On the opening of all this grandeur, I remember overhearing some of the sophisticated guests saying everything was so elegant, but Bill doesn’t belong in it. How right they were! Within a few months I had converted the big bathroom into a bedroom, building a balcony over the bathtub, where I put my bed. I found I couldn’t stand living in all the splendor. But it was tremendous for business, the customers were really eating it up, and they paid sixty-five dollars for a hat without blinking an eye, whereas before the new decor, they would fight over thirty-five for the same hat. There was only one other person who felt uncomfortable in all the pseudo-French grandeur, and that was Mrs. Laurance Rockefeller, a charming lady who believed in simplicity. She said she was sorry I had spent so much money on decor. Her feeling was that women came just to buy the hats and they didn’t need all the fancy trappings. Of course, we know this isn’t true. Most women who indulge in high fashion expect all the trimmings.
The international society ladies are the most fashionable, and the rich ones of this group spend the most money on new clothes. Often they beg for the big impact designs from famous designers, fully knowing that the world press will spot them easily and put their name and photograph in print. Around the moneyed international group are the hangers-on: titled ex-royalty with little money, and famous celebrities who finagle deals so that they get all their clothes for nothing. Many designers give these ladies free wardrobes each season to promote the look of the fashion house. You’d be shocked at the number of fashionable society women who are constantly in the columns, yet never pay a cent for the glamorous wardrobes they strut around in. Lesser-known celebrities don’t get the clothes given to them, but often have free access to borrow sensational clothes from top designers for the night.
After observing parties for so many years, I can spot the borrowed fashions. They don’t fit the way a gown that cost thousands should. Often the women themselves find it amusing to tell the press it’s on loan from the designer. Furriers are notorious for this practice, as are the famed jewelers. They all stand on their heads denying it, and frankly it’s too bad that they do it in the first place, as the designer most often gets back a soiled hem and perspiration stains, and hardly ever a customer. What really gets my goat is that fashion houses then sell these same used clothes to cash-paying customers, after the phonies have paraded around in them. This happens mostly with high-fashion trend clothes that rarely sell, and the designer is so eager to have it seen that he lends it, hoping to attract interest. All it really accomplishes is boosting the status of the wearer with her friends, who think she buys every gown.
The best-paying customers are the huge number of wealthy and unsocial. They tend to be slightly conservative, but these ladies form a backbone for a solid business, as their faithful patronage can be counted on year after year. They don’t change designers from season to season, swayed by the press clippings of the current favorite. Besides being loyal, these ladies pay their bills on time. Social climbers are excellent customers for designers who specialize in the current status uniform. You can never sell these women anything the Duchess of Windsor hasn’t already worn. These ladies have no opinions of their own; they merely use fashion to fit in with the accepted look of the old guard. These women are a locked box to a real designer’s imagination.
Like with any business, there are the small groups of lovely, well-mannered customers who make life worth living. Unfortunately, 65 percent of the women buying high fashion act like star-spangled bitches, never satisfied, and full of conniving tricks to get the price as low as possible, demanding the best quality and three times more service. One of the snags of high fashion is that it attracts the most ambitious social climbers: show-offs, snobs, bigots, and egoists. These women consider themselves as “social”—I think of them as miles of phony society fringe. They are the number one snake pit of the high-fashion business. By contrast, the customers who gave me the most pleasure were the out-of-towners, especially the westerners. These women have no ax to grind and indulge in fashion purely for personal expression and the joy it brings their families. The true cream of the crop of New York society are wonderful customers, but they don’t usually indulge in high fashion. They prefer the best fabric and workmanship, with the quietest styling possible.
I have a book full of Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue hot-air artists who have never paid. And are these dames brazen! They almost dare you to get them into court. If I made lists of the names, you’d drop your teeth. I remember one lady, when I first started in business. She came in putting on the dog and belittling Mrs. Nielsen. I would have thrown the lady out, but she came recommended by one of my best clients. After she was done putting on airs, she left the store with four hats. This was in October. The winter and spring passed, and I couldn’t get a nickel out of her. Even the small claims court was unable to make her pay. By midsummer, when there was no business and I was looking for money to eat, I passed by her apartment on Park Avenue and saw the second-floor windows open. I folded my New York Times—as I had done during my newspaper delivering days—attached a note, and threw it in the window. The note said that as a last resort I was going to get help from the woman who recommended her. The lady ran to the window and threatened to call the cops, and I yelled back for her to read the note. As she was a desperate social climber, I evidently hit the nail on the head, and the idea of informing her friend just threw the woman into a tizzy. Within seconds $165 came flying back out through the window. (All this took place at the northeast corner of Park Avenue and Seventy-Ninth Street. How many times I’ve gone past that house since and burst into laughter!)
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SINCE CHILDHOOD, an extra-sensitive sense has unlocked the door to my subconscious at least ten years in advance of everyone else. I’m able to feel and know what will be the general mood of fashion. During my school days, family and friends were always laughing and calling my ideas in fashion “weird,” but sure enough, within seven to ten years, the very people who condemned my thoughts would themselves be parading around in the clothes they had judged. It wasn’t just fashion, but the arts in general, that stimulated my conscious mind, which has total freedom to reach the very depths of my subconscious. Sometimes even I myself am afraid to submit to my subconscious inspiration, for fear of being ridiculous, but no matter how wild or vulgar an idea seems at its conception, within five years someone is sure to come up with it. My suggestion to anyone who is creative is: never hold back.
Designing a fashion collection is like growing antennas that reach high into the unknown and hopefully higher than any other designer’s. It’s a long time growing them till inspiration begins to tickle and outrates that of your competitors. With each new collection my antennas grew longer, starting in 1948, and reaching their highest by 1960. The day after each new hat collection, when the letdown from creating makes the body feel as if it’s been through the wringer, my mind would spring back to life with the first thoughts of searching for inspiration for the next collection. Every designer has, deep inside his personality, his own unmistakable signature; and if the designer is really creative, the doorway between his conscious and subconscious minds swings open and shut at will.
I allowed my designs the greatest luxury of all: total freedom. In 1957, the apple, pear, and vegetable gardens were spreading all over the hats. Huge, lush organza cabbage leaves formed the cloches, while straws were soaked in a basin of water and molded into overgrown apples and oranges. Sailor shapes became platters of leaves and assorted fruits. There wasn’t an inhibition left in my body. I remember one summer doing a special collection of straw hats that had to be soaked in water before I could drape them into the seashell shapes I wanted. The temperature in the shop was near one hundred, so I filled the bathtub with water, put on my bathing suit, and spent the afternoon in the tub shaping the hats. Each time the phone rang or someone came to the door, I’d have to jump out of the tub soaking wet.
By July, the feathers-and-bird inspiration, wh
ich had taken a firm hold on my thoughts two years earlier, now looked like it really hit the fan. Feathers were everywhere. The foremost fashion writer on millinery for Women’s Wear Daily raved that “such inventive use of feathers hadn’t been seen in many a generation, and midway through the collection the large audience was fully aware that it was viewing one of the most creative millinery shows seen in ten years.”
I had a lot of fun doing this show. I took ostrich feathers and stripped the plumes off the quill, then burnt the soft fluffy white in acid, which left just a delicate lace feather, which then was massed over a simple head-hugging shape, casting an aura around the wearer’s head. Whole birds sprang out of draped velvet; red-combed roosters’ heads rested on live-looking bodies with yard-long tails fluttering down the wearer’s back. The birds looked so real that many viewers thought they must be laying an egg! One bit of amusement was a parrot jumping through a velvet hoop, which caused eyebrows to rise and Garry Moore to quip, “Don’t forget to line the bottom of the hatbox!”
During all these collections, many of the country’s big-shot store buyers would come and sit through my shows and never so much as buy a hat to encourage our work. By 1958 I was so mad that I decided to charge a “caution fee,” obligating the professional buyers to buy six hats or pay two hundred dollars for viewing the collection. This was nothing new, as Paris has always protected itself by the pay-first system. Unfortunately, no one in New York had ever followed this practice, and I didn’t get any payers. But I caused lots of hard feelings with the phonies who did the heavy looking-on each season. Unfortunately the idea of the “caution” is antiquated in a field where it’s a buyer’s market.
With the fall collection of 1958, my antennas, which were reaching higher than ever, told me to hide all the hair with deep hats. A Paris designer had just launched the wig, and I felt certain the future of millinery would be only to cover dirty hair. These deep hats were all of fur, and in their most extreme depth covered the eyebrow. Their look was wicked and naughty, an act of real defiance in the face of all the tiny shell hats women had been wearing. Mrs. Nielsen, who knew how to work fur, taught me all the secrets of stretching, cutting, and sewing furs, and the sables and chinchillas we shaped together formed the most exciting hats I’d ever made. I must say they scared the wits out of the conservatives.
Certainly, with this collection my antennas had gone much further than I had anticipated. Most of the buyers, even the venturesome ones, said I had flipped. They felt the proportions were outrageous, and no one would ever wear the look. Well, the season passed, and I sold most of the best fur hats off for five and ten dollars apiece, but with a lot of faith and patience on my part, after four years my 1958 hats were considered high fashion. Thank God I didn’t give a damn about money. I just wanted to create the most trendsetting hats. That same season I designed a few fur accessories to be worn with the hats: round boas of fox and chinchilla, three yards long. And one item that I think was a definite innovation was a fur pillow, where I sewed the furs into a large collar and then stuffed it with feather down. This gave the fur a living appearance, and made the hairs bristle up and snuggle around the wearer’s neck almost as if the animal were alive and breathing.
By 1960, abstract futuristic shapes began to tickle the tips of my antennas, sending them in a new direction. Origami, the centuries-old Japanese art of folding paper, set me off on squares and angles that were clean and free of curly nineteenth-century Romanticism.
By the fall of 1960, my feelers had stretched so high that people who had believed in me from the beginning were starting to feel that I was destined for Bellevue. The inspiration for the collection was Africa. The head shapes of the Zulu, along with the reptiles of Africa, inspired me to do a collection completely of snakeskin and leather hats. All the cobras and pythons were a thrill to sew. The hats were free of stiff foundations, relying on the snakeskin for shape. Monkey furs were lacquered and married to black leather brims. It was a wonderful collection, but unfortunately they were too new, and hardly sold. But three years later, everyone in the fashion world was wearing or making snakeskin hats, coats, suits, and bracelets.
My final collection in 1962 was space helmets, sleek and naked of trimming, just pure shape, molded like the cones of rockets and racing headgear. This collection was speeding into a new era of fashion.
With each season I gave my critics something to talk about, and talk they did. Too bad they didn’t shut their mouths long enough to buy something new and different. Some of my critics eventually apologized for trying to bully me out of my own ideas. Of course, it’s always easier to see the light ten years after the explosion—but that’s fashion: an idea that is elegant at its time is an outrageous disgrace ten years earlier, daring five years before its height, and boring five years later. There’s no set way of becoming a designer except steady hard work, with an eye and a will bordering on pure stubbornness for what you truly believe in. Only the people who are willing to sacrifice the security and comforts of the establishment, and fight for their individual beliefs, cause the developing changes of the world.
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THE YEARS 1956, 1957, and 1958 were excellent for millinery, but I knew there was a very dark cloud on the horizon. The wearing of hats was soon to be unfashionable. In 1954, when I made those first veil hats, I suspected then that hats were on their last legs, as the veils had extraordinary acceptance, although not with the milliners. The stores that bought them couldn’t put them in the millinery department, as the buyers didn’t want them, so they landed in the street-floor neckwear departments. After that season I stopped making the veils because I felt they would ruin the hat business. Like all the milliners, I put my hatted head in the proverbial ostrich hole, trying not to see the coming threat of bareheaded women. This was a mistake. My friend Mrs. Mack was always yelling at me to be a realist and give people what they wanted. At any rate, the milliners wouldn’t make veils. Consequently, by 1960, hats were becoming extinct, and the veiled head was the supreme victor. And a whole new millinery industry was developed by people who knew nothing about hats. This is really one of the most important lessons in fashion: you can’t fight a trend. Designers must give full play to their innermost ideas, no matter how crazy it seems. I knew very well that hats had no future, yet I thought I could fight the trend.
The final blow to milliners came when Givenchy showed wigs on his models in Paris. Their hair was being ruined each time they changed clothes during his shows, and they didn’t have time to redo their hair, so he put wigs on them. All the newspapers reported it as a big joke; no one took it seriously. But I knew that instant that the wig or the coiffured head would replace the hat for the next generation.
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DURING ALL THOSE years I continued my hobby of gate-crashing to observe fashionable women. I was always lurking behind some potted palm, eagle-eyeing the clothes of elegant ladies. I remember one year Givenchy and Balenciaga, who wouldn’t show the press until a month after the buyers, decided to bring their entire collections to New York two months after the showing in Paris. This was really an innovation, but the buyers had, only two months before, spent all their money on a trip to Paris and paid two thousand dollars each to get into these top shows, and now for a hundred dollars a head, anyone in New York could go to the ballroom of the Hotel Ambassador. The plan was to show Givenchy first, and after a champagne intermission, show Balenciaga. I didn’t have the hundred dollars, so I impersonated a waiter, with a towel over my arm, and walked right through the front door, where Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, was handing over her one-hundred-dollar ticket. Once inside, I ditched the towel and watched the inspiring show from behind the huge damask draperies. Givenchy’s show was spilling over with creative ideas, and the Watteau back was his big message. During intermission, my eyes were filled with the dresses of the audience. (At all the parties I’ve crashed, I’ve never once taken anything to eat or drink, or joine
d the guests. Perhaps too heavy a guilty conscience. At any rate, I felt better just being an observer.)
The Balenciaga show was act two of this double-barreled fashion parade, and seeing one after the other, you knew who was the master. Balenciaga’s clothes had depth and interesting cuts that the younger Givenchy was yet to learn. The contrast of real couture and surface ideas was vividly portrayed to me that night. In all my many years of being associated with the finest clothes of the world at Chez Ninon, it was this particular night that brought me understanding—why Balenciaga or Dior reached the top. Three years later I dined with Givenchy on one of his New York visits. I wanted very much to meet him, so I just picked up the telephone and called him at his hotel. He was as warm as a best friend. I told him I wanted to discuss fashion with him, and he invited me to dinner at the Sherry-Netherland hotel, where we talked for two hours. In his broken English and my torn French, we talked about that showing of his in New York; I was amazed at how fully aware he was of all the copying of his designs. He mentioned many prominent Paris designers who had swiped ideas from him. I could have named many of these myself. It’s too bad designers don’t remember the same principle when they themselves use someone else’s formula. Givenchy had often paraded designs that were seen in the show of Balenciaga the year before. But I still feel Givenchy was one of the most creative people in fashion. He told me that night that Norman Norell, then America’s most respected designer, saw both his and Balenciaga’s showing each season. I must say this shocked me, but he produced a telegram he had received from Paris that afternoon telling of the dresses Norell had bought. Givenchy said Norell came two months after the professional buyers, so no one would see him. Of course, later, when I was to go back to Paris as a reporter, I saw just about every name American designer sitting in the front rows of the Paris showings. But Norell, unlike all the other designers who openly copied Paris and brazenly called it their own, claimed only to be interested in the construction, not the obvious effects. That same night Givenchy, the disciple of Balenciaga, said Balenciaga always encouraged him to design what he liked and believed in, and women would feel the honesty and personal message in the clothes, and buy. This is just what I had found out for myself, five years before.
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