All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  Boulestin had first run an adventurous interior decoration business in London, selling Paul Poiret’s textiles and wallpapers. His restaurants helped to popularize authentic French food and they made the same point that British Vogue was trying to make: They were vehicles for modern design, combining English and French sensibilities. The architect of the first, the Restaurant Français, was Clough Williams-Ellis, John Strachey’s brother-in-law; its decorator was Allan Walton. The murals at the second, the Restaurant Boulestin, were painted by Marie Laurencin and Jean-Emile Laboureur; the curtains were from a fabric designed by Raoul Dufy; André Groult, who ordinarily concentrated on making austere but sensuous objects in opulent materials (furniture covered in shagreen, lacquered screens), supervised the work. Dody commissioned Boulestin to write about food for Vogue, and his restaurants became their clubhouse; “You’d never go there and not know somebody,” said Madge.

  Their own flat, which Madge called “a beautiful house for parties,” was furnished sparely, but was “charming & very cleverly thought out,” said Beaton. There, at “impromptu wild parties,” were writers, actors, designers, photographers, painters, dancers, and composers. When the revue Blackbirds of 1926 played in London after its run in Harlem, Madge invited its star, Florence Mills, and felt that “it was like having somebody from the Royal family” in her home. “Several ultra smart young women came in,” wrote Beaton of another occasion, “wearing lovely clothes & lots of false pearls.” There was Olivia Wyndham, from an old aristocratic family, wild, but something more than a party girl; the socialite and drug addict Brenda Dean Paul; Allanah Harper; Dorothy Wilde. And there was Madge, “the thinnest person I’d ever seen,” recalled Anne Scott-James, “wearing these incredibly graceful twenties clothes with a very long waist.”

  Nicole Groult, seated, at home, with Marie Laurencin (Courtesy Colombe Pringle)

  Madge was one of “the people one always saw at these mad bacchanals” around London in the 1920s, wrote the composer Vernon Duke, author of “April in Paris.” But she was not one of the Bright Young People, upper-middle- and upper-class youths such as Wyndham, Harper, and Dean Paul, who had money and time to burn. Out all night in London or Paris, or up late at home at her own parties, she still had to go to work the next morning. Attending the couture collections in Paris, she understood the spectacle to be as challenging, in its own way, as studying paintings in galleries and museums—perhaps even more so, since the work was constantly in motion and journalists were not allowed to sketch or take photographs during a showing (they could, discreetly, take notes) and embargoes enforced by the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, the industry’s governing body, meant that members of the press had to wait for six weeks to publish what they had seen. These demands created lifelong habits for Madge. Decades later, Hilary Spurling commented on the intensity and speed with which she moved through art exhibits; Madge replied that it was an effect of having learned how to look quickly and deeply at the collections.

  It was the work of a party, the dance of work. It was the way the clothes worked and how they danced. “The ’twenties in Paris,” said Madge, “was a moment when you went out every night…and one’s clothes were very light, because one danced all the time.” The truth of the cliché of that decade as a time hell-bent on fun is that the exhilaration of that dancing, the mobility, was meaningful to people who had lived with physical restraint and diminishment. She was out dancing at hotels and nightclubs; out at a dance hall in Notting Hill Gate, where she met Frederick Ashton, then an aspiring dancer; out dancing with Olivia Wyndham, then back in the middle of the night to the impressive Wyndham family home to make scrambled eggs and try not to wake up Wyndham’s elderly and daunting father. If she stayed in, she would push back the furniture, roll up the rugs, wind up the Victrola, and dance. “And if one wasn’t dancing one watched people dancing,” Madge said. Out at the ballet with the actress Viola Tree, daughter of the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and afterward to the Eiffel Tower restaurant, where they were joined by Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf for coffee. Out with Dody at the London premiere in 1924 of Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Biches, for which Marie Laurencin did the décor and costumes, Madge was struck by “the vein of poetry” that ran alongside the austerity of much modern design. Out by herself one morning, having breakfast at an ABC restaurant, she was still wearing evening clothes from the night before, returning from an assignation, possibly with Wyndham.

  Wearing those incredibly graceful twenties clothes, including Chanel’s simple chemise dress, which appeared in 1924, Madge was participating in a fashion that “eventually swept every other type of dress off the fashion map,” she wrote later, “and put women as nearly into uniform as anything short of a Government department has ever done.” Yet it was in these clothes that she established a distinctive personality. Her clothes were also a way to be adorned in a whole series of relationships: the exchange between high fashion and interior decoration in the 1920s, the artistic and commercial traffic between London and Paris, the sexual fluidity of the time. Cecil Beaton saw these connections when he looked at Madge in early 1926 “look[ing] perfect in a most lovely costume by Nicole Groult. Very influenced by Marie Laurencin—in pale blue and pink.” The outfit Beaton referred to was a “patterned jumper [sweater] and skirt, and a long silk coat of a plain color, lined with the pattern, and beautifully bordered,” as Madge described it, with “a hat to match, and so forth.” Teddy Wolfe, a protégé of Roger Fry and a member of the London Group of artists, loved Madge in this ensemble so much that he painted her in it, in 1927. But he left one eye in the portrait unfinished, Madge said, because toward the end of the sitting they “put the gramophone on and danced.”

  Nicole Groult was charismatic and driven, the creative and financial force in her household. Laurencin was her intimate friend, and Maria Huxley and Sara Murphy were among her clients. Nicole and André Groult’s circle of friends also included Dorothy Parker, the photographer Henri Lartigue, the illustrator Georges Lepape, the sculptor Ossip Zadkine, and the designer Eileen Gray. The Groults profoundly shaped Madge’s taste and they introduced her to that “whole school of Paris artistes-decorateurs.” Laurencin and the illustrator Charles Martin painted the murals on the walls and ceiling of the Groults’ apartment. Madge described Laurencin, to whom Groult introduced her in 1924, as “both Bohemian and bourgeoise,” at once “the independent New Woman [and]…the most enclosed, most feminine” person. Laurencin was associated with Cubism and Dada, but her paintings are curvilinear and whimsical, the forms willowy, the palette pale. Her “costumes for ‘Les Biches’ were momentarily as influential on fashion as any of Chanel’s designs,” notes the historian of art and design Charlotte Gere. Laurencin frequented Natalie Barney’s salon and, Madge recalled, disliked painting men, rarely did, and asked a higher fee to do so. Although many of her figures have a kind of typological sameness, she created vivid portraits of Nicole Groult and of Madge. After she asked Madge to sit for her in 1937, she gave her the painting, telling her it had been a labor of love. Wherever Madge lived, this work was the centerpiece of her rooms. A Laurencin still life was another of her prized possessions; it, too, was a kind of portrait of Madge, a friend of hers noted, because it was “both modern and exquisite.” In a profile of the painter published in 1963 (several years after Laurencin’s death), Madge wrote about a long summer holiday in the Basque country that she took with Laurencin, Marcel Boulestin, and his boyfriend Robin Adair in the 1930s, and recalled Laurencin’s physicality, the pleasure she took in walking in the woods, biking, swimming, and dancing “in her espadrilles to the piano-méchanique in the local bistro.”

  For Madge, being dressed well by Groult and others meant the sensual pleasure of living and moving in strong designs, made to measure, in lush fabrics. It meant the experience, fleeting yet profound, of being shaped, included, and transformed. It meant feeling the division between how she saw herself and how others saw her, and feeling that difference disappear.
It meant all of these combined with her technical understanding of the garment. That mixture of emotion and expertise, and of the simultaneous fluidity and painfulness of borders, is the complex experience that Virginia Woolf, in the orbit of Madge and Dody and thinking about fashion and narration in the mid-1920s, called “frock consciousness.” Woolf understood that it was impossible to separate having clothes on one’s mind and on one’s body. Her writing, from adolescence on, documents her fascination with the relationship between clothing and consciousness, and records her frequent despair at having to get dressed to appear in the world. Her diaries, letters, and stories of the mid-to-late 1920s record the effects Madge and Dody and Vogue had on her and her circle of friends.

  In the spring of 1925, Woolf noted that she had just been photographed by Beck and MacGregor for the magazine:

  I have been sitting to Vogue, the Becks that is, in their mews…But my present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness &c. The fashion world at the Becks—Mrs Garland was there superintending a display—is certainly one; where people secrete an envelope which connects them and protects them from others, like myself, who am outside the envelope, foreign bodies. These states are very difficult (obviously I grope for words) but I’m always coming back to it.

  Frock consciousness is apparently an oxymoron: The first word refers to a winsome sheath, something for the outside, while the second describes the quality of mind we imagine inhabits our insides. But clothes, as Madge knew from a young age, both constitute a boundary to the self and suggest its permeability. Lying between what we understand to be public space (the social world at large) and what we consider private (the body of an individual), they depend on and challenge this distinction. Frock consciousness, a state of dress and of mind, also issues an invitation and presents an obstacle to vision and visibility. As an articulation of the modernist conundrum of how to represent character—another person’s life and mind—it is a key to Woolf’s understanding of consciousness as a social phenomenon, not simply a rarified vessel for private concerns. In the same way, although biographies tend to focus on a single life, that life owes everything to milieux and influences—in Madge’s case, ineffable and concrete networks of artists and of women.

  “My love of clothes interests me profoundly,” Woolf wrote in her diary in 1926, “only it is not love; & what it is I must discover.” After the success of Mrs. Dalloway, Madge said, Woolf “knew that she didn’t look right” and she told Madge “that she would not be afraid to enter any restaurant if she was as beautifully dressed as I was.” Woolf particularly admired the ensemble by Nicole Groult, so Madge procured a version of it for her, in blue rather than pink, taking her measurements, consulting with Groult, and arranging for fittings in London. “So there is a real history attached to that outfit,” Madge said. To Woolf, Madge was someone “there superintending a display,” but she was also a brain to pick, a personal shopper, a provocation, and a conundrum. To Madge, Woolf was a venerated writer who was scared of and moved by clothes. Both women were fascinated by how we wear what we wear, by the effects of clothes on the body and mind, and by the effects of corporality and consciousness on clothes. They shared an appreciation of the awkward details to do with dress and character—a sense of elegance spiked with glee—and an understanding of fashion’s powers of humiliation and conversion. When the fashion expert who was never really that interested in fashion and who made of herself a kind of resistant modernist text first glimpsed Woolf, at a lecture by Roger Fry, she saw “a very beautiful woman…But what also attracted my attention was that she appeared to be wearing an upturned wastepaper basket on her head”—a comically unflattering hat. One night at a party, Woolf was interrogating Madge and they ended up in a “hilarious conversation about corsets,” the clothing convention of their mothers’ generations, trying to fathom how people who had always worn them managed in the mid-1920s, when dresses were meant to be moved in, slouched in, danced in.

  As sympathetic, provocative representatives of the fashionable world and of a certain kind of journalism, and as a visible couple, Madge and Dody not only excited Woolf’s thinking about and through clothes but also incited her thinking about the relationship between her fiction and her journalism, about fame and literary reputation, and about intimacy between women, including “sapphism.” The two of them stand in Woolf’s writing of that period for the knot of art, commerce, and sexuality that haunts and defines both modernism and fashion. The making and marketing of British modernism is often understood as emerging from intimate ventures: little magazines, small presses, personal relationships. But it also depended on commercial enterprises such as British Vogue. The contact between British Vogue and Bloomsbury was an exchange that provoked and benefited all sides: editors, writers, and those written about. The conversation between the art now called modernist and the equally vital products of popular and consumer culture of the time includes the fact that the latter were often the stuff of the former: The advertising and shop windows that Woolf uses to represent consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway are just one such example.

  Woolf agreed to be photographed for “We Nominate for the Hall of Fame” and to write several essays for Vogue, was excited about the high fees the magazine paid, and was intrigued by the thought of greater exposure: “I asked Todd £10 for 1,000 words: she orders 4 articles at that fee.” At the same time, Woolf worried about “the ethics of writing articles at high rates for fashion papers like Vogue.” When Raymond Mortimer invited Woolf to a party, she despaired at her desire to go and equally strong wish to stay away: “Why,” she wrote to Vanessa Bell, “do these young men all run to vulgarity, snobbery, shoddery, Toddery?” When a friend told her she was demeaning herself and cheapening her work by writing for Vogue, she did not take the accusation lightly, but concluded that the censorship a young writer of her acquaintance had encountered at the hands of The Times Literary Supplement was “perhaps worse than the vulgarity, which is open and shameless, of Vogue…Todd lets you write what you like, and its [sic] your own fault if you conform to the stays and the petticoats.” To Vita Sackville-West she wrote: “And whats [sic] the objection to whoring after Todd? Better whore, I think, than honestly and timidly and coolly and respectably copulate with the Times Lit. Sup.” The stays and the petticoats are a metaphor for rhetorical constraint and for a kind of “feminine” writing supposedly practiced in such magazines. But as Woolf’s conversation with Madge about corsets suggests, the phrase also refers to an interest in the actual objects, their effects, and their meanings.

  Complaining about demands made on her time and attention, Woolf wrote, “I want as usual to dig deep down into my new stories, without having a looking glass flashed in my eyes—Todd, to wit.” The irony of this grievance about Vogue as a mirror, annoyance, and social demand is that the stories Woolf refers to are precisely those in which she explores “the party consciousness, the frock consciousness,” which, if they were impeded by Dody and Madge, were also stimulated by them. In “The New Dress,” written in 1924 and first published in 1927, the protagonist, Mabel Waring, commissions a new frock based on an old design, watches her dressmaker produce it, and tries it on in the squalid intimacy of this woman’s workroom, where “an extraordinary bliss shot through her heart. Suffused with light, she sprang into existence.” But when she wears it out to a party, she is humiliated. The story shows how easy it is to think of certain clothes, like certain behaviors, as inevitably belonging to certain people; it exposes how the ineffabilities of taste are a function of class, but are often passed off as part of the natural order. “It seemed to her [Mabel] that the yellow dress was a penance which she had deserved, and if she had been dressed like Rose Shaw, in lovely, clinging green with a ruffle of swans-down, she would have deserved that.” Mabel is both transparent to the other guests, who always “saw through” her, and able to see “through [them] instantly.” Woolf also makes M
abel and her dress hypervisible by putting her experience of being watched on display—which experience, ironically, has a great deal to do with what other people look like. We don’t see Mabel so much as see her being seen: someone else’s “marked” gestures, “their eyelids flickering as they came up and then their lids shutting rather tight.” The dress’s crime seems to be that it is long out of fashion, but if Mabel is marginalized because of her frock, her predicament suggests graver social dislocations. Woolf describes Mabel feeling “like a dressmaker’s dummy standing there, for young people to stick pins into”; she writes of “the misery which she always tried to hide”; she makes us privy to her sense “that she was condemned, despised.”

  “The New Dress” is a story about clothing, class, social aberration, and the visual paradox of discretion: the way in which all concerned pretend not to see what is perfectly apparent. It was exactly this set of problems that Madge confronted in her professional life. While British Vogue represented commerce to Woolf and others, Condé Nast believed that Dody and Madge had produced something excessively bohemian. In the beginning, the New York office seems to have supported the changes they made. “Vogue is going to be altered considerably,” noted Harry Yoxall, the young business manager of British Vogue, in 1923; “the percentage of fashion pages is to be cut down, the fashions shown are to be more in keeping with the present economic stress of this country, and the rest of the magazine is to be considerably broadened and humanised and brought into keeping with the apparent taste of the British public.” But by 1926, Nast, Yoxall, and Chase were arguing that Dody’s preferences—aesthetic and, it was implied, sexual—had perverted the magazine. Chase’s description of Dody as “naturally of a literary and artistic bent” (like the epithets bookish and highbrow that she and other chroniclers of Condé Nast use to describe Dody’s editorial stance) always seems to stand for less mentionable terms. “Fashion Miss Todd all but eschewed,” wrote Chase, incorrectly. “The British edition was not intended to be the advanced literary and artistic review she was turning out.” (Decades later, the magazine’s hierarchy was appalled by another, very different visionary editor, Diana Vreeland.) Woolf and Nast were each wary of being tainted by the other, whereas Dody and Madge were interested in—and Madge herself was made of—the mixture. Madge’s wearing, unlike Mabel Waring’s, was resolutely of the present, a way of being what writers and artists were investigating in their media.