceiling, where the spotlights threw shafts of light on the queen’s diamond tiara. I lay on the suspended catwalk seventy feet above the three hundred elegant guests, with my binoculars glued to my eyes.

  Another time I wanted to see the most exclusive debutante presentation of the city, where no press or public were allowed. It was one of the August Assemblies. I arrived at the Plaza two hours before, and after glancing around the ballroom and seeing dozens of private cops stationed at the entrance door, I knew I’d never get back in, so I crawled under a table in the main dining room and sat for two hours. When feet started to surround the table, I figured I could emerge and blend in with the guests. I got a wonderful exclusive story for the newspaper.

  Gate-crashing was part of my self-education in fashion. When there were three parties each night and I couldn’t see the elegant women on arrival—which is the best time to study all the clothes—I would take up the second best viewing point, which is outside the ladies’ lounge, and as soon as the cocktails were over, every girl in the room would start a fashion parade in and out, giving me a marvelous display of the clothes. This observing has been a full-time hobby, which has turned out to be the finest education in fashion I could ever have. I am seen so often at the hotels that many people think I work there.

  One of the most memorable nights was a masked ball a year earlier, in 1949, at the Waldorf, when the most chic woman in New York, Mrs. Byron Foy, made her grand entrance sweeping across the ballroom floor. She wore the first beaded gown I remember. It was from Dior, and was called “Junon.” The huge crinoline skirt was petaled into dozens of scallops, covered with sequin fish scales of celluloid; the colors were blue, green, and aqua, and the foot-long train swerved like the fin of a mermaid. It made every other gown in the room look like a rag. The Metropolitan Museum acquired the dress and many more of Mrs. Foy’s fabulous clothes for its collection.

  Seeing all these clothes being worn by live women was quite an experience. So many fashions look effective in stiff photographs, but the second they begin to move you really see the difference between a good dress and a cheap one. A fashion design is only perfection when it comes alive on a woman’s body as a graceful sculpture. Whenever I was depressed and needed a lift, I could cure myself by running out to a fashionable restaurant or party and observing beautiful women. This was quite easy to do in New York when three to five big public parties were held each night.

  I never missed the April in Paris Ball, the opening of the opera, or Easter Sunday, as the trio were real fashion-climbing occasions. Often I took a girlfriend and dressed her in some outlandish flight of fancy that got her photo in the paper and pepped up my ego. One Metropolitan Opera opening stands out in my mind. It was in my poor days, when we could just afford standing room. After standing in line all day outside the opera house, we reached the box office, and there was only one ground-floor standing room ticket left; the other two were in the top balcony, which had its own drab entrance. There the music was the best in the house—but we definitely were not there for the music, we were there to see the audience, and had intended to make a splashy entrance on the ground floor at Thirty-Ninth Street where all the celebrities gathered. After buying the tickets at six o’clock, we ran home to doll ourselves up. I left my friends Ellen and Mary, all dressed to kill, in a taxi outside the opera, while I dashed up to the balcony, went out the fire escape, down the side of the opera house, and through the kitchen windows of Louis Sherry’s restaurant, where all the elegant swells were seeing and being seen while they nibbled on their partridge. This put me on the lower floor, where I could get passes for the main entrance, which I did, and then climbed back into the taxi, drove around the block with Ellen and Mary, and made a smashing entrance through the Thirty-Ninth Street doors.

  Three days before, my friend Jack Edwards had designed and made Mary a fabulous empire-style gown, from his pearl-gray moiré shower curtain. The day after the opening, Mary, in Jack’s creation, was on the front page of Women’s Wear Daily, reported as the newest gown to be seen opening night. We almost died howling when we thought of the seven-dollar shower curtain upstaging all those expensive creations. Ellen made several New York papers, in a hysterical feather hat—crafted with white egret feathers that a customer had left with me to mount on a hat. We added a gold jeweled veil that completely covered her $8.95 lamé dress. These were wonderful wild days, when fashion was all we ate and drank. Ellen was the queen of Greenwich Village, always wearing black tights and the latest William J. hats. Easter Sunday we were the same show-offs, parading around. Although many of the press thought these displays were in the worst taste, I must say that for young designers, this kind of exhibitionism relieves the inhibitions you have to get rid of. Sadly, these days are gone now. The television camera caused the death of the opera opening, Easter Sunday parades, and the Paris ball, scaring away the real elegant people and bringing out far too many peacocks and rubbernecking farmers.

  New Year’s Eve was always an explosion, with twenty friends, all rigged up in the most unrestrained William J. hats. Lüchow’s was usually the setting for our big party, with their German oompah band that set the tone. Our table always looked like something out of a Hollywood movie. At one of these parties, Clovine, a hostess friend from the army service club, put on a huge black hat, which I had draped only a few hours before, and there wasn’t a stitch in it. Fifty yards of transparent net were wound around and around into the shape of a bull’s-eye. It all rested on a huge horsehair platter. Clovine got high on German beer and started to dance with a drummer; she was holding on to his suspenders, which were keeping his Alpine shorts up over his little potbelly. As they danced through the room, a branch of the famous Christmas tree caught the netting of the hat, and without her realizing it the net started to unwind with alarming speed. The restaurant was in an uproar of laughter as she retraced her steps, winding herself up again.

  We’d make telephone calls during dinner, asking for the Duke or Duchess of So-and-So, and if you had visited Lüchow’s, you’d remember seeing a page carrying through the rooms a huge three-foot-square blackboard, with the name of a person being paged chalked on it. Naturally, everyone would want to see who the duchess was, and of course one of our behatted girlfriends would sashay her way to the telephone. Upon her return, there would always be some inquiring woman coming over to ask about her hat. It was all nonsense, and I doubt that we ever snagged a customer from it, but everyone had a good laugh, and those trendsetting fashions had an airing.

  Many women who never buy a hat any other time of the year will think nothing of spending a hundred bucks on a hat for Easter Sunday. I had a large crowd of these one-hat-a-year ladies. I think the motivation was always the hope of getting themselves into the newspapers. Years ago, during the Easter parade, really elegant women hardly ever came to Fifth Avenue unless they
were going to a party at one of the hotels, and most of those lunches were filled with ambitious women wanting to be photographed, or fashion designers showing off their wares.

  The Plaza Hotel was still the most voluptuous setting for Easter. The ravishing elegance of the Palm Court, with its glittering light and women dripping in the latest looks, that extraordinary crystal terrace ballroom, whose thirty-foot-tall mirrored French doors are thrown open for the day, allowing a vista of dazzling splendor as you enter the hotel’s lobby. Certainly nowhere else in the world could you see such old-world elegance as at the Plaza on Easter Sunday. Monday night at the opera still had this same atmosphere of gilded women, dripping in chinchilla, jewels, and feathers. Outside the Thirty-Ninth Street door was a sight few places in the world could match—akin to a royal affair in London—as nearly four hundred long shiny black chauffeured limousines waited to carry the cream of capitalistic society to their French-decorated apartments on the gold coast of Fifth Avenue. Events like these kept the fashion wheels of New York spinning at a dizzy pace and the pockets of the merchants filled with green.

  But these events at the height of their splendor frightened me. Wallowing in luxury gives me shame of overindulgence, and as much as I am drawn to all of it, I have the strongest desire to escape to the discomforts of the poor.

  The kind of custom wholesale businesses that blossomed all over New York between 1947 and 1960 never really made money; although they had excellent press coverage, the cost of rent and labor barely let them pay the bills. Occasionally a good year would bolster spirits and faith. For me, the true creative road of design is one of continual struggle, both financially and morally. America is a commercial marketplace, and very few people are educated to understand artists or appreciate originality. A small following of private customers allows a designer to feel the pulse of life, but it cannot sustain a business. Designers in America must be geared to mass production. The big question now is where are creative people going to express themselves? One age-old formula is to lead the life of starvation while enjoying the freedom of creative life. Artists have tried desperately to blend creative life with modern comfortable living. I don’t think they go together.

  No matter which way you turn the problem, high fashion will always have to start on a personal level, being worn by a few daring women. The style cycle must always be a marriage of compromise between classic periods and creative periods. But fashion, like all art, mirrors the spirit of our times.

  I can still hear the ladies at Vogue: “If we could only corral William’s enthusiasm, and make him like everyone else.” Oh, how I thank God they never did corral my thoughts—although I have many scars from the barbed wire traps set for me.

  Nona and Sophie

  All during my fashion career, my life has been involved with Nona Park and Sophie Shonnard, two elegant members of real New York society. The girls started their business because Nona had just been divorced and thought it might be just the thing to get her out of her depression. They opened their first shop in 1929, after they couldn’t find the kind of clothes their lives and those of their friends called for. It seems no designer really knew how elegant women lived. Most designers sat in their workrooms and dreamed of a past that had nothing to do with reality. So Nona and Sophie opened Chez Ninon, buying most of their designs in Paris and bringing them back to New York, where their superb workroom made reproductions. From time to time they hired designers of their own, but always the Paris clothes were the backbone of their collection. The shop was an exclusive club where everyone knew each other. Nona’s sister-in-law, Molly McAdoo, directed the salon, and a few elegant friends down on their luck sold the clothes to more friends. The shop was an immediate success, as their formula for dressing their friends in clothes that fit their way of life was correct. Their families, though, were horrified that they had opened their shop. Their view was that young women from fine families just didn’t go into business; they weren’t educated for anything but the niceties of home and card games.

  Chez Ninon was a name very few Seventh Avenue people had ever heard of until thirty years later, when Jackie Kennedy came into prominence. At that time, all Nona and Sophie’s friends kidded them about being discovered, as the press mobs waited outside the Park Avenue shop, trying to find out what Jackie was wearing. Chez Ninon was like the Social Register of fashion; there were always as many women trying to get through its doors as there were trying to get their names pressed between the covers of the Social Register. Chez Ninon was a small business where clothes were sold not for their flashy appearance, but rather for their quiet whisper. Many people would have just fallen on their heads if they could have seen Nona, Sophie, Mr. Anthony (their superb tailor), Miss Sophie (their head dressmaker, who had the patience of a saint), and me at work, putting our two cents into designing a new model. We’d all be pulling the fabric every which way, looking through magazines for ideas. Nona and Sophie sat on the French sofa proclaiming what ladies would and would not wear. My suggestions were usually too flamboyant, although occasionally a dash of my spirit might stay with the dress. But it was Nona and Sophie who really shaped these collections; they had fantastic instincts for what elegant women would wear. They would make all kinds of suggestions on the design, as Mr. Anthony and Miss Sophie reset the sleeves, repinning the skirts a hundred times, until the ladies felt it was just right. A fraction of an inch makes such a difference in fine custom-made clothes. This was also true in hats. These hours and hours of painstaking development gave me an insight into fashion that is rarely available. After these agonizing fittings I often wondered who would appreciate all the effort, but the customers instinctively admired all the details. Nona and Sophie would admit that they didn’t know a thing about sewing, but few people in the fashion world could match their knowledge of what makes truly elegant clothes.

  In Paris we would sit for a whole afternoon or morning while the girls discussed the designs they were buying. Nona and Sophie were the only buyers I know for whom Dior would allow changes to the designs to suit their taste. It was just a riot the way they took the jacket of one suit and added the fabric of another, the skirt of a third, and the buttons of a fourth. This was unheard of in the couture of Paris, where the House of Dior insisted that manufacturers take the designs exactly as they were shown. But they realized the exquisite taste of the girls and knew that Chez Ninon was one of the last truly custom salons in America, with a following of some of the most chic women of the world.

  Nona’s famous phrase—which I heard a million times when I’d show her an interesting dress—was “It’s too much of an effort.” She appreciated clothes that didn’t overpower the wearer yet had charm for the viewer and were a pleasure for the woman to put on. The girls didn’t believe in that deadpan simple-as-sin look either, where the rich try to appear like their maids.

  During the showings, Sophie sat near the door leading to the ecru-colored salon, where her sensitive eye adjusted each jacket and skirt so they hung at precisely the right angle. She then chose the proper gloves and scarves, tying them herself. Her chair was set into the closet, to keep her from the running pace of the models. Mrs. Park would get very nervous and sit on her damask sofa in the office, like a frightened bird hiding in its gilded cage, constantly chirping, “Oh my God, do you think they’ll like it?” and occasionally getting up to peep out the door and watch the reaction of her audience and friends. After so many years of showings, the girls were still full of anticipation with each new collection. They were past their thirty-ninth birthdays, and their families advised them, when redecorating their new shop, that perhaps they should be thinking of the old-age home—but Nona and Sophie wouldn’t have it. They were like two debutantes at their first big party during each of these shows.

  Many women have been known to exert all kinds of pressure to have themselves seated at the prestige showings, as the press who cover the showings have their eagle eyes trained on the audience as well as the clothes. Social climbers who are
lucky enough to get invitations have been overheard saying, “It’s like getting through the gates of paradise!” Nona and Sophie had a wonderful philosophy on the press. They simply couldn’t understand why the press would want to come to see the clothes, as they answered each press request with the same story: “We have nothing sensational, just quiet, elegant clothes.” Of course, this throws the press into a tizzy and they wish to come all the more. I remember one time in Paris, a leading New York editor asked Nona and Sophie to pose for a picture at Lanvin’s. Nona’s remark was, “Well, we really don’t want to, but if you’re desperate, call us back . . .” Of course, if you understand the puffed-up egos of some members of the press, you can imagine what a whack on the head this was. Nona never meant it that way; she was merely being her truthful, blunt self.

  Just before the war, Nona and Sophie were negotiating with Mainbocher, who had fled Paris before the German invasion. They were in negotiation to have him as designer for Chez Ninon. While the discussions were in progress, he got to know all about the workrooms and the people in them, which are the most valuable part of any fashion house. He stalled on signing the contract, and then fled with all the best workroom help and opened his own fashion house. It was a dirty trick, and contrary to the gentlemanly quality one associates with Mainbocher. Several of the salespeople fled with him, plus their customers. As you know, salesgirls and customers move around together, as the customers get such trust and loyalty in their vendeuses. But eventually one of Mainbocher’s top salesladies who had been with him for years came back to roost at Chez Ninon, bringing with her many fabulous customers. It’s funny how the score evens out if you wait long enough.