by Cecil Beaton
Likewise, his decoration of the magnificent Palazzo Labbia in Venice is devoid of frivolity and is decorated on a grandiose scale worthy of the palace’s vast stone proportions and the Tiepolo frescoes.
A faddist with unlimited energy, Charles de Beistegui avoids mere reconstitutions of exact past styles and epochs. His imagination is so rich that his imitators can never keep up with him or guess what he will make fashionable tomorrow. He is always so busy with his newest schemes of building and interior decoration that one wonders when he himself has time to enjoy the results of his genius. At the moment he is building two vast wings onto Groussay: one to contain a chapel to be decorated in the Gothic style and a ballroom based on the engravings of Abraham Bosse, and the other to contain a Louis Treize theatre in which specially commissioned operas and ballets are to be performed on gala occasions.
CHAPTER XVII
VARIETY SHOW
ONE could easily develop a monist theory of fashion, for its expression invades all aspects of man’s social life. One finds the same changes and laws in the most serious as well as the most frivolous aspects of human endeavour. Literature, for example, is as subject to fashion’s laws as the line of a dress, parties or flowers or scents are subject to variations depending upon the needs of man’s environment. If these diverse themes coalesce in this chapter, it is not because they are related to each other in any direct organic way, but rather because they reflect the same continuum of change that rides through any given age and are, indeed, related in the sense that they often express, in their different media, the tone of an epoch.
Scientists tell us that 80 percent of our senses are visual, the other 20 percent being divided among taste, tough, hearing, and smelling. Though it is the one among his five senses that man could most do without, the sense of smell is, in its own delightful way, one of the rarest gifts that he possesses. Each day flowers, lemons, soap, herbs, foods, oils, medicines, and perfumes assault our nostrils with a never-ending variety of impressions. Not all are pleasant: some are rancid, sour, dank, sickening; some, on the other hand, are titillating, pungent, aromatic, and heartwarming. From the range of pleasant smells, man has chosen, in the course of civilization, to learn to extract their essences and make scents from them.
No doubt the art of perfume making goes back to the earliest civilizations. Greece and Egypt, Cleopatra and Poppæa, all had their salves and incenses, their bath oils and perfumes. Ambergris has been known since the Phoenicians, and a stranded whale with its natural cargo of ambergris has in centuries past been the occasion of a gold rush to the beach.
It is perhaps seldom considered that the tastes in scents of various ages are continually changing just as much as clothing styles or any other expression of fashion alters, to express a new attitude towards our changing surroundings.
During the late Victorian and Edwardian ages, perfumes, in contrast to manners and literature were direct and solid in their appeal. Heliotrope, rose, and lilac odours were especial favourites. Even today the tradition of classical English scents continues to range through the lavenders, rosemary, and sweet geranium smells, and all the herbs that Cardinal Wolsey ever plucked as he wandered in his garden at Hampton Court.
At the beginning of the First World War, when Paul Poiret’s lampshade ladies and the Russian Ballet made exoticism fashionable, perfumes began to become heavy, musklike, and Eastern. This tradition of Oriental scents continued until the 1920s: it was considered exciting for women to leave a heady trail of musk, sandalwood, or Japanese scent in their wake.
Early in the twenties a revolution took place in both the manufacture of perfumes and the manufacturers themselves. Dressmakers had started to invade the field of scent, and soon Chanel, Lanvin, and others began to create perfumes in their own names.
The revolution also affected the chemical composition of scents. Previous to the twentieth century’s discovery and perfection of synthetic compounds, perfumes had been made from ambergris, flowers, herbs, and leaf oils, their essences extracted with alcohols according to certain formulæ that had been developed over hundreds of years. But the great age of organic chemistry had begun with coal-tar dyes and was soon to flood the scent and the food market with synthetic perfumes, synthetic vanilla, synthetic fruit flavours, and ersatz colours. Even chemists will admit that there is a difference between the synthetic and the natural product. Scientists can manufacture in a test tube the smell and the taste of vanilla or of pineapple and pear; but in nature, the esters which impart their smell and their flavour to these fruits, or the vanillin in the vanilla bean, are delicately manufactured and mixed with other components. Natural growth and sunlight have made all the difference, just as hothouse flowers seldom possess the qualities of those that grow in summer.
So it is with perfumes. Few synthetic perfumes can rival the smell of carnation spice and other direct Edwardian scents; nor can modern bath oils or toilet waters compete with what James Joyce would have called the “limony-limony” smell of lemon verbana. Even the most respectable dressmakers have been guilty in the last twenty years of selling almost consistently synthetic products. These perfumes doubtless reflected a changed taste, a trend towards lighter, fruitier smells; yet many people with a highly developed sense of smell complained that they were not true perfumes. Of course a high standard of excellence went into the making of Patou’s Joy and Amour-Amour, Worth’s Dans la Nuit, or the products of Lelong and Molyneux. But somehow the best of these artificial scents seems something less than a true product of nature captured in a bottle.
With Chanel and her world-famous No. 5 perfume, the art of scents had been completely altered. Since No. 5, all luxury perfumes have been only variations on the essential fruit-and-flower quality. This quality, as with all synthetic perfumes, has perhaps a slightly cloying effect; and to me, none of these has ever achieved the lightness of the classical English scents.
Just as it would be difficult to trace the origin of fashions in dress, so, too, the fashion in perfumes is equally elusive. Women seek, unconsciously perhaps, to create certain atmospheric impressions; and today the perfumers attempt to interpret the atmosphere of the moment, emphasizing simplicity or sophistication as the occasion demands.
Perhaps in no other fashion enterprise do names and institutions have such a rise and fall. Famous names in perfumes change continually. In the twenties Coty and Houbigant were the reigning kings; Chypre of Coty was a typical perfume of that period. Guerlain brought in again scents with more than a whiff of spice during the thirties, and in many instances these have persisted to this day, just as the classic English scents, Green Lime, Floris’s Lemon Verbena, Sweet Geranium, and other have continued to be appreciated.
After the last war, perfumes changed once more, becoming even more like fresh fruit and much lighter than ever before.
What is the reason for woman wishing, by wearing perfume, to hide her natural human fragrance? Perhaps it is for the same profound reasons that made people take up the fig leaf to alter their nudity—not from shame, but for the beauty of decoration and the myriad psychological benefits of such embellishment. Perfume is ornament, just as clothing is ornament. But if clothing is also a necessary protection against climatic changes, then perfume is a complete luxury, a useless but delightful expression of man’s æsthetic sense.
To speak of scents is indirectly to speak of flowers. The average person often does not realize how much taste in flowers or plants, both potted and cut, changes with the years. He might even be more surprised to discover the extent to which man has altered the biology of the vegetable kingdom in his pursuit of a changing æsthetic.
At the beginning of the century flower arrangements were given little consideration. Flowers as symbols of festivity were in the hands of the caterer or the nurseryman. Gardeners brought their potted plants indoors, packing them near the Nottingham lace curtains or in the fireplace. Full-grown rambler-rose trees, palms and white spiky spirea in blue and white pots created an atmosphere of festivit
y. Carnations were placed in silver, trumpet-shaped vases and splayed out like a fountain or a fireworks display.
In general colours were segregated. The Edwardian age was an age of pastel colours, and there was a particular variety of pale salmon pink and apricot-coloured rose which was a great favourite. New roses—Gloire de Dijon, La France, and the Mesdames Butterfly, Abel Chatenay and Frau Carl Drushki—were hybridized. These were so revealing of the style of their epoch and the elegance of their day that they remain among the most beautiful of all roses.
Bridal bouquets and court bouquets became enormous. Cartwheels of carnations and asparagus fern would have additional cascades of carnations hanging from ribbons and loops of tulle. At a wedding at which I appeared as a page, carrying a white Directoire stick with a bouquet on its top, the bridesmaids carried vast bouquets of outsize marguerites mixed with wired cabbage roses.
As the Edwardian age progressed, flowers were still seldom mixed together in many colours, though two-colour schemes—pink and mauve, for example—became permissible, and the enormous silver or glass epergnes on the dining table now boasted asparagus fern among the roses, carnations, or sweet peas, while fronds of smilax trailed in arabesques onto the white, starched damask tablecloth. In the drawing room vases of separate coloured sweet peas were dotted with gypsophila or a cloud of baby’s-breath. Actresses in drawing-room comedies were invariably seen arranging wire-stemmed roses while they awaited their fiancés. This activity was stereotyped, and they all walked to and from a vase, cocking their heads to one side before gliding forward to add a single bloom to the confection. But in La Dame aux Camélias, Sarah Bernhardt arranged a huge vase of flowers without once looking at them, accomplishing the gesture with such apparent artistry that when she affixed the final touch there was a spontaneous burst of applause from the audience.
A later innovation consisted of mixing cut flowers with the leaves of some other variety of plant or flower, and magnolia or rhododendron leaves were interspersed with irises or rose-coloured tulips with laurel leaves.
By the twenties, multicoloured tulips were thrust into accumulator jars, for colours were no longer restricted and massed together. Perhaps owing to the Italianate vogue among interior decorators, madonna lilies assumed a fashionable air, and they too were jammed into fish tanks and jars in the gold and black drawing rooms.
Then came the white period. Those who had white rooms considered white flowers a desideratum. The craze for pristine whiteness became so exaggerated that even the green leaves had to be peeled off the branches of white lilacs and peonies. This stripping process, though a lengthy one, produced its surprising metamorphoses, and a bunch of syringa denuded of its leaves became something finely carved out of Japanese ivory.
It was Mrs. Constance Spry who carried the art of Western flower arranging to a point of sophistication that it had previously attained only in the Orient. Even the great Dutch painters of the sixteenth century did not concoct more elaborate still lifes than Mrs. Spry. She would erect great scaffolds of lilies and grasses, or combine orchids with vegetable leaves, dried corn sheaves, or bunches of grapes, For winter she would create remarkable arrangements of dried plants and vegetables. She saved pampas grass, honesty, and thistles, and ransacked the hedges for old man’s beard to give further variety to her ingenious displays.
Mrs. Spry had undoubted taste and a love of flowers; but, like so many ideas that become commercialized, her influence was soon overdone. One can see the results of her shop off Bond Street and her Park Avenue emporium at the annual flower show in almost any great city today. Emphasis in floral arrangements is one more inclined towards the exotic, with Oriental-looking branches bursting from an alabaster vase or some gnarled tree bark. Helen Hokinson ladies sit proudly beneath an arrangement of twigs and driftwood (with one cactus flower on which a butterfly is pinned) that has gained them a blue-ribbon prize or at least an “honourable mention.”
Modern bridal bouquets appear to have gone as far from nature as can be, with sprays of white butterfly orchids, their stems bound with ribbon, or tulips with their petals turned back, looking like a completely different flower. Perhaps flowers, like women’s hair, should be arranged quickly and without fuss. A dozen tulips shoved into a vase with one gesture and never arranged individually seem often more beautiful than premeditated efforts.
In Paris, where artificial flowers are works of art, the great florists make their real flowers seem artificial, and at Lachaume and the other florists’ whose names are sprinkled through the pages of Proust, flowers out of season have been cultivated to change little throughout the season or throughout the years. The sprays of peach blossom, the delicate fronds of lilac, the long-stemmed red roses, and the giant chrysanthemums today stand in the same vases and positions as they have for the last fifty years. Likewise that unique shop, Solomon’s, opposite the Ritz Hotel in London which unfortunately was a victim of the last war, never altered its arrangements from one year to the next, and the gardenias in cotton wool, the lilies of the valley, and the violets were left to speak for themselves. The flower decorations of Goodyear have always remained charmingly nostalgic.
The breeding of flowers reflects the taste of an age. An enormous advance has been effected in later years in the size, colour, and forms of the new dahlias. Yet the latest roses are mostly without scent, modernistic in petal formation, and often aggressive in their shot colouring of yellow, flame, or orange. They reflect the bad taste of the cinema, as do the flame-coloured gladioli splayed out in the cream-coloured urn in the hotel lobby.
The plants that are brought indoors also become subject to the vagaries of taste and environment. From the magnificent fuchsias and “French” lavenders of the turn of the century, we have turned to the more “modern” green leaves of the philodendrons, Mexican breadfruits, and the ficus plants. In America we find that peperomias, dieffenbachias, and amarylli are hardy enough to breathe even in the dry atmosphere of most overheated apartments.
Under Victorian and Edwardian moons women wore corsages of dark red roses combined with lilies of the valley or gardenias. Today any corsage with wires and ribbons is considered in execrable taste. At most a woman can now wear a single gardenia or three carnations clumped together. Even men’s “buttonholes” have almost disappeared or, on the rare occasion when they are seen, have been simplified. Formerly a piece of maidenhair fern could be seen with a rose; nowadays, if any flower is worn at all, it is only a cornflower, or perhaps a clove carnation, without the addition of its grey, spiky foliage. And only stationmasters are forgiven a rose in the lapel.
But regardless of change, flowers are still intricately linked with humanity, serving at weddings, funerals, festivities, in interior decoration, and for man’s delight. Falling under fashion’s rule, they become popular and then obsolete. Yet the moss rose or the striped tulip, though dropped for a season, will inevitably return to popularity again; while the wild flowers of the field, like people in far provinces who have no need of fashion, continue to propagate whether or not we consider them beautiful.
Perhaps some cave man with too much bison in his larder, inviting his neighbours to a meal, was the inventor of parties. In any case, if the aim of parties is that they should be enjoyed, give happiness to the guests, and even take them out of an ordinarily humdrum world into a more exciting sphere, then it is a sound one. Behaviour at parties is permissibly unorthodox; whence, no doubt, springs the notion of wine as an incentive for more highly keyed behaviour. But fashions at parties change according to the epoch.
During the Edwardian period, balls were considered more as an exclusive event than as an opportunity for fun. Either you were a part of the inner circle or you were not, and woe betide you if you were one of the goats. For there were no charity dances where you could pay a guinea to hobnob with a duchess, and you had to make the best of dining and dancing at the Carlton or the Savoy: the night club was unknown.
Lady de Grey (later Lady Ripon), one of the outstandin
g figures in the Edwardian period, was responsible for bringing about many changes in the social scene. She was the first to mix guests from many divergent worlds, and by so doing created what was later to be known as the “international act.” Immensely tall and handsome, with an aquiline profile, a china complexion, enormous grace, and always dressed in the height of elegance, Lady Ripon was an intimate of “Marlborough House circles.” Numbered among her friends were not only the Prince of Wales and his set, but virtually all of the great Covent Garden singers. With a flair for music and an appreciation for the arts, she was able to introduce artists to the aristocracy and to the royal family. To Coombe, her country house, came a hotchpotch of interesting people whom she mixed with great dash. It was not surprising for Nijinsky to sit next to Queen Alexandra at Sunday luncheon, or for Jean de Reszke to spend the weekend there in company with King Edward. By inviting Pavlova to dance on her lawn at a garden party, Lady Ripon interpolated the “divertissement” as part of an “occasion.” Artists were thereafter paid enormous sums for a few minutes’ entertainment with which to give cachet to an “at home.”