The Great Fashion Designers (15 page)

When the Nazis arrived in Paris in the spring of 1940, Grès fled, settling in a small village near the Spanish border. In exile she worked on cobbled-together mannequins made from hay, tin and wood and, because she could not visit a hairdresser, she took to covering her long hair with a turban. This was to become a signature look. Mears has pieced together what happened next. She returned to Paris in the same year to sell her 50 per cent of the business to her partner and former employer, Julie Barton, who seems to have denounced her to the Nazis as a Jew. In 1942 Lucien Lelong, head of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, persuaded Grès to use the money to open a new house, Grès, on the rue de la Paix. The Nazi authorities closed the house in 1944 because of her infringement of fabric restrictions. ‘I was,' she said later, ‘doing the opposite of everything I was supposed to do.'

She was given permission to reopen in time to launch a legendary poke-in-the-eye collection in the
tricolore
of the French flag, red, white and blue just before the liberation of Paris. The two years that followed were tough: two harsh winters, rationing of essential goods and shortages of everything else.
The only thing that thrived was the black market. In October 1944,
Le Figaro
published a communiqué from the Chambre Syndicale: ‘Prepared during a period of incredible material difficulties, these new fashion shows offering a reduced number of models, are the result of a tremendous collective effort, and demonstrate the desire of Parisian fashion houses to lead the way to a rapid recovery of the national economy.' The couturiers dressed miniature mannequins for an international touring exhibition entitled Le Théâtre de la Mode. The dolls were posed on stages designed by Christian Bérard, Jean Cocteau and Boris Kochno. For a secondary touring exhibition, the Gratitude Train, specifically created for America and concerned with historical outfits, ‘Madame Grès created a gown with a high waist and draped bodice à la Grecque, from a design by Leroy, couturier to Empress Josephine, ca. 1808.' After the years of utilitarian clothes and fabric restrictions, Madame was back in business.

But it quite quickly became clear that the emphasis of Parisian couture had shifted. Although the private clients were still important, it was the sale of toiles to ready-to-wear manufacturers, especially those in America, and the granting of licences that would refuel the industry and boost France's economy. In the wake of Christian Dior's New Look, Grès adjusted her style, nipping waists, rounding shoulders, making longer, fuller skirts. She even introduced an interior corset made for her by Alice Cadolle, which allowed her to create strapless Grecian dresses which were a great success in the 1950s. Although the New Look was partially intended to promote the greater consumption of fabric, Grès's natural propensity to use it by the tens of metres was hardly appropriate for mass manufacture. She could not, however, compromise her artistic integrity.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Grès was to reinterpret the high-waisted neoclassical gown again and again, but she also developed more geometric shapes in stiffer, heavier fabrics which were less sensuously seductive but more imposing. What these had in common with the Grecian dresses was the way in which they proceeded from a three-dimensional sense of the body. Her fashion sense remained acute through the 1960s, when she designed op-art dresses and flower-power gowns for rich hippies, and the 1970s, when she was able to exploit fashion's nostalgia for the 1930s with updated versions of her own best pieces.

In 1979, she did relent on her refusal to create a ready-to-wear collection, but it lasted only two seasons. Two years earlier she had told Marian McEvoy of
Women's Wear Daily
, ‘Couture always gives the ideas to prêt-à-porter. The prêt-à-porter designers are always influenced by the couturiers. I feel that prêt-à-porter has indeed given the woman in the street a better, neater appearance, but couture is the creative key. It is a grand work—it is truth—couture brings something to the world.'

Grès continued to design couture clothes of great beauty which kept pace with fashion and modern concerns (she developed less formal daywear and youthful leisurewear) but failing to make a go of her ready-to-wear line was only one of her mistakes. She was, says Mears, too influenced by Muni and by an employee named Mufthah, whose decisions embroiled her in legal actions that lasted years. Gradually, the press coverage grew less and less as the perception of her significance waned.

Grès did, however, become active in the politics of the industry, succeeding Lucien Lelong as president of the Chambre Syndicale in 1972. In 1983 she sold a controlling interest in her house, which eventually became wholly owned by the Japanese company Yagi Tsusho. Alix Grès retired after presenting her spring 1988 collection. She settled in her second home in Saint Paul de Vence with her daughter, Anne, who later moved her mother to an inexpensive nursing home in the Var, where she died in 1993, penniless. Anne hid her mother's death for more than a year. Mears concluded that the daughter, described as immature, simply wanted her famous mother all to herself at last.

In 1998 Hubert de Givenchy, who had befriended Grès in her declining years, acquired Alix Grès's personal collection, 300 dresses, he wrote in the introduction to
The Givenchy Style
in 1998, ‘beautiful enough to go mad over.'

Further reading:
Patricia Mears's
Madame Grès: Sphinx of Fashion
(2007) is the definitive read.

This period in fashion can be looked upon as elitism's last hurrah. At its start couture was dominant, spawning myriad watered-down copies; at its end mass-produced ready-to-wear, specifically designed for the young, was where innovation was happening, and a new breed of art-school trained designers was poised to make its mark. The Second World War naturally imposed stagnation; materials and labour were needed for other, more pressing purposes, clothing was rationed and fashion, for most people, became an irrelevant frivolity. In France, however, frivolity became an act of defiance, and Paris couture, so important not just in terms of exports but also as a symbol of French identity, fought hard to stay alive and functioning. Before the fall of France in 1940, the couturiers who had been called into the army were given two weeks' leave to design and make their collections before returning to the front. At the spring collections the Americans placed a huge number of orders. With the occupation of Paris its couturiers could no longer export to most of their usual markets: many moved to Vichy France; Charles Creed moved back to London, Mainbocher and
Charles James
abandoned Europe entirely to return to New York, and others, led by Lucien Lelong, chairman of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, began the long struggle against the Nazis' efforts to relocate the industry to Berlin or Vienna.

The couturiers of London and New York now eclipsed those of Paris. The Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers (ISLFD) was led by Molyneux and included Norman Hartnell, Elspeth Champcommunal at Worth, Digby Morton, Peter Russell, Bianca Mosca, Victor Stiebel and Hardy Amies—who doubled as a Secret Service agent. In compliance with the Utility Clothing Scheme introduced by the British government in 1942, the ISLFD created austerity couture—clothes that were functional, warm and skimpy. In America couture was led by the Hollywood designers Adrian and Omar Kiam, as well as
Charles James
. Norman Norell showed his first collection in 1940, and
Claire McCardell
seized her moment, removing shoulder pads and redirecting fashion towards comfort and ease of movement, becoming the most celebrated exponent of the first truly American style of dress, the mass-manufactured genre of designer sportswear. In her wake,
Rudi Gernreich
further developed the deconstructed, athletic, natural body shape that epitomised the relaxed, outdoors lifestyle of his adopted California.

At the end of the war the French government made it a priority to re-establish the country's pre-eminence in fashion. Coco Chanel, in disgrace because of her liaison with a German officer, was in exile in Switzerland but
Balenciaga
, Grès, Schiaparelli, Lelong, Fath and Balmain were back in Paris. However, it was
Christian Dior
who made modernity redundant when, in 1947, he introduced the New Look based on belle époque styles. Retrograde as it was, the New Look and its celebration of the hourglass-shaped female body captured the mood of men and women in the aftermath of a devastating war. The men returning from the battle front had witnessed things many could never bear to speak of. They needed the comfort of conventional relationships, they needed their jobs back from the women who had been enlisted to replace them—and they needed children to replace the depleted populations.

The resulting baby-boom generation fuelled economies in which there were jobs for all, particularly in
a burgeoning media and a democratised fashion industry. The ultra-femininity of their mothers' clothes was replaced by an ethos based on the simplicity of children's and men's clothes. Couture, with its high-priced, labour-intensive clothes, was under threat from a ready-to-wear, factory-produced, throwaway culture that wanted something new and cheap every Saturday. The youthquake movement spawned the miniskirt, which sprang from the mods on the streets of London to the imaginations of
Mary Quant
in London and
Pierre Cardin
and
André Courrèges
in Paris. Couturiers such as Chanel, Schiaparelli and
Hubert de Givenchy
scurried to keep up, introducing boutique lines and moving into prêt-à-porter. The scene was set for a massive paradigm shift.

Balenciaga is without doubt the designer's designer, the most frequently credited by other designers as inspirational, the man even Chanel grudgingly admired (the only male couturier thus honoured) and Christian Dior graciously acknowledged as his master. This serious, shy and retiring Spaniard was a technical genius, the architect of cloth, conjuring flattering, dramatic shapes. He was also the most remarkable of far-sighted innovators, capable of sensing shifts in society's mood. His pre-war collections prefigured Dior's post-war New Look, and after the war he resisted Dior's retrospective fantasy and worked towards a crisp, pure-lined modernity. Cecil Beaton, who in 1954 casually referred to Balenciaga as ‘the greatest dressmaker of today', also wrote: ‘If Dior is the Watteau of dressmaking—full of nuances, chic, delicate and timely—then Balenciaga is fashion's Picasso. For like that painter, underneath all his experiments with the modern, Balenciaga has a deep respect for tradition and a pure classic line. All artists who, apart from their unique personal gift, are also mediums transmitting the message of the art of the past, inevitably are timely as well as timeless.'

Colin McDowell, in
McDowell's Directory
, asserts, ‘He is unquestionably the greatest designer of the twentieth century', and Francois Boudot does not hesitate to write in awestruck hyperbole about Balenciaga as an artist. ‘You may have thought you were looking at a Zurburan, a Velazquez or a Goya, but it was always Balenciaga. Discouraging imitators, he created his aloof garments in an atmosphere of secrecy and calm for a small and elite number of wealthy beauties who saw him as a cult figure.' As his self-appointed acolyte and lifelong friend, Hubert de Givenchy was to say in 2006, ‘Balenciaga was like his clothes, perfection. He is still my god.'

Cristobal Balenciaga Eisaguirre was born in 1895 in Guetaria, a small Basque fishing village. His father, the captain of a pleasure boat, died while Cristobal was still a child and his mother, Martina Eisaguirre, supported her three children by working as a seamstress, an activity for which her younger son developed a passion. The story goes that this untypical boy was forward enough to admire the Drecoll
tailleur
worn to church by an ageing local aristocrat, the Marquesa de Casa Torres. Her interest piqued, the Marquesa discovered that the thirteen-year-old's ambition was to be a couturier. She gave him a length of expensive fabric and the Drecoll suit to copy. Balenciaga described how petrified and yet how elated he was. He found the courage to cut into the cloth and, whatever the quality of the resulting outfit, the Marquesa was gracious enough to wear it. She became his first patron, arranging his apprenticeship with a tailor in San Sebastian.

In 1919, Balenciaga opened his own atelier, Eisa, in the town which was becoming the favoured resort of the Spanish royal family and its court. He established a Madrid branch in 1932 and one in Barcelona in 1938, employing members of his extended family to run them. His workroom staff were trained to high standards of traditional craftsmanship, and he visited Paris regularly as a buyer, attending shows
and buying toiles, which he then translated for his own customers. Lesley Ellis Miller emphasises one other background factor that contributed to Balenciaga's unique and uniquely rigorous approach to fashion. ‘His appreciation of art was similarly formed. In all parts of Spain, painting and sculpture are accessible to everyone in the churches and in the streets—as well as in art galleries and museums. Immense baroque churches dwarf the tiniest villages, and their interiors often contain elaborate chapels and overpowering altarpieces.'