by Brenda Polan
And there are elements of his work that are undeniably playful. His architect’s fondness for geometric forms, for apparently hard-edged curves and spheres, was reminiscent of an Eastern approach to dress where clothing does not cling to the body but rather cocoons it, frames it, floats around it. This was to inspire Cardin and Courrèges. In 1958, Balenciaga received the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest award, for his services to the fashion industry. In 1968, ready for a relaxed retirement, he closed his couture house, allegedly reflecting, ‘It’s a dog’s life.’ He died in Spain in 1972.
In a memoir for the Balenciaga retrospective exhibition in Texas in 2006, Hubert de Givenchy wrote: ‘He would say, “Hubert, you must be honest with your customer. Do not try to do something that is only amusing. Be serious in your work. Be conscientious. If you use flowers, then place the flowers in an intellectual manner. Do not place flowers just to add to the drape or cut, if it does not make sense.” A funny saying he had was, “Don’t try to make mouton [sheep] with five legs! That is what another designer would do, just to surprise the press or the customer; not you. It is more important to be conscientious and always aware.” ‘
Further reading: Lesley Ellis Miller’s Balenciaga (2007) and Balenciaga Paris, edited by Pamela Golbin (2006), are the two most comprehensive and analytical books on the designer. Cecil Beaton, in The Glass of Fashion (1989), is an amusing read.
16 CHRISTIAN DIOR (1905–1957)
Christian Dior’s Bar suit, the one with the white jacket nipped at the waist with a stiff peplum standing proud of the full, long black skirt with the archaically padded hips and worn with a white straw hat, is without doubt the most memorable image from all of twentieth-century fashion. Long after Dior’s death, his was the name universally used as a short form for hugely desirable, hugely elitist couture fashion. Cecil Beaton named him ‘King Pins and Needles’ and ‘the last of the great couturiers’ and quoted him thus, ‘Nothing is ever invented. You always start from something. It is certainly Molyneux’s style that has most influenced me.’
Edward Molyneux (1894–1974) was a superb tailor whose refined style made him very successful between the wars. A cultivated man, he also designed for film, and it is generally acknowledged that his wonderfully romantic designs for 1933’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street (the love story of the Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning), inspired by Winterhalter’s sensuous contemporary portraits, remained in Dior’s wistful imagination, a nostalgic dream awaiting its moment of realisation.
That moment came in 1947 in the dreary aftermath of the Second World War as Europe struggled to rebuild a civilisation that had been devastated economically, socially and morally. The New Look’s extraordinary power was not derived from anything as simple as the fact that women were sick of short skirts made from rationed fabric and the square shoulders that went with wearing uniforms and endlessly recycling threadbare pre-war clothes. That was part of it. Nor was it just because the financial backer of Dior’s house was Marcel Boussac, a fabric manufacturer who needed his factories back on fulltime production. Nor even that France needed those factories producing, the workers working, the fashion industry back on its feet and exports beginning to grow again. All that mattered. Indeed, the French government was taxing all exports to subsidise the couture industry in its efforts to re-establish itself. But what was much more important was that everyone was so tired. Traumatised by six years of a terrible war, men and women alike succumbed to a general atavistic yearning to return to a safer time of economic security, social order and moral certainties.
Men were returning from the battlefields and reentering civilian life only to find women doing their jobs and reluctant to relinquish them. Women had tasted independence, economic power, a degree of sexual freedom and the liberating camaraderie of the workplace, and they liked these things. Restoring the natural order required women out of the workplace and back in the kitchen, the bedroom and, as soon as ever possible, the nursery. Populations were drastically depleted, and the morale of nations depended on an investment in the future—in short, babies.
The exaggerated, Victorian-inspired New Look of 1947, with its crinoline skirts, corseted waists and softly sloped shoulders, was essentially the hourglass configuration of the fertility goddess who recurs throughout history. It was almost a caricature of femininity, but it was exactly what the moment required and Dior was the man who instinctively realised this. So can we blame the birth-rate bulge that produced the baby-boomer generation on Christian Dior? He certainly dressed the women who had the babies and, for a decade after, until his early death in 1957, continued to do so.
He wrote in his 1956 memoir, Christian Dior et Moi,
In December 1946 … women still looked and dressed like Amazons. But I designed clothes for flower-like women, clothes with rounded shoulders, full feminine busts and willowy waists above enormous spreading skirts. Such a fragile air can be achieved only by solid construction. In order to satisfy my love of architecture and clear-cut design, I had to employ a technique quite different from the methods then in use. I wanted my dresses to be constructed like buildings, moulded to the curves of the female form, stylising its shape. I emphasised the width of the hips, and gave the bust its true prominence; and in order to give my models more ‘presence’, I revived the old tradition of cambric or taffeta linings.
He also used horsehair padding in his interlinings and directed his less curvaceous models to invest in a pair of ‘falsies’.
Christian Dior was born in Granville, a fishing port and shipbuilding town on the Normandy coast that had turned itself into a smart resort. His father was wealthy, the owner of a flourishing business manufacturing agricultural fertilisers, which he and his partner expanded into other products, such as detergents. His mother was a talented gardener and that passion was to form an exceptional bond between her and her second son. When Christian was six his family moved to Paris, keeping the villa in Granville as a holiday home. It was here at carnival time that Christian learned to sew, helping the maids make up the costumes he designed for himself and his friends. His maternal grandmother, erudite, opinionated and fond of soothsayers and fortune-tellers, was also a strong influence on the boy.
This was the belle époque, a time of rococo furnishings and voluptuous women and, in Europe, a prolonged time of peace and prosperity which was to be terminated by the Great War in 1914. In his memoirs Dior described an idyllic childhood. ‘I picture it now,’ he wrote, ‘as a happy, jaunty, peaceful time when all we thought about was enjoying life. We were carefree in the belief that no harm threatened the wealth and lifestyle of the rich or the simple, thrifty existence of the poor. To us the future would bring nothing but even greater benefits for all. Whatever life might have bestowed upon me since, nothing can rival my memories of those sweet years.’ Doubtless those memories helped inform the New Look.
When he finished school, he wished to attend art school, but his father, a respectable bourgeois to his fingertips, demurred. Instead he sent his son to the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris in an attempt to satisfy his mother’s desire to have a diplomat in the family. Nevertheless, Christian was drawn to the Left Bank haunts of the bohemian, arty crowd which included Christian Bérard, Jean Cocteau, Raoul Dufy, Giorgio de Chirico, Maurice Sachs—and failed his exams. After a painful scene his father agreed to fund an art gallery for Christian, but before it could come about he lost his fortune to a series of bad investments and the promise came to nothing. Christian lived in poverty, then, staying with friends, applying in a desultory manner to job advertisements, drifting rather aimlessly and developing tuberculosis. Convalescing in the South of France, he learned to weave and began to consider the possibility of a career in design. On his return to Paris he began to sell drawings to design houses and to Le Figaro until, in 1938, Robert Piguet employed him as a design assistant. In 1939, as Germany prepared to invade France, Dior was called up into the Army. After the collapse of France, he returned to Paris i
n 1941 and took a job at Lucien Lelong alongside the young Pierre Balmain.
In 1946, the textile magnate, Marcel Boussac, offered to back Dior in his own couture house. Dior dithered until his clairvoyant reassured him, and in February 1947, after an underground public relations campaign to build up anticipation, the 42-year-old showed his first collection. He called it the Corolle Line. The American press, headed by Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar, dubbed it ‘The New Look’. Ernestine Carter, fashion writer for the Sunday Times, was there. ‘The model girls entered the salon, their tiny hats by Maud et Nano tipped to one side, held on by veils caught under the chin, or else simply defying the laws of gravity. As Chanel had invented a stance, Dior invented a walk, perilously back-tilted, which added to the arrogance with which they pirouetted in their calf-grazing, voluminous skirts (one contained eighty yards of fabric). It was not only the length (a foot or more from the ground) that excited; it was the contrast of the discipline of the fitted bodices with their tiny wasp waists and the billowing grace of the full skirts, the softly curved shoulders and the nonchalant back-dipping, open collars.’
She described the consternation that broke out in the front row. ‘To English journalists in their sharp-shouldered (a legacy from Schiaparelli frozen by the war), skimpy fabric-rationed suits, this softness and fullness was, as one journalist put it, “positively voluptuous”. All round the salon the overseas press could be seen tugging at their skirts, trying vainly to inch them over their knees. The models, pushing, as Dior wrote,” detachment to the point of insolence”, swirled on contemptuously, their heavy skirts bowling over the standing ashtrays like ninepins.’
Alison Settle, covering the show for The Observer, was not seduced. ‘What sort of clothes are these for today’s active and restless life?’ Edna Woolman Chase, editor-in-chief of Vogue, was restrained in her praise, ‘His clothes,’ she wrote, ‘give women a feeling of being elegantly costumed.’ The clue was in that last word. Christian Dior, finally his own master, had reverted to his first love, fancy dress costume. And by no means did everyone buy into the fantasy.
It was a time still of shortages and rationing and, famously, the first women brave enough to go out in the street with those dangerous skirts were beaten up by a furious crowd of impoverished working women queuing to buy food. For the Parisian couture industry, however, Dior’s amazing coup was a magic potion. Cut off from Europe by the war, the American fashion industry had been forced to cultivate home-grown designers and not only had they done a good job but the American consumer had developed a loyalty to the new labels—based only partially on patriotism. However, thanks to Dior, February 1947 put Paris back in fashion’s driving seat and back in the US market.
Over the next decade Dior was cannily to introduce a new ‘look’ every season, whetting his public’s appetite and oiling the wheels of the international industry. Corolle was followed by Envol, Ailee, Verticale, Oblique and Muguet in a marketing masterstroke that accelerated the speed of fashion’s imperative changes. In 1953, he shortened his skirts to 40 cm off the ground. He called it the Vivante look; journalists preferred the ‘Shock Look’. In 1954 he introduced his H Line, nicknamed ‘The French Bean Line’ or the ‘Flat Look’. In 1949 he became the first couturier to licence his products. He took the collection on tour to America, playing to adoring audiences in major cities. Consequently, during the 1950s the house of Dior was responsible for 50 per cent of the couture exports to the United States. Thanks to licences and a shrewd understanding of how to exploit the brand through scent, accessories, stockings, furs, gifts and tableware, the house and Dior himself became immensely rich—and a grateful nation bestowed upon him every honour in its gift.
Writing about Dior at this time Cecil Beaton described him as looking like ‘a bland country curate made out of pink marzipan … His egglike head may sway from side to side but it will never be turned by success.’ Beaton and many other contemporaries have suggested that Dior’s only true passions were for the good life in general and gardening and good food in particular. Writing in 1960, Phyllis Heathcote of The Guardian, who had also been there for that first presentation of the New Look, wrote:
Christian Dior was a dear. In the world of high fashion (which is as tough as they come) you do not meet many personalities for whom you can imagine for a moment having any feeling of affection. Dior was the exception. He was kindly and simple and friendly and even after years and years of such spoiling and flattery as the world of fashion has rarely seen, utterly unspoiled. He stayed as sweet as he was.
Dior died of a heart attack in 1957, having made it clear that he intended his young assistant, Yves Saint Laurent, to succeed him. Diana Vreeland, in conversation with Colin McDowell many years later, reflected on Dior’s gluttony, asserting, ‘Poor Christian. He died for the table.’ The black organza pall that covered his coffin was sewn with sprigs of lily-of-the-valley, his favourite flower.
Further reading: Nigel Cawthorne’s The New Look: The Dior Revolution (1996), Colin McDowell’s Forties Fashion and the New Look (1997) and Claire Wilcox’s The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947–57 (2007) all place the man in his context.
17 CHARLES JAMES (1906–1978)
Opinion is divided on Charles James. Balenciaga once called him the ‘greatest designer of them all,’ and Christian Dior described his designs for grand gowns, often draped directly on to the body, as ‘poetry’. Later generations of designers, including Yves Saint Laurent, Thierry Mugler and Azzedine Alaia, have claimed him as muse and inspiration, the great ‘lost’ couturier who died friendless, penniless and forgotten in New York’s Chelsea Hotel in 1978. And yet the fashion historian and distinguished head of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Richard Martin, remained not quite convinced. In his Fashion Memoir series book on Charles James he wrote,
The term ‘genius’ is often used to describe James, and he certainly possessed the explosive temperament often associated with the word. But his achievement is, in truth, less than that of a genius. He compromised his 1930s elegance with his work in the 1940s and 1950s, and his pictorial imagination came to surpass his design innovation. So he was probably not a genius, but he was surely close enough to being one that we can still look at his dresses with a combination of awe and the more modest respect. TS Eliot has said that April mixes ‘memory and desire’. In fashion no one mingles them more persuasively than Charles James.
Caroline Rennolds Milbank, in Couture: the Great Designers, brackets him with Balenciaga, Capucci, Cardin and Courrèges in one of her smallest and most interesting categories, ‘the Architects’, and concedes him the position of ‘foremost among America’s couturiers’. His reputation rests on the grand gowns he constructed from the 1930s onward, gowns which imposed an hourglass, fertility-goddess shape on the least curvaceous or pneumatic of figures and which prefigured Christian Dior’s New Look by a decade at least. He seemed to take his inspiration from the last years of the nineteenth century and used similar methods, piling horsehair padding on top of layers of canvas, stiffened tulle and crinoline-style boning and anchoring bodice and waist with heavy-duty corsetry. The whole, however, was so brilliantly engineered, so well balanced that, although it might weigh between 15 and 30 pounds (half a kilo to more than a kilo), it felt light as a feather on the body and as comfortable. James enhanced the illusion of youthful lightness with ethereal layers of the finest, most fluttery chiffon, or satin or taffeta draped and sculpted into ruched effects, often making the bodice in a contrasting colour to the massive skirt so that the (artificial) slenderness of the tiny torso was emphasised and eroticised like a stamen offering itself from the heart of a rose or a concupiscent orchid. Milbank quotes him on what fashion meant to him: ‘what is rare, correctly proportioned and, though utterly discreet, libidinous.’
Richard Martin connects this imperative to create garments that focus the observer’s erotic interest to James’s early career as a milliner. While a hat must frame or in some
other way complement and draw attention to the face, it must also work with the proportion of the whole body, something which was often neglected in hat shops where women were waited on at dressing tables. In an obituary on the designer in the Soho Weekly News in 1978, photographer Bill Cunningham quoted James’s belief in the dress as a sublime couture creation dependent upon the ‘dialogue between the client and dressmaker’ which, said James, ‘no fashion world would exist without.’ Martin doubted there was, in fact, very much dialogue between James and his clients. ‘He was,’ he wrote, ‘chiefly the creator of his own vision of woman as muse, an image which differentiated little from one client to another.’
Charles Wilson Brega James was born in Camberley, Surrey, near London, in 1906 into an upper-class family. His father was an army officer and his mother, Louise Enders Brega, was from Chicago. Described as ‘temperamental and artistic’, Charles was sent to Harrow, one of Britain’s top public schools, where his circle of friends included Evelyn Waugh and Cecil Beaton, who was to be a lifelong friend. James was expelled from school in 1922 for some heinous but undefined misdemeanour and sent by his sorely tried parents to Chicago to work in the architectural design department of a utilities company. Neither this job nor the one that followed on a Chicago newspaper, the Herald Examiner, lasted long, and in 1926, using the surname of a school friend, he opened a hat shop on north State Street. Two other small shops followed before, in 1928, he moved to New York where he opened another hat shop in a carriage house once rented by Noel Coward. At this point he began to design dresses as well.
