What Am I Doing Here?

by Bruce Chatwin

  I straightened the picture.

  ‘Weissberg,’ she said. ‘He is our best painter. Perhaps that is all one can do today in Russia? Paint whiteness!’

  1978

  MADELEINE VIONNET

  Madeleine Vionnet is an alert and mischievous old lady of ninety-six with eighty-six years of practical experience in the art of dressmaking. Her couture house on the Avenue Montaigne shut its doors in 1939, but at the mention of her name her former clients will sigh as if recalling the Golden Age. To historians of fashion she is a legend. They have acclaimed her ‘The Architect of Couture’: its only true creative genius. And when she announces flatly, ‘I am the best dressmaker in the world and I feel it, too!’ – there are valid reasons for believing her.

  Her name never attracted the publicity – or the notoriety – of Chanel. She never pandered to the fashionable world and, I suspect, believed herself superior to it. She even maintained the word ‘fashion’ was meaningless to a true dressmaker. Yet she is probably the woman who, around 1900, rescued other women from the tyranny of the corset. She is certainly the inventor of the bias-cut, which transformed the course of modern dressmaking. And she insisted that women remain women when other couturiers would have their clients resemble boys or machines.

  The association of haute couture with the very rich makes it suspect for many people. But for Madame Vionnet, who once was penniless, couture is not a minor art. Like the dance it is an evanescent art, but a great one. She sees herself as an artist on the level of, say, Pavlova. She was single-minded in the pursuit of perfection, and even her exemplary common sense is tinged with a streak of fanaticism. The workmanship of her house was unrivalled. No one knew better how to drape a torso in the round. She would handle fabric as a master sculptor realises the possibilities latent in a marble block. Like a sculptor, too, she understood the subtle beauty of the female body in motion, and knew that graceful movements were enhanced by asymmetry of cut. She wanted the body to show itself through the dress. The dress was to be a second or more seductive skin, which smiled when its wearer smiled. Madame Vionnet demanded of her clients that they be tall, have proper breasts and hips, and move easily. She could then match their beauty with her skill — and the result would be a partnership.

  Today she lives in the Seizième Arrondissement, in a street top-heavy with apartment buildings from the Belle Epoque. The facade of her house is adorned with swags of fruit and metal balconies in the heaviest bourgeois taste. Once through the door, however, you enter a world of aluminium grilles, sand-blasted walls, mirror glass and sleek lacquer surfaces: an interior as clean-cut and unsentimental as Madame Vionnet herself.

  ‘I have nothing old in my house. Everything is modern. I did it all myself.’

  Like a Vionnet dress, this is spareness achieved expensively. When she moved here in 1929 the rooms were quickly purged of meaningless ornament. Even the sepia family photographs were ripped from their frames, sandwiched between sheets of plate-glass, and hung on walls that were otherwise free of pictures.

  Squares of natural parchment line the salon. ‘Each one a sheepskin!’ she laughs. ‘You see, I am a shepherdess.’ The room is said to be the most exceptional art deco interior in Paris to have survived - with its owner – intact. There are fur-covered sofas, chromium chairs upholstered in white leather and tables of scarlet lacquer, the colour of Buddhist temples in Japan. The fireplace is of sheet copper, silvered. On it stands a photo of the Parthenon: a talismanic photo, for Madame Vionnet has always turned to Classical Greece for inspiration. Her portrait, resting on an easel, was painted by Jean Dunand, the ‘lacquer master’ of the 1920s. The face is made from a mosaic of the minutest chips of eggshell.

  This refinement was the reward of a long struggle. Her father, Abel Vionnet, came from the Jura but earned his living at Aubervilliers on the outskirts of Paris. He was an octroi: that is to say, like the Douanier Rousseau, he was an internal customs officer who levied tolls on saleable goods as they passed along the highway. His wife deserted him: he and his daughter became inseparable.

  The Vionnet family owned a farmhouse in the Jura ‘with a stream where I could swim’, but Madeleine did not see it until she was sixteen. She had been anaemic in Paris, and relatives suggested mountain air as a cure. ‘But I was bored in the mountains. Papa had to come and fetch me again . . . ’ Nevertheless, the Jura heritage has probably marked her character. The Jurassiens are a people apart. They have a fiercely independent turn of mind, and a history of rebellious and nonconformist attitudes. In the nineteenth century, the watchmakers of the Swiss Jura combined exquisite craftsmanship with practical Anarchism, and influenced all the great revolutionaries of the day. In Madeleine Vionnet the sense of excellence is there - and perhaps a touch of the anarchist.

  The wife of one of Abel Vionnet’s friends worked as a seamstress in a maison de couture, and at the age of ten Madeleine left school to join her. She got special dispensation to take the leaving exam a year early, and never wavered in her determination to succeed. She became ill but recovered. She married at eighteen, but divorced and her child died. She went to England — and she can still break into English at will — where she worked for Kate Reilly, who dressed the late-Victorian court in costumes of voluminous richness. She returned to Paris and was befriended by Madame Gerber, one of three sisters who ran the house of Callot Soeurs, which, with Worth and Jacques Doucet, formed the triumvirate that dominated fashion in France. Madame Gerber demanded the most exacting standards. Madame Vionnet confesses she owes all her later success to her, and keeps a photo of this forlorn-and-determined-looking woman constantly by her.

  In 1900, ladies of fashion were still encased in a heavy armature, and would balance half an aviary on their heads. High-boned collars strangled them. Pointed shoes crippled them. The corsets that squeezed their waists into hour-glass shapes also snarled up their intestines and disturbed their health. But Isadora Duncan was dancing with bare feet, flapping breasts and trailing draperies . . .

  'Quelle artiste!’ says Madame Vionnet with an expansive gesture and backward shake of the head. 'Quelle grrrande artiste!’

  One couturier noticed a princess on a public bus. In a short time, fashionable ladies would burst from their prison.

  Madeleine Vionnet was a leading liberationist. She claims the distinction of being the first dressmaker to discard the corset, while working for Jacques Doucet in 1907: ‘I have never been able to tolerate corsets myself. Why should I have inflicted them on other women? Le corset, c’est une chose orthopédique . . .’

  Certainly, she always believed that no woman can be beautiful if she is constricted. And from 1901 onwards she designed seductive peignoirs or tea-gowns: clothes to collapse in before the ordeal of dressing for dinner. Her models wore sandals, even went barefoot, and she plainly intended that women should adopt the déshabillé style in public as well.

  Credit for suppressing the corset, however, usually goes to Paul Poiret, the designer who grafted the paraphernalia of The Thousand and One Nights onto everyday dress. Perhaps a misunderstanding of this crucial point of fashion history stems from Madame Vionnet’s estimation of Poiret: ‘Monsieur Poiret was not a couturier. He was a costumier . . . très bien pour le théâtre!’

  With this neat dialectic distinction, she succeeds in equating his clothes with fancy dress.

  Her own couture house opened in 1912. She shut it during the War, went to Rome, and returned to Paris at the close of hostilities. She induced Galeries Lafayette to back her, and in 1923 reopened in sumptuous premises on the Avenue Montaigne. The richest women in the world flocked to her: she never went to them.

  ‘I was a dressmaker,’ she says. ‘I believed in my métier. I chose my friends for their brains, for their real worth and for no other reason. Monsieur Léger was a friend. Whenever he was tired of painting, he liked to come and watch me cut . . .

  ‘No. I was never mondaine. I never dined in restaurants and, when I went to the theatre, I went alone. I have
never cared to dress myself well. I was short . . . and I hate short women!’

  Among the few clients she would consent to see was the Italian-born Duchesse de Gramont: ‘Ah! She was a real model. Tall and lovely. When I was designing a dress, I had only to ask her to come and try it on . . . and I knew exactly where it was wrong!’

  She seldom descended to the salon because ‘if I saw a woman who was ugly or short or fat, I would show her the door! . . . je dirai “Va-t-en!”’ Many of her clients were the wives of Cuban sugar millionaires: ‘They were not intelligent, those Cubans! But they were properly made. They moved well, and you could do something with them.’ Then Europeans began to plant beet; Cuban cane-sugar slumped, and the husbands objected to the bills.

  ‘We planted beets,’ the old lady chuckles. ‘We lost the clients.’

  Then there were the Argentines! At the mention of the word ‘Argentine’ – and the memory of Argentine women with undulating buttocks like carnivores’, ‘. . . avec leurs fesses ondoyantes des carnivores . . . ’ – Madame Vionnet sinks her white head onto the pillow and, in a moment of unguarded reverie, sighs, ’They always said I loved women too much . . . !’

  Perhaps the loveliest of the ‘Argentines’ was the Brazilian-born Madame Martinez de Hoz, who, after the Stock Market Crash, bought a share in the house of Vionnet and kept it going until Hitler’s War.

  ‘We were a village in those days, a town even . . . ’ Vionnet used to employ 1,200 people in 21 ateliers. Her seamstresses worked in rooms that were a model for their day, airy and flooded with light: ‘I remembered the horrible work conditions when I was a girl and I wanted ours to be the best . . . in that way you get the best work.’ She stationed herself in a strategic position on the main floor: no one who moved across the room escaped her vigilant eye: ‘We lost no valuable time . . . ’

  There was no time to be lost. The Maison Vionnet produced six hundred models a year, which is twice as many as Dior. Each dress was photographed for reasons of copyright: a practice hitherto unknown. Every label on a Vionnet dress bore the fingerprint of Madame herself. Illicit pirating of her designs distressed her, not for financial reasons, but because mass-production was a betrayal of her art. She needn’t have worried. A Vionnet dress relied on the subtlest combination of fine workmanship and handling of cloth. It was, in practice, uncopiable.

  She rarely designed models on paper, but created them in miniature on a small doll or mannequin eighty centimetres high. The doll is now one of the more famous props of French couture, but it mystified Abel Vionnet when his daughter brought it home in the evenings. She was a middle-aged woman, yet she persisted in dressing her doll. Had she failed to grow up?

  She confesses she was to blame for his bewilderment: ‘I dared not tell Papa the extent of my business. I was afraid he would pay us a visit, and make a public sermon on the evils of ambition.’

  Once Madame Vionnet had evolved her style, she stuck to it. When rival couturiers lifted skirts above the knee, she refused: ‘To show the knee is ordinaire . . . vulgaire . . . !’ She admired the fluid lines of Japanese costume and the severity of the Classical Greek tunic. Her most characteristic dress, to be seen in quantity at every race-meeting at Longchamps, was a shift of cream silk. But this Greek-inspired simplicity was manoeuvred to extremes of opulence. An evening gown of black velvet and white mink – her original combination – was the subject of one of Edward Steichen’s best fashion photographs for Vogue.

  A Vionnet dress looks nothing in the hand. It contains no pads, no artificial stiffening, and flops limply on its hanger. There are two hundred of them at the Centre de Documentation de la Couture, and they are something of a trial to the ladies who look after them. ‘What can one do with it?’ asks the curator with despairing eyes as she holds up a tube of flimsy white material – for she cannot work out how it was worn. She also tells me that Vionnet clients had the same difficulty, and used to telephone in panic when they couldn’t understand how to put a dress on.

  Not so Madame! She calls for the maid to take me upstairs, to the wardrobe where her favourite models are stored. We station a couturier’s dummy beside her chair, and on it put a black evening dress with a design of sea-horses, in the style of Attic red-figure vase painting. Suddenly, the hands shoot forward and with a tug here, another tug there, the dress miraculously comes alive.

  ‘I am a woman of the most extraordinary vitality,’ Madame Vionnet assures me. ‘I have never been bored for a second. I have never been envious of anyone or anything, and now I have achieved a certain tranquillity.’ She is satisfied with her work, satisfied to sit in her salon and read a biography of Cardinal Richelieu.

  ‘I could, of course, live in Rome,’ she reflects, as if a move to Rome were a possibility. ‘But I love my country and I wish to die here.’

  She does tire easily and, towards the end of the interview, her conversation tailed off into staccato bursts. But she is still interested in the events of Paris fashion – and certainly knows what to dislike! ‘Totalement déséquilibré!’ she snorts at a photo of a Courrèges dress in Vogue. Couture is the art for which she has lived, and she feels it is dying with her: ‘It’s very sad now . . . very reduced!’

  Other dressmakers are divided into friends, foes, and those consigned to a limbo of indifference. She cherishes the memory of Balenciaga, ‘Un ami . . . un vrai!’ On the subject of Christian Dior she was vague: ‘He had a pretty name, but I did not know him.’ And of Madame Chanel, who at one time must have galled her considerably, she had this to say: ‘She was a woman of taste . . . Yes. One had to admit it. But she was a modiste. That is to say, my dear, she understood hats!’

  On leaving her, I was worried that our photographer might disturb her tranquillity.

  ‘No. He will not disturb me. I shall be very pleased to see him. But he cannot photograph my brain . . . !’

  1973

  MARIA REICHE: THE RIDDLE OF THE PAMPA

  Maria Reiche is a tall, almost skeletal, German mathematician and geographer who has spent about half her seventy-two years in the Peruvian desert surveying the archaeological monument known as the ‘Nazca lines’. This astonishing curiosity lies on the Pan-American Highway some three hundred miles south-east of Lima and fifty miles inland from the coast, a flat waterless plain, lying high above two irrigated valleys, with the foothills of the Andean Cordillera backing up behind. This plain, the Pampa de Ingenio, is covered with a thin layer of sand and pebbles which has oxidised a warm brown colour on the surface. It has a texture rather like a meringue and overlies a bed of whitish alluvium. If you so much as tread on the Pampa you leave a white footprint that will last for centuries.

  Nearly 2,000 years ago the local inhabitants realised they could use their pampa as a gigantic etching plate. And over the generations, they made what is surely the largest, and certainly one of the most beautiful, works of art in the world. The surface of the desert is furrowed with a web of straight lines, linking huge geometric forms – triangles, rectangles, spirals, meanders, whip-like zig-zags and superimposed trapezes – that look like the work of a very sensitive and very expensive abstract artist. There are lines as thin as a goat path, and as wide as airport runways. Some converge at a single point, others run on, five miles and more, straddling valleys and escarpments in their unswerving course. These surface drawings make little sense on the ground, and no aerial photographs do them justice. But from a light aircraft you can only gasp with amazement at their scale and the imagination of their makers.

  As you bounce about the sky in the thermals that rise off the plain, you soon distinguish other figures. Apart from the geometric forms there is a zoo of animals and birds, looking rather like Steinberg drawings on an enormous scale. There is a whale. There are a guano-bird, a pelican, a humming bird, other unrecognisable birds and a frigate bird, with a distended sac under- its bill. There is a dog. There is an Amazonian spider-monkey with a prehensile tail curving upwards in a spiral. There is a copy of a spider (of a species cal
led Ricinulei that copulates with its hind leg). There is a tom-toddy figure with head and no body; a flower; a strange kind of seaweed; and a beast, half-bird and half-snake. There is also a lizard with its body shorn in two by the highway.

  The lines on the Pampa de Ingenio were spotted in the late Twenties by the Aerial Survey of Peru. But for more than ten years the archaeologists were either ignorant of their existence or chose to ignore them. In 1939 Dr Paul Kosok of Long Island University was surveying Ancient Peru and followed up a rumour of ancient irrigation channels on the Pampa. He found the mysterious lines and was doubly astonished when the figures of birds and animals emerged from under his footprints. Kosok was not perplexed by the origin of the figures. Their style roughly coincided with those that decorated the pots of the local Nazca culture (even if the figures on the desert were finer and less folkish than the figures on the pots). But other questions troubled him. What was the point of this colossal creation when its makers, who did not have the aeroplane, could never have seen them properly? How could a people of simple peasants and warriors have mastered their superlative surveying technique without a knowledge of higher mathematics?

  By chance Kosok timed his visit to coincide with the Winter Solstice, 21 June, the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere. That evening at sunset he was crossing the Pampa where several lines ran in an east-west direction. He was delighted to find that the lower rim of the sun touched down at a point where one of the lines met the horizon. He decided that the line had been made for determining the date of the Winter Solstice. And he went on to speculate that all the lines and geometric forms were used as sightings to predict the risings and settings of the sun, moon and stars. The Nazca people, he said, had imprinted on the desert ‘the largest astronomy book in the world’.

  The Nazca Culture had been discovered in 1905 by the German Peruvianist Max Uhle. It was a smallish empire of warriors and peasant cultivators that flourished and declined between the second and eighth centuries of our era. The empire looked in two directions – across the Cordillera to the jungle, with its humming birds, its spider-monkeys and spiders; and to the sea coast, where white guano islands float on a heaving silvery sea. Nobody knows the real name of the Nazca people. First they were absorbed into the Inca and even earlier empires; then the Spaniards killed off the Indian population of these valleys and assured for them the anonymity of oblivion. One can but reconstruct their lives from the things they buried with their dead. And this is a rather hazardous business, since tomb-robbing is almost a national pastime and the robbers (the huaceros) have ransacked all but a few cemeteries. Seen from the air, the sides of the valleys are pockmarked with their holes.