by Lisa Cohen
She is Madge Alma McHarg, a tall, thin, slightly bucktoothed girl with freckles and long, straight blond hair. Her eyes are a bit too close together, her clothes seldom flatter her, and her parents constantly remind her of her “deficiency both in looks and in manners.” Her shyness is so devastating that it “amount[s] almost to paranoia,” so acute that she experiences it as yet another physical distress. When she stands, she hunches her shoulders and drops her head, looking up from this bent and tentative posture.
Despite or because of these aberrations, she is full of energy, desperate for learning, mad in pursuit of autonomy.
In the early evenings, she is occasionally required to present herself to her parents for inspection: to her beautiful mother, in her late twenties at the beginning of the century and always perfectly turned out, with flowers in her hats and feather boas around her neck; and to her father, not handsome but also impeccably dressed, with his taste for fine suits and shoes and his professional knowledge of textiles. Like other privileged girls of this place and time, Madge is dressed as she grows up “as a pale and meagre version of [her] mother.” But at this young age, when her parents summon her to their drawing room, a nursemaid helps her slip a special pinafore over her ordinary day dress. It is made of white muslin, edged with Valenciennes lace, and threaded with blue ribbons that bubble up into voluptuous bows on her shoulders. For a moment, in this garment, she is transformed—suffused with pleasure and self-confidence.
This fragile, awkward, defective child, called “charmless” by her parents, grew into a woman who organized her life around such moments of transformation, around the experience and display of physical elegance. She became a woman of high polish and even, in Virginia Woolf’s estimation, “rather excessive charm.” In her twenties, she took her graceless figure and remade it, learning how to stand and move and dress, and she made a career in which flawless posture had meaning. She took her paucity of formal education and invented a life in style to compensate herself. And she renamed herself, at Gertrude Stein’s suggestion. Discarding her family name and taking the floral, pretty surname of an ex-husband whose name she had refused when she married him, she became Madge Garland: a hyperfeminine but tough embodiment of the world of haute couture. She became a woman who rejected all training in docility, but outfitted herself to look as if she were no threat. She became an “intellectual devotee of couture,” who was nevertheless often seen as the incarnation of trivial nothingness—a “meringue,” as one colleague put it. “A bunch of froth,” said another. She became a public figure whose organization of her life around self-display was bound up with a need to actively, continually conceal herself.
In her twenties, she ran away from home to become an apprentice journalist at British Vogue, then a magazine in which couture took a distant second place to flattery of the upper classes. She helped transform it into a forum for high fashion and high art, a mingling that seems self-evident now, but was a revelation to readers then and was resisted by Condé Nast and his managers as dangerously uncommercial. With her mentor and lover, Dorothy Todd, then the editor of British Vogue, Madge Garland helped make the magazine a place for writers and visual artists including Woolf, Edith Sitwell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, as well as Stein, Picasso, Proust, Cocteau, and Matisse. Coming into her own as a fashion journalist around the Bloomsbury group and with avant-garde writers and artists in Paris, Madge Garland made herself new in ways that had everything to do with the modernist valorization of novelty and mingling of art and the decorative arts. Knowledgeable about the history of costume, she often said that she had been “ideally cast” as a fashion editor because she invariably “thought that this year’s clothes [were] prettier than last.” To the end of her life, she was riveted by whatever was most contemporary: “I have always been a sucker for something new,” she told an interviewer in the 1970s. She also made herself a trained observer whose professionalism, like her experience of fashion and of modernity, was inseparable from her feminism—her need to break away from her family, to repudiate a world of strictures about how she should live and of low expectations about what she could accomplish.
This was a woman who played a defining but still obscured role in almost every aspect of the English fashion industry in the interwar and postwar years. In the 1930s, as the fashion editor of other women’s magazines in London, and then again at British Vogue, she promoted and dissected high fashion with intelligent wit. A symbol of effortless elegance, she also wrote about fashionable dress as a world of work, rather than as the natural exhalations of some enduring femininity. After the Second World War, she created the country’s first school of fashion design, was a consultant to the textile industry, advised the government on schemes to coordinate art and industry, and wrote book after book on fashion and beauty.
Near the end of her life, however, she told a reporter, “I was never really that interested in fashion, but I wanted to be financially independent.” Asserting that her work had been nothing more than a means to make a living was a way to express her anger that fashion had been one of the few fields in which a woman of her social class could find “respectable” work. It was a way to reiterate her sense of injury that her father had denied her the higher education she wanted and kept her unqualified for any other profession. It was an opportunity, too, to criticize her father’s work as an importer of textiles and women’s clothing. Yet Madge Garland was not shy about her expertise, nor about the idea that such a sphere of knowledge existed. “She believes in knowing things,” wrote a journalist in the 1950s, “and the caprice and whimsies of some women of fashion have no place in her life or personality.” Yet if she herself believed that she knew more than most about her field, she also held that what most women felt about clothes was important.
By dismissing her interest in fashion, she was both bowing to the idea of fashion as a trivial field of endeavor and preempting it. In fact, she was acknowledging that an argument about “importance” was at the heart of that industry and one of the engines of her own life. In her meticulous, unsentimental journalism, she grappled with this issue, grasped the world of haute couture as popular entertainment, and presented herself as a character in that story—a participant-observer, expert but amused, often self-mocking. Her denial, her investment, her constant refining of surfaces both sartorial and rhetorical—all have to do with how she looked: what she saw, what she looked like, what it meant to look like her, like someone to look at. Looking at her now means remembering modernism not just as the thrill of new ways of writing and painting but as a whole set of experiments in fields that are still understood as secondary: interior decoration, textiles, bookmaking and bookselling, magazine publishing, as well as fashion—so-called minor arts that provided a range of expression for and were significantly shaped by women who were breaking away from their families and attempting to create something new in their lives and in the culture. Madge Garland lived these experiments her whole life, well beyond the modernist moment, however it is defined.
“Fashion can be a mask to cover imaginative poverty, and is often the antithesis of individual taste,” she wrote in the 1960s, “but it can also become a weapon to establish a distinctive personality.” It is an assertion that says everything about her own battle to establish herself. “She really was a rebel,” a friend observed, “but in many ways such an unlikely looking rebel.” Like many of the women who shaped and were changed by the iconoclasm of the first decades of the twentieth century, Madge Garland also sought safety. She needed financial security, since she had no independent income and was never supported by a husband. The world she moved in demanded respectability, particularly for those who did not quite belong, but her social standing was always precarious. Conspicuously, wittily well dressed, she wanted to be admired by all, but desired by women, and she lived alone or with another woman for most of her life. Although she lived in London for nine decades, she was born in Australia and therefore seen as an outsider in England. Even after h
er death, the rumor or hint of someplace else about her persisted, and a sense that she had tried to hide her origins, along with an English scorn for un-English origins. She made sure that the facts were clear to almost no one: One old friend was sure that her family had moved to London from the Hebrides, or perhaps South Africa. Rumors of sexual scandal also persisted her whole life. In response to this pressure, she produced a style that was at once correct and distinctive, that played on correctness and was something more than correct: a bold performance. And she practiced an intense social discipline. Madge was a “kitten,” said Mercedes de Acosta, who had “a dynamic drive hidden under all those blue bows and ruffles.” Rebecca West, a friend for more than fifty years, called her “an exquisite piece of porcelain,” but knew how strong she was.
An autodidact of the fiercest sort, Madge Garland was also perceived as someone of little substance or enduring interest: “She was undoubtedly a fascinating person—I mean really fascinating,” said one of her closest friends, “but she has left no monument.” He was trying to imagine both how she could be worthy of a biography and what materials one would use to tell her story. She herself did not believe that she had a legacy, but in old age, at the urging of friends, one of them an accomplished biographer, she tried to write a memoir. She wanted to tell a story of adversity surmounted, of professional success. She produced a number of antiseptic, jaunty, repetitive pages. She left out names, some of the most important parts of her life, huge stretches of time and feeling. She veiled or rewrote even the most apparently straightforward details about her birth and schooling. She could hardly get past the moment when she defied her father and left home to get a job—a huge wrench for a young woman of her background in 1920.
Clothes fade away and they are not easy to archive. “Fashion is both ephemeral and personal,” she wrote in 1951, “it cannot be preserved. At most, the husk of a garment is left, a sloughed-off empty skin. Each dress may be said to die with its wearer, and the smart dress of to-day is only a crumpled curiosity to-morrow—soiled and worn.” But Madge Garland knew how clothes—the experience of wearing them well or poorly, of looking at oneself and being looked at with rapture or scorn—could lodge in the memory and in the body, and in advanced old age she could recall the look and texture of clothes she had worn as a young child and the energy associated with them. Describing the outfit in which her nanny had dressed her when she was required to present herself to her parents, she wrote, “Never in all my life—and I have been privileged to be dressed by Chanel, Dior, Patou, Schiaparelli, Lanvin, Jacques Fath, etc—has any garment given me the feeling of absolute self confidence that…muslin, beribboned and lace frilled pinafore gave me as I put it on over my everyday dress.”
Repudiating so much, she still inclined to optimism and desire. Strict with herself and others, she was stalwart in friendship and open to romance until the end. In a draft of her memoir, she wrote that she fell in love for the first time at age five, “a state in which I have remained all my life, only the objects have varied from time to time.” Like the leaning, leaping people in the photographs of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, those figures who seem to be launching themselves into modernity, Madge Garland was always wanting more, wanting now, wanting what happens next.
So look at her. Look at her in a beige satin, drop-waist Chanel dress, around her neck a long rope of pearls and a multicolor, hand-block-printed silk scarf by Sonia Delaunay that she “cherished.” It is the South of France in the late 1920s.
Look at her posing for the fledgling Cecil Beaton, her own modernity placed against his self-consciously modern backdrops (cellophane, props, faux-“futuristic” painting): her blond hair shingled, her eyebrows the thinnest pencil line, two strands of pearls around her neck, an enormous flower pinned to the metallic sheen of her outfit.
Look at her “beautifully dressed in logical suits and illogical blouses,” circa August 1945. On her head, “an insane Hat.” With her piercing blue eyes and “sophisticated pink and white make-up” she looks like a painting by her friend Marie Laurencin.
Look at her in her late seventies “wearing a Marimekko dress and yards of huge pearls,” or wrapped in a knitted mohair coat of dusty but vivid aquamarine, still making people look up and the restaurant hum with interest as she pauses at its entrance.
And look at her well into her eighties out in the Kensington High Street, “looking absolutely marvelous” even on a bitter cold day. Or at lunch at the Reform Club in “the most beautiful mauve wool outfit.” Or out at Harvey Nichols, where she is looking intently through the racks of clothes, studying them, said an acquaintance who watched her from afar, “as if she were a scholar in an archive.”
I Absolutely Refused
At age two, Madge Alma McHarg moved with her family from Melbourne to London. She moved from the colonies to the metropolis, from a place of self-invention to a country obsessed with lineage. She attempted to discard her national and family origins as soon as she became conscious of them. Trying to make herself at home in her body, she cast off her orthopedic boots and the “horrid, thick…woolen dresses” and woolen underclothes she wore in winter. She thought of her life as a long struggle against the limitations of illness and of her family. She never entirely discarded her sense of imperfection.
“My family didn’t enter into my life really at all,” she said in old age. Alienated from her parents and siblings and desperate to erase her Australian middle-class antecedents, she was never nostalgic about her past. Refusal was the keynote when she described her childhood and adolescence. “I told them, ‘No, no, no,’” she said; and: “I thought, ‘No, I won’t, I won’t, and I won’t!’” Refusal, and an inchoate but overwhelming desire for independence. Yet her father’s business involved the stuff with which she composed her career: His company traded in “Millinery, Straws, Ready-to-Wears, Felts, Flowers, Ornaments, Paris Novelties, Ribbons, Neckwear, Veilings, Laces, Embroideries, Handkerchiefs, Silks, Velvets, Mantles, Blouses, Hosiery, Underwear, Gloves,” and she remembered him as “very, very fond of clothes.” If she gave him no positive credit for having influenced her professional life, it is not surprising, since he had done everything he could to keep her from having a profession.
For the record, she considered only three things about her coming-of-age significant: the brief but idyllic aesthetic education she received at a finishing school in Paris before the First World War, the time she spent in the United States just after the war, and the extent to which her parents thwarted her and she rebelled against them. The rejection and refusal to conform were real, but the way she recalled them hid a story more complicated than she was able to tell.
She was born in Melbourne on June 12, 1896. Both of her parents were first-generation Australians, the children of Scottish immigrants who had been part of the wave of voluntary migration from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Canada during the boom created by the discovery of gold in 1851 in the newly founded state of Victoria. In southeastern Australia, Victoria is roughly the size of England, and its capital, Melbourne, has been the Australian city most identified with England, especially with upper-class English customs and assumptions. As people and capital poured into Victoria during the gold rush and through the second half of the nineteenth century, Melbourne became the financial and manufacturing center of the country. By the mid-1890s, it was a busy city that had already weathered a depression, the scene of enormous wealth and poverty, and still a raw and sprawling frontier town.
Most of Madge’s forebears were enterprising men of the type referred to in Australian newspapers of the time as “just the stamp of man to develop into a successful colonist.” Coming from next to nothing in Scotland, they did not doubt their right to remake themselves in Australia. There is almost no record of the women of those generations. Her maternal grandfather, Thomas Aitken, immigrated in 1842 and eventually founded the Victoria Brewery. Her mother, Henrietta (Hettie) Maria Aitken, was raised in the mansion adjoining the brewery, on Victoria Parade in fashionab
le East Melbourne. Her paternal grandfather immigrated the following decade and became an official in the colonial government. Her father, Andrew Creighton McHarg, left school to work as a clerk in the garment business, a trade his older brother James had already entered; a few years later he joined James and two partners, who had founded Brooks, McGlashan, and McHarg. They were “warehousemen” and wholesalers of ladies’ clothing and accessories who imported raw and manufactured goods from Europe for distribution around Australia, catering to the growing colonial population and the Edwardian vogue for elaborate, feminine trimmings. Brooks, McGlashan, and McHarg’s warehouses were devastated by fires twice in the 1890s, but by the turn of the century the firm was one of the most successful businesses of its kind in Australia.
The business of fashion sent the McHarg brothers back in the direction from which the family had emigrated: They are said to have pioneered constant commercial travel between Australia and Europe in 1894, when Andrew McHarg first went to England and Europe for the firm; until then, Australian wholesalers had depended on supplies from English dealers. Andrew McHarg had married Hettie Aitken in 1892, and in 1898 he moved to London to position Brooks, McGlashan, and McHarg at the source, bringing with him Hettie and their two young children, Madge and her older brother, Gerald. The family settled first in Sydenham, in South London, and then in northwest London, in what Madge—alluding ironically to her mother’s distress at its distance from the fashionable center of town—described as “the wilds of Hampstead.” In the first part of the twentieth century, Hampstead was significantly Jewish, suburban in feeling, inhabited by businessmen and their families. In fact, it was fifteen years before the Mc Hargs reached it; they lived first in even more remote areas of North London. If it was possible for Madge to allude to Hampstead as a disappointment to her mother’s social aspirations (her longing for a good address in the West End, the apex of London social life and the place for pleasurable public consumptions such as shopping and the theater), the earlier addresses were so far out of the swim that Madge was careful never to mention them at all.