For me, intermissions were the most fun, as the designers allowed the press who were interested backstage, and you could get a real close-up of the clothes. They allowed you to take them off the rack and turn them inside out, to see how they were made and study the materials. Backstage was quite a production, especially with the Italians. They did everything in such a grand manner. Each designer brought his special hairdresser, makeup artist, milliners, and dozens of helpers to assist in getting the fifteen models in and out of the 150 designs shown in the hour allowed.
The tensions were unbelievable, what with the admiring audience rushing backstage to smother the panic-stricken designer with sometimes-real kisses, with the word “genius” flying through the air with the greatest of ease. After successful collections, the climbers elbowed their way back with such force you’d think some movie queen was doing a striptease. After an awful collection, it was really very funny to watch the press sneak out the back doors so they didn’t have to write about the showing.
Bikinis sashaying down the runway were a big event in the Italian shows, and designers competed with each other with fresh ways to get news coverage, with the tiniest bikini bathing suits. There were a clatter of camera shutters as the models of Pitti Palace danced through their striptease on Sunday mornings, while the church bells of Florence were ringing their message of God. The buyers were a ravenous bunch, sitting there just waiting to gobble up a success. You could tell their nationality by their applause. When the simple-as-sin designs came parading out, the ones that looked like a reheated version of last season’s bestseller, the Americans went wild with praise. When all the fuss and feathers came strutting down the runway, you could see the faces of the Germans light up. The English granted their rather reserved applause for whatever looked expensive. But they could also be deceptive; they often applauded like crazy during the dullest shows. At first, I couldn’t figure them out, until I realized they do that just to keep awake. I pity the poor designer who thinks he has a success on his hands. When the buyers really like a collection, they sit there deadpan, not moving a muscle on their face, at times tossing candies across the runway to their friends. All this hocus-pocus is merely to throw their competitors off from what they really like.
The evening shows were the same procedure, only the audience came dressed in their best clothes, each eyeing the other like jealous birds of paradise. Often the shows onstage were dull compared to the audience. The showings ended around midnight, and that’s when the big rich fabric houses gave their fabulous parties, or the titled aristocrats of Florence often opened their palaces with private parties for their favorite designers. The palace hopping was the most fun. I always managed to lose myself and go snooping through all the rooms to see how the royals lived. Often I have wondered who wears all these extravagant clothes, as nobody I know lives that kind of life in America. But you’d be amazed at how many rich Italians still live in superb style. All that crying of poverty in Europe seems to stop at the palace doors, for inside the walls of what appear to be broken-down old houses, a staggering life of luxury continues. As for the press, we have to write our stories before we can indulge in the parties. Frankly, I didn’t know how most of the press stayed out all night and then struggled into the showings the following morning.
This delightful orgy of fashion continued for five days. Like the emotion-packed melodramatic Italian opera prima donnas, each Italian designer brought along his own claque to encourage his talent at the Pitti Palace. They could be heard standing along the side walls of the great ballroom, and when the press put on their sour pusses, and the faces of the German buyers took on that “I’m waiting to see something new” attitude, and when the American buyers started crinkling their candy wrappers, the claque, being paid off by the Italian designer, came to life, making their hands blister. It was all very embarrassing for the designer, as the pros knew only too well that the house was stuffed.
The first time I was allowed into the showroom while the big-money buyers were spending, I hid myself behind a rack of reversible coats, so as not to cramp the buyers’ style—they don’t like having the nosy press around when they’re spending money. And it’s no wonder, after the performance I witnessed.
Three hawk-eyed Seventh Avenue women designers, wearing the chicest boots and lace stockings, were pulling everything off the racks, where the two Italian owners and a salesgirl, plus one model, were desperately trying to keep the white clothes neatly placed. While these shrewd businesswomen were turning everything upside down, trying to discover the hidden seams, two overweight cigar-smoking Seventh Avenue manufacturers were haggling over prices, in an attempt to distract the owners, so their soft-spoken demure little boy designer could make quick notes on all the styles worth stealing. Over in another corner, a California store represented by two buyers had the model jumping in and out of the clothes so fast I could hardly keep track. This was also a distraction, as they were in cahoots with the manufacturers, puffing up clouds of choking cigar smoke, causing at times a dense fog excellent for quick copying. The pathetic Italians almost went off their rockers trying to keep their eyes glued to this den of thieves, who would pluck your eye out and eat it for a grape. In the midst of all this, two photographers from the Italian version of Confidential stuck their heads into the room and snapped pictures before the door was slammed in the camera’s eye. It happened so fast I thought it was a police raid, but I noticed one of the Seventh Avenue ladies flash a quick smile for the camera and then continue her copying. Outside the door, there started an awful row, as the English and German buyers began to bitch up a storm about the long delay by the Americans, who had been in there turning the place upside down. After all this ruckus, I could scarcely believe this crowd of thieves only bought one dress between them. The exhausted Italians collapsed into chairs as the Germans and English invaded for more of the same.
Italian fashion showings ended each year with a big party given by Mr. G. B. Giorgini, organizer of the showings. Generally, one of the government-owned historical palaces is opened for the occasion. On rare occasions a private palace, still in use, dropped its gates of privacy to the visiting press, all for the cause of Italian fashion, which often needs that extra padding to captivate the professionals. This particular year, each of the press and buyers received an engraved invitation to a ball being kindly given by Countess Sofia Pucci at her home, Serristori Palace. Most Americans immediately threw their invitations away, thinking it would be just another one of those damp, drafty empty palaces.
I had nothing else to do, so I saved my invitation and went to the ball, which started promptly at ten o’clock. On arrival I could feel in the surroundings that this was a place someone really lived in, and an invite was a real treat. Strains of Viennese waltzes greeted the guests as they ascended the grand stairway to one of the most sumptuous private homes in Italy. Footmen and maids, all starched in perky white uniforms, darted everywhere. Rooms filled with carved gilt furniture, red damask walls, huge crystal chandeliers, five-foot-high vases of fresh tea roses; ceilings of sculpted life-size mythological gods; wood-burning fires in white marble fireplaces; tables filled with rare porcelains and an abundance of family photographs. There were five of these salons, all decorated in similar effect. Each opened out into a monumentally huge ballroom, where you could possibly have fitted the East Wing of our White House. Six gigantic Venetian glass chandeliers of roses and feather-like branches held hundreds of candles, which bathed the frescoed walls and ceilings; gabled windows edged the forty-five-foot ceilings, from which servant girls could be seen peeking down on the dancers. The countess, who looked like someone’s kind grandmother, wore a red damask gown that seemed to match the walls, and was definitely prewar vintage. Around her neck hung a remarkably beautiful strand of canary diamonds the size of pennies. Her hair was pulled back and held in place with a bow. There was lots of hand kissing, and lorgnettes were in full play by the local aristocracy, who seemed to enjoy observing the strange foreigners.
It wasn’t every day the Italian aristocracy liked to share their parties with the local press. The titled guests wore full-skirted strapless ball gowns in the grand manner, and they seemed comfortably at home sweeping through the ten-foot-wide marble arched doors. So often when I’d seen those fabulous creations in the designers’ shows, I wondered just who wore them. Now I know. As for the fashion people who came to the party, they really took the cake, if cake is given out for looking like a bunch of people who didn’t have the faintest idea about fashion. Eighty percent looked like they’d just come in off of Forty-Second Street, in their mismatched outfits. And to think these were the same people who spent their lives dictating to everyone else what to wear.
A lavish and tasty buffet was served at midnight. It’s amazing how many people in Italy and Spain lived this almost make-believe life—or were they just saddled with family tradition and a white elephant that they couldn’t unload? During the party, I made an excuse to get to the men’s room so I could see what lay behind the gilt doorways. I heard gossip that the countess took in boarders on the qt, and wouldn’t you know it—the maid with her hand outstretched, outside the men’s room, was most eager to tell me that Chicago’s Mrs. Sherwin-Williams, of the paint company, was for many years renting an apartment in the palace. One of the buyers from a Pennsylvania department store had remembered visiting Mrs. Williams eight years before, and he claims that she had the bedroom that belonged to the countess’s in-law, Napoleon’s brother, the king of Spain. Incidentally, the countess’s background was loaded with imperial ancestors, including one czar of Russia.
* * *
—
AFTER ITALY, the ambitious press invaded Olde England, which had flipped its bowler hat and thrown the wrapped umbrella out the window. The English had gone stark, raving fashion happy. The most stylish girls in Europe were to be seen crowding the colorful little shops all over London. The Establishment of England could hardly believe the rejuvenation that had taken place. Even the queen had ditched the white foxes that were emblematic of royal glamour.
Tucked away in parlor-floor apartments of lovely old Georgian houses were nearly fifty new designers, all in their twenties, and all designing clothes for the new England. When I visited each of them, I found they were mostly graduates of the same school—the Royal College of Art. I immediately hurried over to see what the school was all about that could produce so many talented people. Well, it’s a nonpaying affair, where you must first pass the entrance exam, and if the school finds you worth teaching, a royal scholarship is yours for three years of happy, intensified hard work. The school only took forty-five students, including all three grades. This accounted for the personal attention the design students must have received, as the wholesale teaching at most of our American fashion schools produced only a lot of carbon copycats. Secondly, teaching at the Royal College of Art was not a five-day-a-week job; rather, the teachers were top designers, tailors, and dressmakers working in the field who donated one day a week to teaching. This kept the students studying in a realistic world. As I toured the eight-story ultramodern building, I could feel the healthiest freedom for learning. Although there were lots of casualties among the new designers setting up their businesses, a surprisingly large number had held on, and made money. After observing them for two years, I saw where they were really developing, and their clothes later matured into well-constructed designs that normal people would enjoy wearing without feeling like freaks.
One of the most interesting aspects of this English fashion boom was the number of young girl designers. Girls had been rare on the fashion scene since the 1930s. Two of the biggest successes in London had been young girls. They were admired for the comfort of their clothes and the total understanding the designers had of a woman’s body, whereas in Paris most all the designers were men who too often didn’t understand the female body. Many professionals felt the next trendsetting designer would be a woman, and perhaps for the first time an Englishwoman. The two leaders, Mary Quant and Jean Muir, were then both in their late twenties. Mary said that her generation no longer had to prove their sex; they could strip themselves of all the phony outfits and wear comfortable clothes. As for the two sexes looking more alike, Mary said it didn’t matter, as they know which sex they are and don’t need clothes to prove it. Jean Muir believed that clothes could now be effortless and serve a comfortable life for the wearer. None of this tripping over train as Paris tried to push. Her clothes slid over the body, but never glued to it. The big-bosom and bleached-hair female symbols of the past just didn’t work for their realistic world. Certainly, England had become the number one challenger of Paris for design leadership. Fifteen years earlier, it was the Italians who almost stole the crown from Paris, but they slipped into the bad habit of copying. Now the English had a better chance because they invented their own look, which swept in with the Beatles, and a whole new generation all over the world was finding the British style the most exciting thing to wear.
After England, the fashion press who hadn’t run out of breath or ink rushed down to Spain, where the big-spending-money buyers placed some of their largest orders, as the clothes were good-looking and terrifically inexpensive compared with Paris. The leader of Spanish designers was a Mr. Pertegaz in Barcelona. His clothes had the same sophisticated elegance that you would see in the best Paris salons.
* * *
—
AFTER A FEW free days in London and Spain’s couture houses, it was time for the Paris shows. Arriving in Paris, I would always go immediately to the famous flower market and buy armloads of fresh flowers to brighten up the ugly, cheap hotel room where I’d stay. A reporter’s budget is very small, and flowers brightened the place up and put me in the mood to write about gay Paris, and the thirty-five collections I would cover in ten days. My hotel was a real flea trap, but what can you expect for a couple of dollars a night? I was always brushing the cockroaches off the bed, and when I started to type those elegant reports on world fashion, those damned cockroaches came jumping out of my typewriter. Of course, I could have moved to a cleaner hotel farther away, but the saving grace of this place was its location—right in the heart of the fashion district. I could look out the bedroom window into the workrooms of Castillo, and out of the hall toilet into the salon of Pierre Cardin. The hotel had the usual community bathtub, where the maid was always complaining because I take more baths than anyone else, and they charged me double: sixty cents for each bath, because I ran the water over the six-inch mark. One evening I was luxuriating in the tub, when the maid accidentally looked in and saw it filled to the top. She nearly fell in and drowned over the shock of such a huge amount of water, but didn’t seem the least bit disturbed by my immodesty.
The second thing you do when you arrive in Paris is go over the bundles of invitations, sorting them out according to their importance. There are five parties a night sandwiched between five shows a day. But it’s the show invitations that cause even the most jaded old-time press to ruffle their feathers. Unlike the Italians, who show in a huge ballroom where everyone has a seat, in Paris each French house shows individually, at their own time, which is often overlapping that of their competitors. The tiny salons are airtight; they would be jam crowded with two hundred press, but in Paris there were eight hundred magazine, newspaper, radio, and TV journalists all wanting to get into the first showing. What a mess! Usually all my invitations for the best houses were second and third showings. Being with a newspaper, it was crucial to be at the first show so you could wire your story at the same time as your competitors. For the first day, I would be running all through the streets of Paris, in and out of each couture house, talking my head off over how important it was to get into the first showing. When I found real stiff opposition, I immediately told them that the paper won’t print a story if it arrives after those of the other newspapers. This usually worked, and I’d be squeezed into a corner with fifty other people who had pulled the same story. It was really hell, getting into thes
e showings, no matter how important the newspaper you represent. And those salesladies, who lined the grand stairway of every couture house, dressed in their vulture-black dresses, defied you to get in without the proper credentials. These women were certainly the hellions of the couture, who delighted in torturing the press. I suppose it’s their only defense against the fickle press who, after huffing and puffing their way into the shows and eyeing the collection, walk out arrogantly and whisper in a loud scream how it wasn’t worth it. But if any of the press weren’t let in to begin with, they’d probably kill themselves at the loss of face, as rival publications were quick to notice who was and who wasn’t there. I’ve known some editors to go to parties and collections just so their competitors wouldn’t say they weren’t invited. Of course, the American press didn’t have half the trouble the Europeans suffer, as we rode on the coattails of our big-spending buyers. God help us when our buyers stop buying! In the meantime, it’s rather enjoyable to sit back and watch the squabbling between the English and German press—you’d think the Second World War was still on.
The Dior show was the pinnacle of fashion; every newspaper in the world could count on the magical name of Dior to make headlines. Certainly, the biggest fights for seats took place in its fancy salon. You’d think we were getting into heaven, the way everyone carried on. And the name-calling over seats was enough to make a truck driver blush. I never had to worry, as I never got any further than the stairway, where a pair of opera glasses were needed to see the clothes.
Fashion Climbing Page 15
