The Great Fashion Designers (17 page)

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 in 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.

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.

In 1930 James returned to Britain and established a couture house on Bruton Street under the name E. Haweis James. Ernest and Haweis were, Milbank points out, his father's two middle names. She does not speculate but, given what is known of James's spiteful and pusillanimous nature, one has to wonder whether his intention was to provoke the military man who sired him. James identified himself not as a couturier but, in the kind of pretentiousness that marked his character, as a ‘sartorial structural architect'. This establishment went bankrupt almost immediately, and James quickly started up again in premises down the street. Georgina Howell identified Charles James's first appearance in British
Vogue
in 1932. There's a photograph of a conservative-looking but softly contoured little suit and a caption that reads: ‘A 12-guinea spring suit in marine blue facecloth. Raglan-sleeved top gathered on to a belt and the neck twisted with a spotted scarf.' In 1934 there was another financial crisis, and his mother stepped in to underwrite a fashion show in the Wedgwood Room at Marshall Field & Co in Chicago. He showed his collection for the first time in Paris in 1937, and over the next few years he showed collections in London and Paris leading
Vogue
to refer to him as ‘that itinerant designer'.