by Brenda Polan
In the late 1940s and through the 1950s McCardell’s name, propagated by the doyenne of publicists, Eleanor Lambert, dominated American fashion. She died of cancer in 1958
Further reading: Claire McCardell; Redefining Modernism (1998), by Kohle Yohannan and Nancy Nolf, is comprehensive, and Richard Martin’s American Ingenuity: Sportswear 1930s–1970s, the catalogue to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1998 exhibition, is excellent for context and detailed illustration.
19 HUBERT DE GIVENCHY (1927–)
The first ‘Little Black Dress’ (LBD) was probably Chanel’s; when she introduced it in 1926, Vogue compared it to the Model T Ford (which you could famously get in any colour as long as it was black) and predicted that it would ‘become the sort of uniform for women of taste’. Balenciaga focused on it, refined it, sculpted it to become the byword for chic and social comfort that it is. But the iconic LBD is, without a doubt, Givenchy’s. It is the one Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The conundrum for fashion writers is whether Hepburn recognised Givenchy’s wonderfully well-bred, modern and unfussy style as a major force in fashion and wisely used it to cement her own image or whether the fact that a generation of women made her their role model precipitated her couturier and friend to an essentially unearned stardom. Certainly Hepburn’s gamine look and breastless, hipless body was the one young women in the late 1950s and 1960s craved for their own. And certainly many critics of fashion have argued that Givenchy was no innovator. But, as Caroline Rennolds Milbank wrote in 1985,
The originality is there, but always under complete control; never could one of his dresses or ensembles be termed loud, overbearing or offensive. For over 30 years, Givenchy, the perfect gentleman, has dressed a clientele ranging in age from debutante to dowager in a style that has been young and mock-elegant, pure and sculptural, refreshingly ladylike as well as addictive. His clients are women for whom elegance is not an end in itself, but merely the way they do everything. For them, Givenchy is a last bastion of quality.
The clue, in a way, lies in the word, clientele. Although he created a ready-to-wear line in 1968, Givenchy was essentially a couturier, truly focused on making couture clothes for real (rich) women. While sacrificing nothing of quality or refinement (he is a demanding perfectionist to his fingertips), he modernised their wardrobe, introducing separates in 1955 and, a little later, easy-care synthetics such as Orlon. He thought of it as a youthful update of a classic way of dressing. Unlike some other couturiers working at this time, he allowed for the modern woman’s busy, multifaceted, working life; his easy dresses, suits and coats were adored by women such as the Duchess of Windsor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, Princess Grace of Monaco, Gloria Guinness, Bunny Mellon and Capucine. When the assassinated President John F. Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in 1963, all the Kennedy women were wearing Givenchy, their mourning black flown in specially from Paris. It is said that at that time the Givenchy atelier possessed individual pattern sheets for every female member of the Kennedy family. In many ways Hubert de Givenchy, the discreet aristocrat, was nearer to the great events of a wider world than any other fashion designer before or since.
He is an immensely cultivated man, comfortable at the highest levels of any society, an expert on art, furniture, architecture and, perhaps his greatest passion, gardens, of which he has made many—including leading the restoration of the kitchen garden at Versailles. He is a man of great integrity, incapable of a self-aggrandising cheap trick of any sort. ‘I persist,’ he said, ‘in not understanding flashy elaborations whose sole purpose, in my opinion, is to shock.’ He has always been dismissive of mere notoriety, mere success, saying, ‘For those concerned about quality, prestige is what counts. Success is not prestige; prestige alone is what endures after you’ve gone.’
The relationship with Hepburn was at the centre of his professional life. Theirs was a stylistic partnership made in heaven. In 1953 she had been cast in her second major film, Sabrina, with William Holden and Humphrey Bogart, and the director, Billy Wilder, sent her to Paris to pick up some chic clothes appropriate for the transformed chauffeur’s daughter. Hepburn’s first choice had been Balenciaga, but he was too busy preparing his collection and could not see her. Givenchy was her second choice. He assumed the actress coming to choose clothes for a film was Katharine Hepburn. He hid his disappointment. He too was in the throes of creating a collection and unable to design anything specifically for her. Undeterred, Hepburn rummaged through previous collections hanging in the workroom and found the pieces she wanted. The Paramount costume designer Edith Head was credited with them on the film, and at the premiere an embarrassed Hepburn promised Givenchy she would make it up to him. She did—by wearing his clothes in her private life from then on and insisting that only he could design her wardrobe for Funny Face (1957), Love in the Afternoon (1957), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Charade (1963), Paris When It Sizzles (1964) and How to Steal a Million (1966). ‘His are the only clothes in which I am myself,’ she said in 1956. ‘He is far more than a couturier, he is a creator of personality.’
The two earliest films in which she wore Givenchy focus on the transformative power of clothes and were a gift to a couturier. ‘In film after film,’ wrote Givenchy in 1998, ‘Audrey wore clothes with such talent and flair that she created a style, which in turn had a major impact on fashion. Her chic, her youth, her bearing and her silhouette grew ever more celebrated, enveloping me in a kind of aura or radiance that I could never have hoped for.’
Hubert James Taffin de Givenchy was born in 1927 in Beauvais, the younger son of the Marquis de Givenchy, who died of influenza in 1930. Hubert and his older brother, Jean-Claude, were brought up by their mother, Béatrice, and her mother, the widow of the artist, Jules Badin, who had studied with Corot and was artistic director of the historic Gobelin and Beauvais tapestry factories. In fact, Hubert de Givenchy’s maternal ancestors were a creative dynasty, involved in designing for the Beauvais factory and for the theatre. His grandmother cultivated his early taste for beautiful things. ‘When I was a schoolboy,’ Givenchy wrote in The Givenchy Style in 1998, ‘my grandmother rewarded me for good grades by showing her treasures—whole cabinets filled with every kind of fabric, all of which left me utterly dazzled. Could I have sensed that one day fabrics in the hundreds and thousands of metres would pass through my hands?
‘During those many years of couture collections, there were always fabrics which I liked more than others. The allure, the odour of silk, the feel of a velvet, the crackle of a “duchess” satin—what intoxication! How truly wonderful! The colours, the sheen of a faille, the iridescent side of a shot taffeta, the strength of a brocade, the caress of a velvet panel—what bliss! What extraordinary sensuality!’ Throughout his career, Givenchy remained enchanted by fabric; he often worked closely with the textile factories to create unique textures, colours and effects.
At ten years old, he was taken to visit the Pavillon d’Elégance at the 1937 Paris Exposition, and he decided that he wanted to work in fashion. He attended college in Beauvais and moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux Arts. He desperately wanted to train in the atelier of his great hero, Cristobal Balenciaga, but it was not to be. The seventeen-year-old’s approaches were rebuffed, and it was to be many years before they met. In 1944, thanks to family contacts, Givenchy got a job with Jacques Fath, working at the couture house—a convivial place peopled by giggling mannequins and the generosity of spirit of Jacques and Genevieve Fath—in the mornings and going to class in the afternoons. On the recommendation of Christian Bérard he left Fath in 1946 to take a job with Robert Piguet, an altogether more sober establishment, leaving after a year to join Lucien Lelong. His stay at Lelong was even shorter, a mere six months before, on the recommendation of René Caron, he moved on to a covetable post as first assistant to Elsa Schiaparelli and director of her place Vendôme boutique. There he designed bright separates—often using up pre-war surrealis
t prints—that were much admired by Schiaparelli’s urban sophisticates. By anyone’s standards, it was a meteoric progress.
In 1952, at just twenty-five years old, Givenchy opened his own design house near the Parc Monceau in Paris. He named his well-received first collection, shown on plaster mannequins because live ones were too expensive, after Bettina Graziani, Paris’s top model who was handling his publicity. The collection was made chiefly in inexpensive white cotton shirting fabric and featured the Bettina blouse with bell-like bishop sleeves ruffled in white and black broderie anglaise. It was very widely copied (and even had a twenty-first century reprise) and established his name in America as well as Europe. He teamed it with a narrow, nutmeg-coloured skirt or a wide, black dirndl and flat shoes, sometimes woven from straw. Dior still dominated Paris couture and Givenchy was seen as the young challenger, his style marked by the insouciance of the simple fabrics and a youthful cleanliness of line that was to become his signature. ‘I’ve dreamt,’ he said, ‘of a liberated woman who will no longer be swathed in fabric, armour-plated. All my lines are styles for quick and fluid movement. My dresses are real dresses, ultra-light, free of padding and corseting, garments that will float on a body delivered from bondage.’ The boutique that he quickly opened on the ground floor of his building was inspired by his time at Schiaparelli and allowed his clients to mix and match his easy separates in a truly innovative way.
In 1953, in New York at a party, he finally met Balenciaga, an encounter that was to lead to a long friendship and have a lasting effect on Givenchy’s life and work. ‘By then my house had already been established,’ he wrote. ‘Nevertheless, that first encounter with M. Balenciaga, a man I had admired since my youth, left me in a state of shock. His influence on my work was immense, and yet I realised I still had everything to learn. I had to acknowledge that, fundamentally, I knew very little about my profession.’ He could not go back to apprentice himself, but Balenciaga did take on the role of teacher, allowing Givenchy to preview his own collections. ‘He taught me it isn’t necessary to put a button where it doesn’t belong, or to add a flower to make a dress beautiful. It is beautiful of itself,’ said Givenchy. The two most important principles imparted by Balenciaga and adhered to all of Givenchy’s career were, ‘Never cheat’ and ‘Never work against the fabric, which has a life of its own’.
Gradually, the acolyte and the mentor became linked in the minds of press and public. In 1956 they both banned the press from their shows until after the buyers had placed their orders unaffected by the opinion of any fashion editor. As a result their clothes would be reviewed, together, a month later. As Givenchy’s style matured it fell into step with Balenciaga’s, growing ever simpler and more sculptural. Both designers introduced the chemise or sack dress in 1955 and the sheath in 1957. Where Givenchy departed from Balenciaga was in his love of colour—buttercup yellow, electric blue, peppery red, singing purples and pinks. There is often, too, in his work, a sweet, flirtatious playfulness, something of which Balenciaga was never accused. Givenchy introduced the ‘baby doll’ look in 1958, collarless jackets, asymmetric dresses and, in 1967, light-hearted shorts ensembles, his riposte to the vulgarity of the micro-mini.
When Balenciaga retired in 1968 he sent most of his clients across the road to Givenchy. In that same year, as the youthquake eclipsed couture, the ready-to-wear line, Givenchy Nouvelle Boutique, was launched, perfectly catching the mood of the times with leopard-print trouser suits and denim pieces top-stitched in orange.
In 1981, while remaining in creative control, Givenchy sold his fashion house to the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessey group. Showered with many awards at home and abroad, Givenchy was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1983. In 1991 the Musée Galliera de la Mode et du Costume mounted a huge retrospective exhibition entitled Forty Years of Creation. He retired at the end of 1995 (but remained active as chairman of the World Monuments Fund for France and president of Christie’s France) and a series of high-profile young designers has kept the house in the headlines.
Further reading: The Givenchy Style (1998) by Francoise Mohrt has a charming introduction by Hubert de Givenchy.
20 PIERRE CARDIN (1922–)
Asked in 2006 to define himself in one word, Pierre Cardin replied, ‘as a sculptor.’ Although coming from a fashion designer that might sound hubristic, there is justice in his claim. His style, which we call futuristic because so much of it seems inspired by 1950s modernism, by the romance of the space race and by images from sci-fi pulp magazines, was in fact the consequence of applying a bold abstractionism to the human body. Three-dimensional, plastic, his designs have always had a sculptural quality, a clean profile, occasionally a sense of monumentality and a hierarchical presence. He gave the world the bubble dress, the cocoon coat, the trapezoidal cut, enormous circular collars and sharp-edged asymmetric cuts that, along with materials like vinyl, Perspex and mouldable ‘Cardine’, proclaimed themselves the high-tech future. Long before he became the first designer to identify China as an emerging market, his design handwriting owed something to Chinese theatre and traditional dress in its love of geometry, illusion and drama.
The adjective most frequently applied to this designer, mega-entrepreneur and French academician, however, is egotistical. The clothes—witty, insouciant, very sexy—deceive you into expecting a sense of humour. The designer who, to celebrate his Chinese coup, gave his men’s suits flicked-up ‘pagoda’ shoulders would surely be a giggle, but in person any levity is hard to find. In an interview he does not wait for the questions but leads with the assertion that his is the biggest fashion name of all time, circling back to that statement repeatedly to make sure one hasn’t missed the point. Brenda Polan, who has interviewed him twice at length, is not the only journalist to be disappointed by his querulous demands for acknowledgement.
‘I am a self-made man,’ he told her in 1989. ‘I was the youngest man in fashion in the world, the youngest to have a great, great success. In the beginning people thought I was eccentric. It was hard. From 1950 to 1958 I had to persevere. I needed great confidence. The difference between then and now is that success then came because you were creative, now it is because you are commercial. I was both. I was two personalities—something very unusual in fashion.’
‘Cardin is hugely unreliable,’ wrote Richard Morais in 1991. ‘Cardin is a flake. A man who couldn’t manage his way across a room let alone run a multinational corporation. And yet Cardin is a phenomenal success.’ Allegedly, Cardin still does the company accounts himself in school exercise books and while guesstimates of what the business (composed of twenty-four separate companies, including Maxim’s de Paris) is worth are in the billions of euros, no one knows for sure. And although he has talked of selling the business and encourages rumours of impending retirement, he is still working.
In the 1989 interview with Polan, he said, ‘Fashion is my first love and last pleasure. In my theatre, in my restaurant, my hotel, I have a team but in fashion I do everything from A to Z. It is the reason I continue so strongly. I do not want to disappoint. I must get the headlines, project the name for the stores, the customers who buy my clothes. Remember, my first show was in 1950. It’s very hard to stay so long on the front page. I am like a railway engine driver; all the wagons follow me.’ He has been a great innovator and moderniser in so many ways and on so many levels, a powerful influence on the course of fashion and its global dissemination in the twentieth century.
In October 2008, at a sprightly eighty-six, he presented his dual-season 2009 collection at the Palais Bulles, his huge Cote d’Azur home and many-roomed homage to the curve, the circle, the bubble and the sphere—which is what the collection was all about, too. This was generously ignored by the fashion press; while still demonstrating some of his masterly skill with structure, it was nevertheless a debased and vitiated version of the vision that made him, in Francois Boudot’s words, ‘doyen of a new wave of fashion that straddled the world of the past and that of the fu
ture’ and in Ernestine Carter’s, ‘less a couturier than an explosion of talent’.
And that talent is as much about commercial opportunities as it is about design creativity. Cardin was one of the epoch-defining designers of the 1960s. Together with Courrèges and Saint Laurent, he gave young women a wardrobe that was a generational chasm away from their mothers’. But it is as the king of the licensers (one estimate in 2005 was that he held 900 licences worldwide) that he has shaped contemporary fashion, fostering that first marriage of big-name designer and mass-market sales that is now a dominant force.
Pierre Cardin was born in 1922 into a once affluent farming family whose acres north of Venice were devastated by some of the bloodiest battles of the First World War. Pietro-Costante was the youngest of the eleven children of Alessandro and Maria Cardin who escaped economic disaster and Mussolini’s blackshirts by moving to France in 1924, where workers for a slowly reviving industry were in short supply. Growing up in Saint-Etienne, a coal-mining town in central France, Cardin, the immigrant, was bullied and, he told his biographer, Richard Morais, dreamed of revenge. In 1930, when Cardin was eight, a school inspector asked his class what they wanted to become. Without hesitation, the young Pierre announced, ‘A couturier.’ He was already making clothes for a collection of dolls.
At fourteen he became apprenticed to the best tailor in Saint-Etienne, Chez Bompuis, and began to learn to cut and sew. From a sallow, shy adolescent he blossomed into a beautiful young man, joining a gym and an amateur dramatics company—the start of a lifelong love affair with the theatre. In 1940, as France was overrun by the Nazis and Saint-Etienne became part of the client state of Vichy, Pierre Cardin seized his fate in his hands and decamped for Paris. His parents were alarmed but, recalled Cardin, ‘They knew I was driven by an irresistible call.’