All We Know: Three Lives (30 page)

Both the fashion journalism and the modernist writing are practices of expressing and caressing objects that rely on oracular utterance: “Looking is not vanishing. Laughing is not evaporating. There can be the climax. There can be the same dress. There can be an old dress,” writes Stein in her “Portrait of Mabel Dodge at Villa Curiona.” And: “There can be pleasing classing clothing.” In both forms, the language is almost furiously static: full of emphatic, precise pronouncements. (As Stein writes elsewhere: “For this is so. Because.”) In both, descriptive energy and precision blend with a euphoric proliferation of sense. Both involve addressing oneself to nouns while celebrating verbs: “showing that there is wearing.” Both concern accentuation, pattern, regular arrangement; the practice of measurement; the artificial or accidental quality of the natural; resemblance that is not resemblance; the spectacle that is emotion and the emotion (animosity, crackle, betrayal) circulating around these items meant for display—more and more garments.

Writing about couture clothing has, until recently in the Anglo-American context, been termed trivial—ephemeral and apparently inconsequential, appearing most often in trade papers, magazines, and newspapers. Yet, or perhaps as a result, the language of fashion itself continually stresses significance. (Which is another message of the urgent “telegram.”) “Velvet is Very Important,” Madge wrote in
The Bystander
in 1932. “The ANGLE of one’s BRIM is important.” The detailed focus on surfaces in this writing also implies that these objects and the work that goes into producing and consuming them deserve respect. The emphasis on significance is direct and unashamed: “This insistence on a smooth and tight-fitting hip-line is another universal characteristic of the spring fashions, and one of the utmost importance,” she wrote in
Britannia and Eve
. And: “Importance is given to the shoulders of this black camel’s hair coat by appliqués of satin gaillac.” Importance is the question begged by fashion at least since its more exclusive association with femininity, following what is called the Great Masculine Renunciation—the abandonment of surface adornment and the adoption of sober similarity in men’s clothing with the ascendance of the suit in the nineteenth century.

It is characteristic of fashion—historically the premier public arena for women—that it has been relentlessly characterized as trivial even in the face of its economic, aesthetic, and psychological importance, made a receptacle for concern about the meaning of our surfaces. Madge addressed this cordoning off and willful ignorance candidly in
Britannia and Eve
in 1930: “There is a tendency in England to regard everything which concerns the lighter moments of men (sport, for instance) as important, while the more mundane occupations of women are universally condemned as frivolous.” She is echoing and expanding on a point that Virginia Woolf made the year before in
A Room of Her Own
: “it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial.’” But, as Madge wrote, “the desire to dress up is too deeply rooted an instinct to be treated lightly, nor may it be thwarted without detriment to the character of the individual.”

To make this point, Madge also put herself and the rituals of haute couture on display. “It is a rule that that no one is allowed to leave until the collection is over,” she wrote in “This Fashion Business,” also in 1930.

She also made the physical atmosphere of the couture showings vivid for her readers. “A huge modern entrance in the Champs Elysées, vast salons in the everlasting grey, an incredibly large number of extremely uncomfortable cane chairs,” she wrote in
Britannia and Eve
in 1933. “A mannequin enters in the unassuming two piece woolen suit which convention ordains shall begin even the most sensational collection.” At another show: “A magnificent Hotel of the Empire period. Huge salons decorated in the authentic early Empire manner, slender gold bas-reliefs on cream walls, sand colour taffeta curtains draped in the window embrasures. Small tables with bouquets of tea roses are arranged around the vast room which has a stage at one end and slightly raised rows of seats at the other. A slight, very discreet murmur—then silence and against the velvet curtains the first mannequin appears.” Later: “Enormous applause breaks out—a mannequin has just appeared wearing a magnificent black velvet evening wrap cut on Florentine cinquecento lines…The previous mannequin…turns round to give an envious glance to her admired successor.” In “yet another series of salons,” she sees “a new colour which resembles stewed blackberries and a lot of lamé.”

Madge was now a success. But the question of importance still preyed on her. She continued to immerse herself in modern design, and when she was not regretting her missed academic career, she sometimes said she wished she had been an architect, a more respected form of containing bodies than the one from which she made a living. She had traveled to the Bauhaus in the late 1920s, probably to assist Dody with
The New Interior Decoration
. She later lived in one of the London houses designed by Halsey Ricardo and wrote several articles about these buildings—rich subjects for her, with their emphasis on color and decoration. She met Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier’s collaborator, and was “madly jealous of her, because there she was working with Le Corbusier, and there was I sweating it out in the fashion world, about which I didn’t care a hoot in hell.” In the 1920s, walking into Jean Désert, the decoration business and showroom on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré of the designer Eileen Gray and her collaborator Evelyn Wyld, Madge had fallen in love with the rich simplicity of Gray’s work and the stark geometry of Wyld’s rugs, and she became close to both women.

Wyld had formed the French War Emergency Fund during the First World War with a group of friends, including Gray; she received the Medaille de la Reconnaissance Française—a decoration given to volunteers who helped the wounded and refugees—for this work. She remained in France after the Armistice, able to live more openly as a lesbian in France than at home, and eventually settled in an old house in the South of France, in the hills between Cannes and Grasse. A tough Scotswoman with bright orange hair, she came from a family of committed suffragists and “always set her own style, dressing in beautifully cut trousers, Byronic silk shirts and wide embroidered belts.” She had no formal education in art (she had studied music), but Gray—who had moved to France in 1907 and worked first in lacquer, then in wood and metal, making screens, chairs, tables, and lamps—invited her to produce textiles with her. After travels with Gray in North Africa and research on her own into weaving in England and Scotland, Wyld began running the weaving studio and designing rugs for Jean Desért. When Gray began to focus on architecture rather than interior décor, their partnership ended, and Wyld collaborated with the American Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux. Madge described one apartment designed by de Lanux as combining “the most austere lines…with most precious materials.” Wyld and de Lanux exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in 1928 and 1929, the Salon d’Automne, and the Union des Artistes Modernes, then in the early 1930s moved their operation south, opening a studio in Cannes and working out of Wyld’s house.

The work of all three women “was radical in its stress on surface qualities, bareness and elegant comfort,” notes Isabelle Anscombe in her pioneering study of women and the decorative arts. They created interiors that “were among the most sophisticated but practical of their day,” entirely distinct from the homes they had been raised in, modern yet attuned to physical ease. Madge, writing in 1930, noted how the unusual color schemes, “the grain of the wood, the smooth surface of leather, the roughness of hand-knotted rugs, are all employed to give interest to what otherwise might be banal.” In 1930 she organized an exhibition of rugs by Wyld and furniture by de Lanux at the Curtis Moffat gallery in London. (Rugs by Marion Dorn and Ted McKnight Kauffer were also on display.) For Madge, becoming friends with Gray, Wyld, and de Lanux meant that she “grew up in” their work, and for forty years she spent most of her holidays at Wyld’s house in Provence. But they “were all completely independent, all had their own money, then lived their own lives the way they wanted to,” she said. “They accepted me as being an exception; it couldn’t be helped. I was
literally
the only person they knew who had ever earned her living.”

After working for
Britannia and Eve
and
The Bystander
for several years, Madge found her health again deteriorating. Her solution, which she kept secret from her employers, was to check into a clinic. She went to work every day, but lived under a doctor’s supervision until she recovered. Then, in the spring of 1934, Condé Nast and Harry Yoxall asked her to return to British
Vogue
as fashion editor. It was a vindication on every level: the personal satisfaction of being recognized by them; the fact that no other glossy magazine had the prestige of
Vogue
(and daily papers still did not cover fashion). Still, she bargained hard. Nast finally agreed to match her two salaries, cabling the London office from shipboard on his way back to New York: “Give Madge what she wants.”

She found
Vogue
a wholly different place from the magazine she had been forced out of in 1926. By 1934 many aspects of the magazine and fashion industries had been professionalized, and the alliances between editorial, manufacturing, and retail solidified. It was now standard practice for wholesale copyists and retailers to get credit for designs. The advent of photographer’s models and modeling agencies, long resisted, was another shift. The industry still revolved around Paris and haute couture—although ready-to-wear was becoming more prevalent, it still imitated couture—and twice a year, buyers and journalists converged on the city, and the showings went on from early morning until late at night. Most designers showed at least two hundred models, and a journalist would see four or five collections a day—nearly a thousand dresses. Select wholesalers of ready-to-wear clothing could attend the couture showings by paying a high entrance fee, called a “caution,” which they would forfeit if their firm did not go on to buy or pay the patent on the toile, the garment from which the pattern and then copies could be made. These buyers were “toadied to in no uncertain manner,” Madge wrote later, “and the more influential American ones treated like princesses.” She was not treated badly herself: When she arrived in her room at the Ritz, she invariably found a new hat from the milliner Suzy.

She had a great deal of power. Half a century later, Hardy Amies, who became the official dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth II, remembered exactly the moment in 1935 when Madge encouraged him to open his own
maison de couture
and told him, “You will go far.” She influenced which dresses would be mass-produced, since by the early 1930s it was accepted that being a fashion journalist at a glossy magazine was not entirely distinct from “the rôle of merchandise-stylist.” This merging was initially “looked on with equal disfavor by both sides,” Madge recalled. “The fashion editor, who had never dealt with firms other than
couture
houses and court dressmakers, turned up her nose at the ready-made clothes, which in the main were quite dreadful, and the wholesaler, who had not yet realized what a power the press could be, was annoyed by her criticism.” But the new level of coordination with manufacturers and stores also meant that a good fashion editor could “be the pivot around which revolves the whole complicated apparatus of launching a new idea.” Madge made “deals with the heads of wholesale companies, such as Olive O’ Neill at Dorville, whereby
Vogue
would feature a particular couture gown, mention the manufacturer who bought the toile or pattern,” and even help “distribut[e] copies of the gown to the most important stores.” She had a contact at one firm, a talented copyist, who would tell her which models her company was buying from which Paris houses and which department stores—“Selfridges or Harrods or a place in Newcastle or wherever”—would retail them.

Alison Settle was still the magazine’s editor. The staff included Anne Scott-James, the travel writer and memoirist Lesley Blanch, the society writer Johnny McMullin, and a young Audrey Withers. As fashion editor, Madge had a staff of seven. She worked closely with Cecil Beaton, who now did much of the magazine’s photography, and she set up
Vogue
’s photography studio. To one subordinate, she “was the chicest and most terrifying woman”—impatient with bureaucracy, exacting, delicate, haughty—but also someone who made you “laugh a lot.” Scott-James saw her as someone who had “antennae” for what was new and good, but was high-strung and an egotist, the kind of person who blamed others when things went wrong. When Settle was forced out in 1935 (Nast et al. using tactics that, again, did not reflect well on them—indeed, that damaged their reputation in the fashion and magazine businesses in England), Madge lobbied hard for the job. But more than competence was at stake. Edna Chase and another manager were “bitterly anti-Garland on the morality issue,” wrote Harry Yoxall in his diary. “Can’t see why, myself, her editorship should cause such a scandal,” he noted, “when her appointment as fashion editor did not do so.” A lesbian at the head of the magazine was not acceptable, and Condé Nast and his executives eventually chose the American Betty Penrose, whom Scott-James called “much more boring and solid and reliable.”