Fashion Climbing

by Bill Cunningham

  In big retailing stores, competitors are always raiding the best employees from others—it’s all part of the retailing game. One afternoon when I stopped into Chez Ninon, Molly McAdoo was sending Mrs. Kennedy ideas for designing an evening gown to be made from the exquisite saris Prime Minister Nehru had given Mrs. Kennedy on her trip to India. They were extraordinarily beautiful, but absolutely hell to design into a dress, as the huge gold and brocade designs made them more suitable for wall hangings. We draped them on the models for days trying to figure out an elegant solution. Finally, sketches were made and sent to Mrs. Kennedy. On the spur of the moment I made a few rough sketches that went down to Washington and came back with Jackie’s notes, stating, “Definitely not!”—my ideas were too full of drama. My ego was deflated for days, but soon recovered when Nona and Sophie decided not to make the dress, and advised Mrs. Kennedy against it. We read later that another designer had cut up the saris and made a gown, which Women’s Wear Daily described as looking like it had been made by “loving hands at home”—a reference to shoddy workmanship. Several years later, when I went to interview this same designer, I was astonished to see the remains of the fabulous sari hanging as a window curtain in the designer’s salon. All I could think was, what would Prime Minister Nehru think of the final resting place of his beautiful gift?

  I never officially worked for Nona and Sophie, as my taste and theirs was at opposite ends of the fashion poles. I scarcely ever made hats for them, as they rarely wore them, and Nona thought most of my designs were freaks. The girls had the belief that anything extreme is considered bad taste, although Sophie often found merit in the designs but wanted me to give it all up and go into my uncle’s advertising business. All the years that I had known the girls, our businesses had been miles apart. On rare occasions, I loaned hats for their openings, but seldom did the models wear them. Our association was always more of a private friendship, as our fashion philosophies were in constant conflict. The only thing in common was that we each dressed women.

  The Southampton Shop

  Each year, after the millinery collection opened the first week of July and I had shown the fall collection to the buyers and press, there would be those horrible two months of midsummer when there is absolutely no business. These were always penniless days, and all the money made on the spring hats was spent creating the fall collection. The cost of making a new collection is extraordinary, the labor alone is lost time, as you can only ask a legitimate price for each hat, no matter how long you worked on the original model, which often takes days to develop. On top of the cost of the collection was the cost of a big opening for the press. During the late 1950s when I was really fashion climbing, I had this idea in my head that it had to be a glamorous champagne opening, and of course this would put the shop in the red for about two thousand dollars. So each September we started by paying old debts. My friend Claire Weil, the editor of Hats magazine, was forever telling me it was ridiculous to spend all that money, but I was at the impressionable age and thought a big splash was good for business.

  I can tell you now that it definitely didn’t mean a damn thing for business—as a matter of fact, all it did was attract the freeloaders. The serious press and the busy buyers couldn’t give a damn about the fancy hors d’oeuvres and champagne. They find it time-consuming and annoying. At any rate, the day after the showing, the pocketbook of the shop would be empty. The flowers filling the rooms were dying, and the buyers had bought only a handful of hats that would scarcely bring any profit. In high-fashion wholesale buying, they tend to buy only one or two of a model, and in wholesale you need orders by the dozen to make money.

  Those early summer days without a customer in sight were rather miserable, and even to this day I get the willies when I think of the summer months. I can remember searching the trash baskets along Seventh Avenue for the Times and Tribune so I could read the fashion reports from Europe. I was too proud to tell anyone I didn’t have money, so I would go from day to day wondering where the next meal was coming from. At times like these I moved out of the Automat into Nedick’s, where fifteen cents would buy breakfast and twenty-five cents a hot dog lunch. By the mid-1950s, I got the idea of taking my beach hats that hadn’t sold in New York and going to the customers at the beach resorts. The first year I got on the Long Island Railroad, stopping at resorts in the Hamptons, and I found quite a bit of interest. The second year, Nona and Sophie, who had summer homes in Southampton, a very swanky village, had been asking me to come out and stay with them. While I was there I decided to look for a tiny shop. Nona thought I was mad, as she said my hats were freaks and she couldn’t imagine who would buy them, and besides, she felt Southampton was just a private little family beach. Of course, this was the understatement of the year. Southampton was the watering spot of the New York Social Register.

  But Nona proved to be 100 percent right, as I found out during my summers there. I found a shop that same weekend and rented it on the spot. It hadn’t been taken for the season, so the owner let me have it for the remainder of the summer for a modest two hundred dollars. I borrowed my friends’ tiny station wagon, rushed back to New York, and loaded the car with all the leftover spring and summer hats, and, of course, my wild beach hats. I also packed a few workroom supplies, so I could design in my spare time. Worktables, mirrors, hatboxes, the whole works, were piled on top of the little car, which nearly collapsed under the bulging load. Ostrich feathers were hanging out the windows. My bed was tied to the roof—as I was determined to sleep in the back of the shop—and Ollie, my large black beatnik French poodle, had to sit on the floor under the brakes and gas pedal, as there wasn’t an inch of space. It was to be the first time I had been away in five years, and the thought of escaping the penniless summer in New York filled me with renewed strength. I can still smell the fresh-cut grass as we drove through the farms and villages of Long Island. I didn’t have a care in the world.

  On arriving in Southampton, the lady who owned the shop next to the place I had rented couldn’t believe her eyes when the car stopped in front of her shop. She thought some refugee fleeing Greenwich Village had just broken down. Within a few hours, the shop was set up for business. Once all the whimsical beach hats filled the display window and I had hung a wonderful art nouveau sign of purple panne velvet with shocking-pink letters spelling “William J,” my hastily arranged shop was opened.

  For the first day, no customers came in. People gawked at the window as if they didn’t believe it. Occasionally someone would ask if it was a costume shop, and when I tried to convince them that it was a legitimate hat shop, their eyes almost fell out of their heads. I suppose it was the hats in the shapes of fish and vegetables, and one huge octopus hat, that scared the hell out of everyone. Southampton might be the most conservative fashion resort in America. At the time, they never thought of anything as being a hat except for the beret, which I’ve always hated with a vengeance. I’d never make the darned things, even if it killed me. I felt they weren’t fashion, and besides Woolworth’s carried them for $1.98. At any rate, I lived with my aesthetic values, and it was eighteen days before anyone came in and bought a hat.

  The first woman with the daring to come in was an elderly matron who drove up in a chauffeured car. I thought she’d have a heart attack when she saw the hats. Instead, she loved them, and said she hadn’t seen such wonderful, imaginative hats since the days of the famous New York designer Herman Patrick Tappé, one of the most talented and fascinating designers around the time of the First World War. The lady turned out to be a Miss Ruth Woodward, a millionairess who lived at the Irving Hotel, Southampton’s equivalent to the Plaza. It was a rocking chair hotel for pampered dowagers. Sometime I’d like to do a marvelous picture book on all the distinguished dowagers in their dog collars and elegant but passé fashions, rocking themselves on the veranda.

  Each summer the reigning dowagers of Southampton would tell me about the fascinating Mr. Tappé. Besides being a truly original designe
r, he possessed a sense of showmanship and flair that made him the gossip of every fashionable salon of New York. His costume parties were notorious soirées. He went through a half dozen fortunes, indulging in luxuries. One time he married the mistress of one of New York’s wealthiest telegraph tycoons. The gossip had it that the gent paid Mr. Tappé $100,000 to relieve him of his romantic duties. Once, an august dowager who had financed Mr. Tappé was miffed because he had spent a huge sum of her money on a group of glass elephants, which was to have been used on dress materials from Paris. At any rate, the lady, while sitting in her box at the opera one night, saw Mr. Tappé sitting below in the orchestra. When the lights went on at intermission she leaned over the red plush balustrade, her pearls and diamonds spilling over the nude cupids that festooned the box, and hollered down: “You’re a thief, Mr. Tappé!” With that, Tappé, who was a handsome six-footer, always fabulously dressed in swirling black capes and carrying a gold-handled walking stick, looked up at the box and, in the most triumphant voice, said, “Madam, you’ve made a mistake, I’m not Mr. Tappé.” With that he strutted to the opera bar and toasted the lady’s health and wealth in champagne.

  Tappé’s admirer, Miss Woodward, bought six hats right off the bat on her visit to my shop and paid me in cash. She said she’d be back the next day with friends. I was absolutely delighted with joy, as I’d run out of money four days before. As soon as the lady had left the shop, I locked the door and dashed to the nearest restaurant, where I proceeded to stuff my shrunken stomach. I could have gone to the beautiful summer home of Mrs. Park, where the best French cook was always preparing delicious meals, but I was full of that damned false pride and didn’t want to admit to Nona that I hadn’t sold any hats. Sure enough, the next day Miss Woodward arrived with two more elderly dowagers, both pillars of Southampton society. The ladies were a Mrs. Preston and a Mrs. Fox. They were both much more conservative than Miss Woodward but absolutely darling and bought about six hats between them. Unfortunately, they loved berets, and I must say it wasn’t soon after their visit that I indulged in the foundation of the millinery world—making berets. And I think when I stopped fighting it all, my troubles ended. Anyone who is interested in millinery, for God’s sake, make berets—you will never have to worry about eating—they’re the equivalent of the basic black suit or dress.

  Mrs. Preston and Mrs. Fox knew everyone in Southampton, and they sent all their friends into my shop. At last, I was established, but it was with the dowagers, and not the young fun people for whom I was interested in designing. At any rate, I was paying my bills and was now designing winter hats for the ladies. The darling dowagers from the hotel had told me that Bergdorf’s came once a year and put on a big millinery show, doing jaw-dropping business, so I dashed into the city and bought out all the fall materials. The velvet and feathers were flying around in the ninety-degree heat of Southampton.

  There is a wonderful business opportunity if a designer can gear himself to the conservative rich. But all those imaginative crazy beach hats that I loved so much just rested on their hat stands, causing lots of laughter but no sales. The younger people seemed to be afraid of imagination. Their conservative upbringing kept them from enjoying creative fashion, especially in Southampton, where it was considered chic to look like the maid. Well, this was just the opposite of what I believed in, and I soon found my most exciting customers came from the surrounding communities. They wore the wild beach hats over their pink pants and brilliant printed Pucci blouses. The other group that admired my chicest and most amusing beach hats were the weekend international society, who visited the old guard residents. These ladies gave Southampton its glamour. Their parties were elaborate costume affairs, or elegant dinners, where long Paris gowns were worn.

  On weekends, the famed artist Larry Rivers would appear in the shop with his lady friends. He had bought an old leghorn hat, with a dented brim and crown, right off my head—my dog had often slept on it, giving it a well-used effect. This was the quality the artist loved. He wore it for years, and his friends had been begging him to give them his hat, but no doing; Larry wouldn’t give it up. So I would have my dog sleeping on leghorn hats all week, getting them fashionably out of shape for his girlfriends. Sometimes Larry would take a paintbrush and sign his name inside the hat so the girls would feel authentic.

  For me, Southampton was a wonderful, let-your-hair-down place. Weekends were a hoot. These summers were the time when I succeeded in showing people how to enjoy fashion. The shop must still be vibrating from the howls of laughter. By the end of the first summer, I had paid back all my debts, and the new customers were following me back to the city.

  The next summer I rented the same shop at the going price of one thousand dollars for the season. The long-dreaded summer months were now full of excitement. The shop was the talk of Southampton. Many people thought it was a disgrace. The year-round residents were amused, as if they were at a circus, and the old guard at the restricted beach club on one occasion sent three arrogant ladies to tell me my shop and its vulgar, uninhibited designs were the cause of an influx of prostitutes. I was absolutely astonished, and nearly died laughing. What a reputation! Oh well, what did I care? I was paying the rent, and lots of people enjoyed my designs—but I’m sure it wasn’t my hats that brought the influx of the ladies of the night.

  The shop was a stage, with one funny episode after another. The customers were on vacation and wanted a laugh, a sense of freedom. I always wore the most outrageous hats around the shop, and often out around the village. On dull days, a young lady who took care of the shop while I was in the city would dress as a beatnik, and I, unshaven for a week, wearing the dustiest clothes I could find, would sit on the shop floor reading poetry, to the astonishment of the sightseers. It really was good for business, as people came in and they usually bought something. One time a rather prim-looking tourist stuck her head in the door and asked what we sold. I yelled out, “Marijuana!” and invited her in for a jab of the needle. The woman fled the shop, and a few minutes later showed up with the local police, whom I knew very well, and who knew I was playing pranks on the tourists—whom, incidentally, they couldn’t stand. Their automobiles were always blocking up the village streets as herds of the city sightseers made their summer pilgrimage to Southampton so they could rub shoulders with the swells, whom they rarely saw, as the famous inhabitants remained concealed behind the twelve-foot privet hedges that hid all of chic Southampton.

  I was always giving advice to the unhappy social climbers who were trying to crash Southampton society. One day a couple of these ladies were in my shop trying to find out which hats the local swells had bought—I guess they wanted the same status. The two girls were crying up a storm over how dull life was—it seems they hadn’t been invited to any of the parties. I advised them to go back where they had friends, and to stop trying to crash society. I must say, though, the climbers sure bought a lot of hats. I was always giving them a big song and dance about how many famous people had the hats I was selling, but of course they didn’t, as these famous people never wore hats.

  Lots of the gay boys from neighboring communities were my best customers, always buying fancy hats for parties. At first they would say they wanted a hat for their sister. Of course, I knew damned well they wanted them for themselves, so I’d tell them to try them on, as they could better tell how it would look on their sisters. I always felt it was none of my business who buys what for whom—it was more important to humor people and make them feel good. Everyone seemed to enjoy coming into the shop. Lots of people just came in and sat down to laugh. I went out of my way to make everyone feel wanted and at home. Sometimes they bought, and sometimes they just took up my time, but usually they came back. The great trouble with private shops is this feeling of unfriendliness that freezes customers out. Unless the salesgirls know who is coming through the door, they usually give the stranger the unwelcome eye. I let customers browse around without breathing down their backs. I’ve always felt th
is is why department stores are so popular, as it allows freedom to look around without being belittled by some snobbish saleslady.

  One Saturday afternoon the Gabor sisters came in with their mother. They wanted something simple for Mama, as she was invited to be a guest at the restricted beach club, and they wanted Mama not to “stick out.” Well, one look at Mama and I knew darned well she was going to stick out like a Folies Bergère girl! Mama already had on gold wedgie shoes, shocking-pink pants, a screaming print blouse, and a turquoise chiffon scarf around her waist, plus lots of family jewels. Magda said she wanted Mama to fit in with the other ladies, so I promptly told her to go home and exchange clothes with the maid. The answer was, “None of your nonsense, William, just make Mama a nice simple hat.” All I could think of was, how could a nice simple straw hat quiet this explosion? After much haggling over an untrimmed straw hat, Mama and the girls left the shop. They got outside, looked in the reflection of the shop window, turned around, came back in, and asked for a little trimming—it seems the hat was too naked for Mama’s taste. We ended up with a big ribbon bow on the hat, and I never did find out if her conquest succeeded in a return invitation to the beach club. But I remember it took me two months to collect the ten dollars, after all the fuss.