by Brenda Polan
Both Worth and Poiret believed their expertise gave them the right—and duty—to dictate to their customers. A woman must be guided in her desire for a new fashion, they thought. But couturières such as Jeanne Paquin and Callot Soeurs were more inclined to listen to their customers. The first decade of the twentieth century concluded with Paul Poiret at his peak, inspired by orientalism, which drew influence from all points east.
1 CHARLES FREDERICK WORTH (1825–1895)
Charles Frederick Worth, an Englishman from the quiet county of Lincolnshire, was the first couturier of modern times. His one rival to that title, Rose Bertin, milliner and dressmaker to Marie Antoinette, was from a different era, the late eighteenth century. The story of how an Englishman rose from unpromising roots to international renown is one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of fashion. Before Charles Frederick Worth, only women were dressmakers; men were tailors or haberdashers. Before Worth, a customer would purchase fabrics separately then take them to a dressmaker to be made up. Before Worth, clothes-makers were not society figures. Worth focused on fit and construction, the qualities that are at the core of haute couture. He was, said his biographer Diana de Marly, ‘like an engineer or an architect for whom the soundness of the construction was the fundamental consideration.’
For four decades, Worth was the dominant force in Western fashion, developing many of the fundamental components of the modern fashion system. These ranged from the creation of a collection in advance of the season, to the development of styles that typically endured for around five years, and the creation of the fashion label (stamped, at the house of Worth, in gold on silk petersham ribbon). Charles Frederick Worth’s apprenticeship in London and Paris was long and hard, but when the breakthrough came with a coveted order for a dress from Empress Eugénie of France, his career was made virtually overnight. To appreciate fully his achievements, it is helpful to understand the mindset of high society in nineteenth-century Europe. The concept of a man fitting clothes to a woman’s body was not merely unusual, it was considered immoral, indeed thoroughly shocking. The English, who did not have a word to match couturier, reported that Worth was a ‘man-milliner’ running a house that was, so the rumours ran, more of a bordello.
Worth also set the tone for the couturier as dictator, rapidly acquiring much of the arrogance of the French court he served, with prices to match. ‘Those ladies are wisest who leave the choice to us,’ he told an interviewer. According to his son, Jean-Philippe, ‘in time he came to have no awe of anything … and to recognise only two higher in authority than himself—God and the Emperor.’ He also had an innate appreciation of the insecurities and competitiveness of the ladies of high society. Speaking to the journalist F. Adolphus, Worth once said: ‘Women dress, of course, for two reasons: for the pleasure of making themselves smart, and for the still greater joy of snuffing out the others.’
He was born in 1825 in Bourne, Lincolnshire, one of five children. Disaster hit the family eleven years later when his father, William, a solicitor, went bankrupt and left his family to fend for themselves. His impoverished mother was left with little choice but to find an apprenticeship for her son, who worked at a printer’s shop. The young boy, however, hated the work and persuaded his mother to allow him to move to London to gain employment at Swan & Edgar, a haberdashers located in the recently constructed Regent Street. This was effectively Worth’s home through his teenage years; legend has it that he even slept beneath the counter. The opportunity to work with textiles gave Worth an outstanding grounding for the future. Perhaps equally important were his frequent visits to the new National Gallery, within walking distance of both Swan & Edgar and Lewis & Allenby, the royal silk mercers, to which he moved in 1845. Society fashion drew heavily and freely on the costumes of past centuries, particularly for balls and masquerades. Thus, Worth’s encyclopaedic knowledge of costume history, garnered from observation of portraits in the National Gallery, stood him in good stead.
At the age of just twenty, Worth arrived in Paris in 1845, determined to make his way in the capital of fashion. He lived on the breadline for more than a year, making money where he could and picking up French along the way. It took him two years to land a job at Gagelin in the rue de Richelieu selling fabrics and another eleven years before he was in position to set up his own business. Worth’s breakthrough innovation went unnoticed at the time: he persuaded his employers at Gagelin to allow him to open a dressmaking department. Never before had textiles and dressmaking been brought together under the same roof—and never before had a man been a dressmaker. Gagelin entered dresses to the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in 1851, the year Worth also married the Gagelin in-house model Marie. In 1855, Paris hosted its own international event, the Exposition Universelle, where Worth’s court train, unusually suspended from the shoulders rather than the waist, won a first-class medal. Three years later, Worth joined forces with Otto Bobergh, a young Swede with similar skills to Worth, to open Worth et Bobergh at 7 rue de la Paix.
Paris had been in political and social upheaval during Worth’s early years in the French capital. But the creation of the Second Napoleonic Empire in 1852 under Napoleon III, son of Napoleon I’s brother Louis, unleashed a period of imperial extravagance that put Paris at the heart of the European social scene. Empress Eugénie required a new dress for every occasion, as did the guests at imperial balls, masquerades and country visits. A veritable gold mine awaited Worth, although breaking through the barriers of court convention to secure the first royal order required all Worth’s skills of salesmanship, acquired on the shop floor over the years in London and Paris. The story goes that Empress Eugénie did not like the first gown Worth made for her in 1860, rejecting the heavy brocade from Lyon as looking like ‘curtain material’. Napoleon entered the room at that precise moment, whereupon Worth explained that support for the silkmakers of Lyon, a city with a republican tradition, might be very advantageous to the emperor. Remarkably, this Machiavellian switch of sales patter paid off—Worth was on his way.
Empress Eugénie’s patronage opened the floodgates for Worth. If the empress wore Worth, then so did most of her ladies-in-waiting and guests. For one ball alone, Worth might be called on to make up to 1,000 dresses. The house’s ability to respond to such a volume of orders was boosted by recent advances in technology, specifically the development of the Singer sewing machine for long seams. Worth also industrialised the process, creating standard patterns that could be used as the basis for apparently new designs. Countless variations were developed around similar dresses, often refreshed through trimmings alone. In colour terms, Worth was more restricted: white was the required colour for court dress, with silver playing the decorative role. For masquerades, the parties where the court collectively let its hair down, Worth was freer, often drawing inspiration from the eighteenth century and creating fantastical costumes that delighted his clients.
Worth’s approach to design was to find simple solutions to the challenges thrown up by nineteenth-century propriety and society values. He was not afraid to innovate, using his wife Marie to test the market with some of his more daring designs. She was outstanding at presenting a dress to best effect, making her a forerunner of the modern fashion model. Princess von Metternich was another important ally for much of his career, not least because of her social connections. For Empress Eugénie’s walk by the seaside, he created ankle-length skirts, a breakthrough after thirty years of ground-length hemlines. Likewise, he made the unwieldy crinoline more practical by pushing the volume round to the back rather than to the sides, enabling the wearer to walk through a doorway without having to turn sideways. Another innovation was the gored skirt with panels that are wide at the hemline and narrow at the top, a smoother option to gathering. Worth achieved such dominance as an arbiter of style that he could achieve remarkable changes in fashion in short order, such as replacing the bonnet with the hat as the favoured form of headwear or removing the crinoline altogether, a ste
p he took finally in 1868.
By this date, Worth himself was a considerably wealthy man with a country house outside Paris at Suresnes, which he expanded and transformed into a chateau over the years. In Paris, he had more than 1,000 seamstresses working for his house. He created dresses for royal courts throughout Europe besides that of Napoleon III in Paris and also designed for the theatre and the opera. His clients would be expected to make an appointment at rue de la Paix and stride backward and forward in his creations while he observed from a sofa. Over the years, Worth came to consider himself as much more than a dressmaker—he was an artist and began to dress as such, wearing a velvet beret and a silk scarf round his throat and consorting and collaborating with artists such as Winterhalter. The adoption of aesthetic dress by Pre-Raphaelite artists in England struck a chord with him. Aesthetic style with its looser dresses and rejection of corsets was a reaction against the swift-changing whims of fashion in favour of more natural lines and less restrictive clothing. The glories of the 1860s ended abruptly for Worth in 1870 when Napoleon III was overthrown by the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan. By January of the following year the Prussians were in Paris, Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie were in exile in England, and even Princess von Metternich left shortly afterwards. Worth vowed to carry on the business, now without Bobergh. Such was his fame that business continued to pour in, although with a new clientele, including Americans and other international visitors to Paris. In 1874, Worth brought his sons into the business, with Jean-Philippe helping with design and his older brother Gaston focusing on business. In fashion terms, he continued to innovate, slimming down the skirt and creating the Princess line, a one-piece dress with a fitted waist but no waistseam. In the 1880s, he reintroduced the bustle with the launch of the crinolette. Even in the final years of his life, he was experimenting with seamless dresses and bias cuts.
After his death in 1895, his son Jean-Philippe followed confidently in the footsteps of his father, emerging as a couturier of assurance in his own right, creating the trousseau and wedding dress for Consuelo Vanderbilt’s marriage to the Duke of Marlborough, the most feted society wedding of the 1890s. His brother Gaston ran the business and financial side of the house. Opulence, rather than innovation, was Jean-Philippe’s key attribute. As Diana de Marly put it: ‘He could not conceive of a dress that was without splendour.’ Stepping down in 1910, Jean-Philippe was succeeded by Gaston’s sons Jacques and Jean-Charles, the latter another couturier of note who responded confidently to the fashion trends of the 1920s. Jacques and Roger, a fourth generation of Worths, carried the Paris house into the 1940s, although it finally sold out to its London branch in 1946. As a fashion house, the business ground to a halt in 1954 when a perfume company bought the name.
Charles Frederick Worth created the modern couture system that remained dominant until the rise of ready-to-wear in the 1960s. Among his many innovations were the sale of toiles and patterns and the use of models. More importantly, he took dressmaking on to a higher plane through the rigorous focus on fit and construction, a tradition that was carried on by Worth’s sons after his death. When he died of pneumonia in 1895, his funeral service drew 2,000 mourners and his widow, Marie, received telegrams of condolence from all the courts of Europe. But although the pioneer was dead, the new world of haute couture was only just beginning.
Further reading: Diana de Marly’s biography, Worth: Father of Haute Couture (1980), is an outstanding introduction to the couturier’s work and life.
2 CALLOT SOEURS (1895–1937)
Callot Soeurs, a Parisian fashion business run by three sisters, began as a specialist in lace, developing into a fully fledged house renowned for the quality of its work and precise details. Although the house closed its doors in 1937 and is little known today, in its prime it was one of the greatest of all couture businesses, rated by French novelist Marcel Proust as one of the four greatest in his novel, A la Recherche du Temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), alongside Paquin, Doucet and Chéruit.
A complete reappraisal of the house is long overdue, but even a brief exploration of its work suggests that Callot Soeurs deserves greater prominence in any consideration of early twentieth-century fashion. Making an important contribution to its rehabilitation, Camille Janbon researched Callot Soeurs for a Courtauld Institute of Art master’s thesis in 1999. She highlighted the achievement of three sisters operating as couturières in an era when a business run by women for women was a novel concept treated with suspicion or open disapproval. It is clear the dominance of women at their couture house fed into the clothes that were created, typically combining comfort with elegance. The Callots were quick to abandon the corset in their designs. Putting a modern spin on their achievements, Janbon concludes the house was, in essence, ‘a very feminist structure which promoted women and femininity but always in a discreet way.’
That said, as with all their competitors, they made clothes for a rich elite class of women, initially in Paris and increasingly in America. In their heyday, a day dress was priced at around 2,500 French francs, compared with a ready-made dress price of less than 300 francs. They were supreme exponents of the orientalist style, producing dresses that drew inspiration from the Near East and Far East, spectacularly embroidered and coloured and dubbed robes phéniciennes for no very obvious reason. Dresses of embroidered satin featured panels with a cornucopia of motifs from all points east. During the 1920s, their cubist-influenced dresses continued to draw on oriental motifs and colours. Overshadowed historically by more extrovert personalities, such as Paul Poiret, the sisters were also considerable innovators. Callot Soeurs was the first couture house to show evening dresses made from gold and silver lamé, a fabric composed of metal threads. They also pioneered the combination of lace blouses with tailored suits and developed rubberised gabardine for sportswear.
In the beginning there were four sisters: Josephine, the youngest, committed suicide in 1897. Of the remaining three, Marie Callot Gerber was the design talent, a striking figure with red hennaed hair and a confident manner that impressed all who met her. The other sisters were Marthe, later Madame Bertrand, and Regine, later Madame Chantrell, who had a reputation for being domineering and conservative in attitude. Gerber was hugely admired by no less an authority than Vionnet, who worked as her toile maker for six years and rated her higher than Poiret. Madame Gerber, she recalled years later, ‘was a great lady totally occupied with a profession that consists of adorning women … not constructing a costume.’ In perhaps the most celebrated comment on the influence of Callot Soeurs, Vionnet added: ‘Without the example of the Callot Soeurs, I would have continued to make Fords. It is because of them that I have been able to make Rolls Royces.’
The Callot sisters were from a family steeped in textiles. Their father, Jean-Baptiste, was a painter and antiques dealer, and their mother, Eugenie, was a lacemaker from a lacemaking family. In 1879, Jean-Baptiste set up his daughters in a small shop in Place de la Trinité. Marie Gerber worked as première in the atelier of Raudnitz & Cie for most of the 1880s, learning her craft. The family shop became celebrated for its quality lingerie and above all for its lace, often antique lace from the eighteenth century reconstituted for modern tastes. The Callot sisters were fashion’s supreme exponents of lace, even though the novelist Marcel Proust thought they used a little too much of it. Marie Gerber acknowledged the development of machine-made lace as ‘a triumph of imitation and also an adieu to the past.’
In 1895, the couture house of Callot Soeurs was formally founded on the rue Taitbout and developed steadily. In the early days, the sisters played to their strengths, using antique laces and ribbons for lingerie and blouses, and then offering period gowns in the style of Louis XV in floral silks adorned with lace ruffles. Few couture houses had a better appreciation of the skills of the textile producers of Lyon, France’s historic textiles centre. Business grew apace: by the time of the Exposition Universelle in 1900, they had 200 employees and sales of 2 million French fran
cs. This event was a magnificent promotional event for all twenty couture houses involved, as 1 million visitors were exposed to their work. Few took as much advantage as the Callots, who doubled sales and tripled their workforce in the year after the exhibition. The S silhouette, created by a corset that propelled the bust forward and the hips backward, dominated the looks at the Exposition Universelle, but change was in the air. When Poiret abandoned the corset in 1903, the Callots were with him every step of the way. And when Poiret embraced orientalism, the Callots were once again singing the same tune. Gerber found inspiration through her friendship with Edmond de Goncourt, a renowned collector of Japanese art. Orientalism, particularly influenced by Japan, had been bubbling under the surface in Paris since the late 1880s, although it was the Exhibition of 1900 that brought it to the fore. Gerber, who always focused closely on sleeve construction, developed a particular fascination for the kimono sleeve.
If Gerber had shared the ebullient personality, not to mention the gender, of Paul Poiret, perhaps her achievements would have been more widely recognised. Fashion historian Caroline Rennolds Milbank highlights Gerber’s genius at turning the exotic into the new for her discerning customers. ‘No one was more skilled at combing history and the far corners of the world and translating these foreign motifs into contemporary Parisian terms.’ In her history of haute couture, fashion historian Diana de Marly preferred to highlight Gerber’s heavily decorated gowns, overhung with networks of beads or tiers of lace. But many of the Callot dresses preserved in modern museum collections reveal a delightful lightness of touch and make it clear that Gerber was an innovative designer who reflected the trends of the period while making them her own. Richard Martin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York revealed himself to be a fan in his catalogue for a haute couture exhibition in 1995: ‘It is hard to describe Callot Soeurs as either conservative or radical, so thoroughly combined and compatible are the traits of each pole.’
