by Brenda Polan
So he tied a cardboard case to his bicycle and set off to pedal the 480 kilometres along the Route Nationale 7, which was choked with refugees. Arrested and robbed by the German occupiers, Cardin diverted to the nearest town, Vichy, a glamorous, expensive spa and now bustling capital of unoccupied France. On the strength of his sewing skills he secured a job at Manby, the best store in town. In 1943, however, he was called up for compulsory labour in German factories. He initially went on the run, living rough, then evaded deportation by creating a wound in his leg that exempted him; he was nevertheless sent to do secretarial work at the French Red Cross in Vichy. At nights he studied accountancy and made clothes for his female co-workers and friends. As the war ended, Cardin finally headed for Paris, equipped with an introduction at the couture house of Paquin.
Jeanne Paquin had founded her couture house in 1891 on her husband’s money and was the first couturière to achieve international fame. Her contribution to the death of the corset and rise of more supple clothes was considerable. By the time Cardin joined the house as first tailor she was widowed and retired, and Spaniard Antonio del Castillo was the head designer. Only six months later, Christian Bérard and Marcel Escoffier, working on the costumes for Jean Cocteau’s film, La Belle at la Bete (Beauty and the Beast), erupted into Paquin’s workshop to make up their designs and, in the absence of Jean Marais, the film’s star, chose to fit his Beast costumes on Pierre Cardin. ‘I was so overjoyed,’ said the stage-struck Cardin, ‘I used to dream about it at night.’ His enthusiasm was such that the production team co-opted him for his cutting and stitching skills. His biographer has noted that in later years Cardin has rewritten history to claim he designed the costumes; he did not, but his small part in the making of Cocteau’s cult film introduced him to the intellectual demi-monde and inspired an insatiable ambition to succeed in the arts as well as couture.
It also got him an introduction to Schiaparelli, whose place Vendome boutique he joined in 1946 as a cutter. He lasted two months before joining Escoffier as his assistant at the Comédie-Française, a post which quickly led to a meeting with Christian Dior, who was then engaged in putting together his own couture house. Cardin designed, cut and made a coat and suit for Dior and was offered the job of head of the coat and suit studio. He was one of the original team of forty-seven who created Dior’s retrospectively feminine Carolle Line and with it, the New Look.
In 1948 there was evidence that Dior sketches were being leaked to an unprincipled mass manufacturer. The police were called and Cardin was questioned at length in front of colleagues. Eventually, someone from another studio was prosecuted, but Cardin was gravely offended. He resigned to start his own business making theatre costumes in partnership with Marcel Escoffier. Christian Dior, ever generous, would also send to him clients who needed extravagant outfits for costume balls. At about this time, Cardin met the young man, André Oliver, who was to become his life partner and design collaborator.
When Pierre Cardin finally launched his haute couture label in 1953 his work attracted respect but no fashion hysteria. The following year was different, however. He launched his ‘bubble dress,’ which was a worldwide success, and opened his two boutiques, Eve and Adam. The Eve boutique was in effect the first germ of designer ready-to-wear. Cardin realised quite quickly that there was more money to be made from manufacturing and distributing simpler, cheaper ‘copies’ of his own designs than there ever was from ‘selling’ a couture toile for a modest $250 to $500 to a manufacturer. There was, he then realised, even more money to be made from licensing the design and taking a cut on every copy made and sold. The godfather of logo-mania, Cardin was the first designer to license his name unashamedly, and the first to put clothes bearing his name in a department store—both of which are the standard practice today.
After the 1959 launch of a prêt-à-porter boutique in Au Printemps on the boulevard Haussmann, Cardin was expelled from the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, the strict governing body of Parisian couturiers. Unrepentant, he secured the first licence deal for men’s shirts and ties, moving on to children’s clothing and then in 1968 to his first non-fashion licence for porcelain, thus birthing the age of fashion designer–endorsed lifestyle goods. ‘Recently,’ he told Polan in 1989, ‘The Chambre has invited me back as president. I turned them down because I am too busy.’
In the 1970s, Cardin fulfilled a dearly held dream, and on the avenue Gabriel, he opened L’Espace Cardin comprising a theatre, cinema, gallery, exhibition hall and restaurant, his ‘cultural cosmos’. In 1977 he opened his Evolution Gallery and presented his first haute couture furniture collection, entitled Utilitarian Sculptures. He also opened a Maxim’s boutique in his Faubourg Saint-Honoré building, an association which was to lead in 1981 to his acquiring the whole Maxim brand and business.
In 1979 he became the first Western fashion designer to show in China, knocking a chip in its long isolation and opening the door to today’s powerhouse Asian market. Hard on the heels of the first whiff of perestroika, he was also the first designer to open a boutique in Russia. His vision of good design for the masses has proved inexorable. ‘Why should I work only for rich people,’ Cardin said when interviewed in 1983 for The Guardian by Brenda Polan. ‘Why should only rich people have access to certain places, certain things? Everyone is entitled to have the best that they want to afford. I want to work for people in the street.’
Cardin’s 900 or so licences—conservatively reckoned to be worth 1 million euros a week—encompass most product groups. If he uses something, he wants to put his name on it. ‘Everything is Pierre Cardin, absolutely everything,’ he said, referring to his home in Paris and the Palais Bulles. ‘I can wake in the morning in my Pierre Cardin bed linen and shave with one of my razors, use my own aftershave and dress in Pierre Cardin from my tie to my pants to my shirt. Then I can go to my Pierre Cardin restaurant—Maxim’s de Paris—or go to my Pierre Cardin theatre.’
Further reading: Pierre Cardin: The Man Who Became a Label (1991), by Richard Morais, is an excellent biography and cultural and character analysis. Pierre Cardin: Past, Present, Future (1990), by Valerie Mendes, is stronger on the fashion.
21 MARY QUANT (1934–)
Caught in the middle of the contest over who invented the miniskirt, Mary Quant has always been pretty phlegmatic in the face of competing cross-Channel claims from Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges, saying dismissively, ‘It was the girls on the King’s Road who invented the mini. I was making easy, youthful, simple clothes in which you could move, in which you could run and jump and we would make them the length the customer wanted. I wore them very short and the customers would say, “Shorter, shorter.” ‘
Mary Quant did not train as a designer. She is the daughter of Welsh teachers who both came from mining families and who had, via scholarships to grammar school and Cardiff University (where they both got first-class degrees), travelled to London and into the middle class. Mary was born in Blackheath and in 1950, at age 16, won a scholarship at Goldsmith’s College of Art to study for an art teacher’s diploma. To please her parents, who would rather she had gone to university, she worked hard during the day and, with the fellow student who became her husband and partner, Alexander Plunket Greene, she would play hard at night. ‘We were excited to be grown up and in London and at art school,’ Greene told Brenda Polan in 1982, ‘but it was a dreary city, really, for poor students. Restaurants were either expensive or they were unattractive places selling egg and chips or meat and two veg. The pubs sold warm booze and no food. There was nowhere for young people to go except the cinema or a jazz club.’ The couple ricocheted between very expensive restaurants like Quaglino’s when Greene’s allowance arrived and seedy Chelsea pubs and smoky jazz cellars when it had run out.
But they were on the cusp of a historic social change. Quant failed her course (well, she never did want to be an art teacher) and, longing to leave home, got a job with Erik, the milliner in Brook Street, while Greene worked
as ‘a sort of photographer on the King’s Road’. Quant made her own clothes because she had no money to buy any, and they were becoming ‘rather odd … I was beginning to get more daring in the invention of my own clothes. People used to look at us wherever we went. They would laugh at us and sometimes shout after us, “God, this Modern Youth!” Their base was the King’s Road, where they were founder members of what was to become known as the ‘Chelsea Set’, a loose circle of ‘painters, photographers, architects, writers, socialites, actors, con-men and superior tarts. There were racing drivers, gamblers, TV producers and advertising men.’ The creative and louche characters, in fact, who were to people the swinging sixties.
On the wings of an economic boom, the fully employed, salaried young were in a position to challenge what they called ‘The Establishment’—its social stratification, values, morals and hypocrisies. That same boom created a new media, writers, photographers, publishers who took a more conceptual, contextual and political approach to fashion coverage and readily identified with a new generation of designers whose clothes were youthful, imaginative, challenging and modern. They celebrated, too, the egalitarian attitude of this new fashion generation, which valued availability over exclusivity. It is difficult to claim that the 1960s were not elitist; it was just a different elite—what those in it liked to call a meritocracy. Jocelyn Stevens, publisher of the iconoclastic Queen magazine and later rector of the Royal College of Art, wrote in 1966, ‘All sort of completely accepted attitudes were proven wrong … we lashed out at everything with a vengeance. All the household gods were attacked … It was the most marvellous time to start everything.’
It was Clare Rendlesham, fashion editor of Queen magazine, who in 1965, on a black-bordered page, announced the demise of Parisian couture and ran a premature obituary of Balenciaga and his disciple, Givenchy. In the Weekend Telegraph magazine the story was followed up with a photo essay by William Klein entitled, ‘Is Paris Dead?’ and featuring clothes by Cardin, Dior, Lanvin and Ungaro. Klein answered his own question by declaring, ‘No! Paris is jumping!’ but, in fact, Paris was jumping to keep up. That year Emanuelle Khanh, a member of the new wave of young French designers working in upmarket ready-to-wear, insisted, ‘Haute couture is dead.’ She would, she said ‘design for the street … a socialist kind of fashion for the grand mass.’
It was a pivotal moment in fashion, when it became obvious to all that the future could not really be resisted. But it was a change a decade in the making, its seeds sown when Mary Quant was finally able to indulge her long suppressed desire to work in fashion. In 1955, together with ex-solicitor and entrepreneur, Archie McNair, Mary and Alexander opened a boutique on the King’s Road that, she wrote in her autobiography, ‘was to be a bouillabaisse of clothes, accessories … sweaters, scarves, shifts, hats, jewellery and peculiar odds and ends. We would call it Bazaar. I was to be the buyer. Alexander inherited £5,000 on his twenty-first birthday and Archie was prepared to put up £5,000 too.’ In the basement Alexander opened a restaurant.
It was something she ‘desperately wanted to do,’ but their inexperience nearly finished them off in the first weeks as they undercharged for the clothes and constantly ran out of stock. Mary only became serious about designing when an American manufacturer snapped up a pair of pyjamas she had made, telling her a mass-produced copy would make him a lot of money. Furious, she bought a sewing machine and some Butterick paper patterns which she altered and made up in fabric she bought retail at Harrods. ‘No one had told me about buying cloth wholesale.’ Her earliest designs were inspired partially by the beatniks who paraded in the King’s Road and partly by a memory from an early ballet class when she had glimpsed, through an open door, a girl dressed for tap-dancing in a tiny skirt over thick black tights worn with little white ankle socks and shiny black patent leather Mary Jane tap shoes.
In fact, as she was one of the first to acknowledge, a generation of women who did not wish to look like their mothers in the bourgeois uniforms dictated by couturiers in Paris opted instead to dress like breastless, hipless children, gauche and gangling, innocently big-eyed with blotted-out mouth and Bambi lashes. ‘I wanted everyone to retain the grace of a child,’ she said, ‘and not to have to become stilted, confined, ugly beings. So I created clothes that allowed people to run, to jump, to leap, to retain their precious freedom.’
Gradually, Quant invested in more sewing machines and began to employ seamstresses to work in her tiny, crowded bedsit. Bazaar became a sensation, its stock snatched off the hangers as soon as it hit the rails. The clothes were unique, simple, neat, unfussy, in déclassé, hard-working fabrics which also smacked of the nursery and the schoolyard—the first embodiment of what was to become known as the ‘youthquake’.
‘It was about the moment,’ Quant told Brenda Polan in an interview for The Guardian in 1982.
We didn’t realise at the time of course that we were in the middle of a social revolution. It took ten years for this country to start to recover from the war and suddenly the economy was booming and ours was the first generation which, when young, actually had the money and therefore the freedom to create a culture for itself.
Before, the middle-aged had always tried to give the young what they thought the young needed; the youth revolution came as a terrible shock because the middle-aged hadn’t noticed the new economic freedom and didn’t know what had hit them. They were stuck deep in old attitudes; a woman was daddy’s daughter until she became someone’s wife. In the mid-1950s women started, without analysing it, to grab a time when they were their own person by moving out from under daddy’s roof and sharing a usually overcrowded, usually scruffy flat with other girls.
The mini was part of that. The mini said: ‘Look at me.’ It was very exuberant, pure glee. Looking back, it was the beginning of the women’s movement. Clothes always say it first, you know, then comes the effect. All those retro fashions of the 1970s betrayed the nervousness that was to come.
In her autobiography Quant wrote:
Fashion is the product of a thousand and one different things. It is a whole host of elusive ideas, influences, cross-currents and economic factors captured into a shape and dominated by two things … impact on others, fun for oneself. It is unpredictable, indefinable. It is successful only when a woman gets a kick out of what she is wearing; when she feels marvellous and looks marvellous.
As Amy de la Haye wrote in 1996, ‘Bazaar caused a fashion revolution. Its short production runs of youthful ready-to-wear clothes were a far cry from the established formula for formal, structures and highly accessorised styles. In comparison to haute couture pieces, Mary Quant’s clothes were considered cheap. Rejecting the conventional categories of day and evening wear and seasonal collections, she produced new designs all year round.’
The short skirts of 1955 still covered the knee—as they still did in a photograph of Bazaar’s window taken in 1961 (and it was not until 1966 that Time magazine noticed that something quite significant was happening and ran its cover story on Swinging London). ‘Nevertheless,’ said Quant in a radio interview with Colin McDowell in 2009, for his Radio 4 essay, The Shock of the Knee, ‘from the beginning bowler-hatted types would knock on the window and shake their umbrellas at us to admonish us.’ Asked if she was perhaps deliberately provoking that sort of person, she agreed that indeed she was. Felicity Green, fashion editor of The Daily Mirror in the 1960s, was challenged by her chairman, Hugh Cudlipp, for supporting Quant with regular exposure on her pages. She refused to mend her ways and was told, ‘I probably ought to fire you.’
The second Bazaar opened in Knightsbridge in 1957, and Quant accepted a contract to produce four collections a year for JC Penney, the American store group. She expanded the range of fabrics she used, including nylon, PVC, men’s suiting and rugby-shirt jersey. In 1961 she launched her first wholesale collection with dancing models, and in 1963 she created Ginger Group, a lower-priced line. By the mid-1960s she was designing underwear, swimwear, night at
tire, stockings and tights, rainwear, furs, sewing patterns for Butterick and a hugely successful range of cosmetics beloved for its witty nomenclature (courtesy of Alexander). In 1965 she took her collection on a whistle-stop tour of the United States. With thirty outfits and her own models, she showed in twelve cities in fourteen days. Sporting miniskirts and Vidal Sassoon’s five-point geometric haircuts, just like Quant’s own, the models ran and danced down the catwalk. It was the epitome of swinging London, and it took America by storm. In 1966 she was awarded the OBE.
In the following decades Quant’s name was also attached to stationery, spectacle frames and sunglasses, household furnishings, carpets, wine and toys. In 1981 she relaunched a fashion range and a shoe collection. Mary Quant remained a genuine fashion innovator well into the 1990s and into the 2000s. She adjusted to the great social and psychological changes of the century, becoming a designer for the lifestyle retailing boom in the 1980s and 1990s. Her market had grown up with her, and she was able to anticipate its demands. She wrote several books on beauty and cosmetics. Her husband died in 1990, and Quant stepped down as director of Mary Quant Ltd. in 2000 while remaining a consultant for the myriad products she had pioneered over her long career.
Further reading: Mary Quant’s autobiography, Quant by Quant (1965), is a must-read. Amy De la Haye’s The Cutting Edge; 50 Years of British Fashion (1996) and Christopher Breward, David Gilbert and Jenny Lister’s Swinging Sixties: Fashion in London and Beyond 1955–1970 (2006) are good background.