by Lisa Cohen
Madge never found steady work—unlike these friends, she did not have family money—again became ill, and eventually returned to London. But once there, she was approached by the Illustrated Newspapers Group and offered a job editing the women’s section of their two recently amalgamated magazines, Britannia and Eve. It was a coup, given the dire state of the economy and the disgrace she had lived through. It was another thing to reconcile it with the kind of work she had been used to. Rebecca West told her she could not possibly be associated with such a lowbrow publication, especially one with a name as absurd as Britannia and Eve. (They had kept the titles of both papers.) “I can and I will,” Madge said, citing the salary. West continued to tease her, referring to the magazine as “Madge’s two old girls” and calling the night she closed her section “putting [her] two old girls to bed.”
Hired as the “Woman Editor,” Madge told the editor in chief that she was qualified to produce the fashion pages but had no knowledge of “what are called women’s interests”: “knitting, and babies, and cooking.” She had Elspeth Champcommunal’s old nanny check the knitting patterns, managed the pages on child rearing with the help of friends and their nurses and governesses, and paid the cook of wealthy friends (Lord and Lady Sainsbury) to test recipes. She published an early article on flower arrangement by horticulture and household design guru Constance Spry, which began a friendship that lasted until Spry’s death. The editor congratulated her on her knowledge of knitting (“I said nothing”) and cooking (“In those days I don’t think I’d seen a saucepan”), then asked her to edit the fashion pages of another of the company’s magazines, The Bystander. She began producing five pages a week for The Bystander along with twenty pages a month for Britannia and Eve. She had a minuscule staff, but loved that the work was “such a challenge”—and that in the worst years of the Depression she had two salaries and two expense accounts. She lived in Mayfair—her mother’s dream, achieved in her own way—surrounded by the luxury goods about which she was writing. In one flat, on Bruton Street, she was flanked by the couturiers Norman Hartnell and Victor Stiebel. She had a favorite table at the Ritz, bought a country house in Sussex, and resumed her life in Paris, in style. The Illustrated Newspapers’ offices were close enough to Victoria Station that she could catch a 4:30 train to Paris on a Friday afternoon, arrive by midnight—the fashionable hour for art openings—spend the weekend in Paris, and return home in time to be at work on Monday. She made longer visits for the collections at least twice a year.
Sailor style in the South of France (MGP)
It was not just the money. The November 1929 issue of Britannia and Eve, her first, carried the headline “Fashions Feminine and Otherwise by Madge Garland” along with her photograph—one of the portraits Beaton had taken several years before. “What I Saw in Paris, by Madge Garland” was another early headline. Beginning in January 1932, her name was also splashed across the pages of The Bystander every week: “Madge Garland writes a Forecast of Fashion”; “A Portfolio of Spring Fashions Compiled by Madge Garland”; “Madge Garland Brings Back News from Paris.” The 1930s, she recalled, was when “I lived the fullest life.” Her medium was her self-presentation. She began appearing on television, talking about women’s clothes for the BBC. Able to buy couture clothing again, she wore Lanvin and Schiaparelli—the wit and conceptual flair of the latter especially pleasurable to her. She was “always very elegant, slightly affected, willowy, soignée.” She was “always in a hat.” She was in a black wool coat with sleeves of leopard skin, designed by Victor Stiebel.
Her medium was also the mixture of technical vocabulary, rapturous hyperbole, and didacticism that was the language of fashion. She was working at a time when fashion was a set of demanding but always changing rules handed down from above. As she said later, “I thought I should inform people, be absolutely clear and exact—whether they like[d] it or not!” As in: “Dark brown is excellent when accompanied by brilliant sapphire blue.” “Pink and brown is good, provided that both colours approximate to mushroom shades.” The logic is sometimes elusive: “Sports clothes favour colour contrasts, but skirts are often divided.” At times, the more she rendered the clothing, piling detail on detail, the more the object seemed at once to escape and reward her—and the reader: “For evening wraps nothing is so satisfying to the eye, nor so practical to wear since it does not easily crease, as a good lamé, particularly when it is shot with multi-colored flower colours which permit it being worn with several different coloured satin or velvet gowns.”
Emphatic and effusive, this rhetoric also careened toward the telegraphic. Madge’s report from the spring 1930 collections, described in Britannia and Eve as a “copy of a telegram received from our Woman Editor in Paris,” reproduced not just the syntax but the look of an urgent, condensed communiqué: “SHINY STRAW HATS FEATURED FOR SUMMER STOP BIZARRE JEWELS CRYSTAL ENAMEL ETC WORN WITH SIMPLE EVENING GOWNS WOOD AND METAL NECKLACES FOR SPORTS WEAR STOP.” And: “LATEST SHOES FROM BUNTING MADE OF FISH-SKIN RESEMBLING SHAGREEN BUT FINER AND SOFT STOP.” Then there is the question that is not a question: “Don’t you think a spotted handkerchief knotted closely around the throat is a practical and becoming fashion?” she wrote in late 1931, as if searching for another way to be didactic. “Does your new winter hat reveal one side of your waved hair and dip abruptly over the other side?” “Are you one of the enthusiasts who are delighted at the so-called return of the bustle?” And: “Which Would You Choose—Pink Velvet or Black Tulle?”
Writing on fashion, the physical, and the electricity of the present in the section of Tender Buttons called “A long dress,” Gertrude Stein uses a version of this form:
What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current.
…
Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it.
These, too, are questions that preempt themselves, doing what they ask. Writing about the space of waists and of necessity, the relationships among colors, and the crackle of technology, Stein is concerned with the way lines of text and the lines of a dress—“long lines,” “the serene length”—intersect. “Practice measurement, practice the sign that means that really means a necessary betrayal, in showing that there is wearing,” she writes, in the section of Tender Buttons titled “A chair.” And: “Actually not aching, actually not aching, a stubborn bloom is so artificial and even more than that, it is a spectacle, it is a binding accident, it is animosity and accentuation.”
With friends in the South of France, late 1920s; Madge is second from right (MGP)
Both the fashion journalism and the modernist writing are practices of expressing and caressing objects that rely on oracular utterance: “Looking is not vanishing. Laughing is not evaporating. There can be the climax. There can be the same dress. There can be an old dress,” writes Stein in her “Portrait of Mabel Dodge at Villa Curiona.” And: “There can be pleasing classing clothing.” In both forms, the language is almost furiously static: full of emphatic, precise pronouncements. (As Stein writes elsewhere: “For this is so. Because.”) In both, descriptive energy and precision blend with a euphoric proliferation of sense. Both involve addressing oneself to nouns while celebrating verbs: “showing that there is wearing.” Both concern accentuation, pattern, regular arrangement; the practice of measurement; the artificial or accidental quality of the natural; resemblance that is not resemblance; the spectacle that is emotion and the emotion (animosity, crackle, betrayal) circulating around these items meant for display—more and more garments.
Writing about couture clothing has, until recently in the Anglo-American context, been termed trivial—ephemeral and apparently inconsequential, appearing most often in trade papers, magazines, and newspapers. Yet, or perha
ps as a result, the language of fashion itself continually stresses significance. (Which is another message of the urgent “telegram.”) “Velvet is Very Important,” Madge wrote in The Bystander in 1932. “The ANGLE of one’s BRIM is important.” The detailed focus on surfaces in this writing also implies that these objects and the work that goes into producing and consuming them deserve respect. The emphasis on significance is direct and unashamed: “This insistence on a smooth and tight-fitting hip-line is another universal characteristic of the spring fashions, and one of the utmost importance,” she wrote in Britannia and Eve. And: “Importance is given to the shoulders of this black camel’s hair coat by appliqués of satin gaillac.” Importance is the question begged by fashion at least since its more exclusive association with femininity, following what is called the Great Masculine Renunciation—the abandonment of surface adornment and the adoption of sober similarity in men’s clothing with the ascendance of the suit in the nineteenth century.
It is characteristic of fashion—historically the premier public arena for women—that it has been relentlessly characterized as trivial even in the face of its economic, aesthetic, and psychological importance, made a receptacle for concern about the meaning of our surfaces. Madge addressed this cordoning off and willful ignorance candidly in Britannia and Eve in 1930: “There is a tendency in England to regard everything which concerns the lighter moments of men (sport, for instance) as important, while the more mundane occupations of women are universally condemned as frivolous.” She is echoing and expanding on a point that Virginia Woolf made the year before in A Room of Her Own: “it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial.’” But, as Madge wrote, “the desire to dress up is too deeply rooted an instinct to be treated lightly, nor may it be thwarted without detriment to the character of the individual.”
To make this point, Madge also put herself and the rituals of haute couture on display. “It is a rule that that no one is allowed to leave until the collection is over,” she wrote in “This Fashion Business,” also in 1930.
The other day when I had seen about three hundred models at a certain house, I discovered that if I were not to be late for an important appointment I must leave at once. I was in Paris for a few days only with much to do, and having seen about three hundred of the five hundred models presented by this house, I considered, rightly or wrongly, that I had a fairly good impression of the style and line of their clothes, and that I must go. I got up to leave, but at the door a charming but very firm young lady begged me to be reseated. I explained my dilemma. She scolded me, the assumption being that on the day when I had the honour to be admitted to such a house I should have made no other appointment. I explained my brief visit to Paris, conditioned by such and such circumstances. She demurred. I begged that my case should at least be referred to the higher courts of the publicity manager, whom I happened to know well. Reluctantly she consented to dispatch a mission to him. Time passed. Eventually he arrived, but I could see by his expression that I had committed a grave misdemeanour. He treated me to a long homily about how to attend a serious collection of the importance of So-and-So’s; I heartily agreed to everything he said, pleaded extenuating circumstances, and, promising never to do it again, I fled. I shall probably not be allowed to re-enter that house.
She also made the physical atmosphere of the couture showings vivid for her readers. “A huge modern entrance in the Champs Elysées, vast salons in the everlasting grey, an incredibly large number of extremely uncomfortable cane chairs,” she wrote in Britannia and Eve in 1933. “A mannequin enters in the unassuming two piece woolen suit which convention ordains shall begin even the most sensational collection.” At another show: “A magnificent Hotel of the Empire period. Huge salons decorated in the authentic early Empire manner, slender gold bas-reliefs on cream walls, sand colour taffeta curtains draped in the window embrasures. Small tables with bouquets of tea roses are arranged around the vast room which has a stage at one end and slightly raised rows of seats at the other. A slight, very discreet murmur—then silence and against the velvet curtains the first mannequin appears.” Later: “Enormous applause breaks out—a mannequin has just appeared wearing a magnificent black velvet evening wrap cut on Florentine cinquecento lines…The previous mannequin…turns round to give an envious glance to her admired successor.” In “yet another series of salons,” she sees “a new colour which resembles stewed blackberries and a lot of lamé.”
Madge was now a success. But the question of importance still preyed on her. She continued to immerse herself in modern design, and when she was not regretting her missed academic career, she sometimes said she wished she had been an architect, a more respected form of containing bodies than the one from which she made a living. She had traveled to the Bauhaus in the late 1920s, probably to assist Dody with The New Interior Decoration. She later lived in one of the London houses designed by Halsey Ricardo and wrote several articles about these buildings—rich subjects for her, with their emphasis on color and decoration. She met Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier’s collaborator, and was “madly jealous of her, because there she was working with Le Corbusier, and there was I sweating it out in the fashion world, about which I didn’t care a hoot in hell.” In the 1920s, walking into Jean Désert, the decoration business and showroom on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré of the designer Eileen Gray and her collaborator Evelyn Wyld, Madge had fallen in love with the rich simplicity of Gray’s work and the stark geometry of Wyld’s rugs, and she became close to both women.
Wyld had formed the French War Emergency Fund during the First World War with a group of friends, including Gray; she received the Medaille de la Reconnaissance Française—a decoration given to volunteers who helped the wounded and refugees—for this work. She remained in France after the Armistice, able to live more openly as a lesbian in France than at home, and eventually settled in an old house in the South of France, in the hills between Cannes and Grasse. A tough Scotswoman with bright orange hair, she came from a family of committed suffragists and “always set her own style, dressing in beautifully cut trousers, Byronic silk shirts and wide embroidered belts.” She had no formal education in art (she had studied music), but Gray—who had moved to France in 1907 and worked first in lacquer, then in wood and metal, making screens, chairs, tables, and lamps—invited her to produce textiles with her. After travels with Gray in North Africa and research on her own into weaving in England and Scotland, Wyld began running the weaving studio and designing rugs for Jean Desért. When Gray began to focus on architecture rather than interior décor, their partnership ended, and Wyld collaborated with the American Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux. Madge described one apartment designed by de Lanux as combining “the most austere lines…with most precious materials.” Wyld and de Lanux exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in 1928 and 1929, the Salon d’Automne, and the Union des Artistes Modernes, then in the early 1930s moved their operation south, opening a studio in Cannes and working out of Wyld’s house.
The work of all three women “was radical in its stress on surface qualities, bareness and elegant comfort,” notes Isabelle Anscombe in her pioneering study of women and the decorative arts. They created interiors that “were among the most sophisticated but practical of their day,” entirely distinct from the homes they had been raised in, modern yet attuned to physical ease. Madge, writing in 1930, noted how the unusual color schemes, “the grain of the wood, the smooth surface of leather, the roughness of hand-knotted rugs, are all employed to give interest to what otherwise might be banal.” In 1930 she organized an exhibition of rugs by Wyld and furniture by de Lanux at the Curtis Moffat gallery in London. (Rugs by Marion Dorn and Ted McKnight Kauffer were also on display.) For Madge, becoming friends with Gray, Wyld, and de Lanux meant that she “grew up in” their work, and for forty years she spent most of her holidays at Wyld’s house in Provence. But they “were all comple
tely independent, all had their own money, then lived their own lives the way they wanted to,” she said. “They accepted me as being an exception; it couldn’t be helped. I was literally the only person they knew who had ever earned her living.”
After working for Britannia and Eve and The Bystander for several years, Madge found her health again deteriorating. Her solution, which she kept secret from her employers, was to check into a clinic. She went to work every day, but lived under a doctor’s supervision until she recovered. Then, in the spring of 1934, Condé Nast and Harry Yoxall asked her to return to British Vogue as fashion editor. It was a vindication on every level: the personal satisfaction of being recognized by them; the fact that no other glossy magazine had the prestige of Vogue (and daily papers still did not cover fashion). Still, she bargained hard. Nast finally agreed to match her two salaries, cabling the London office from shipboard on his way back to New York: “Give Madge what she wants.”