by Lisa Cohen
In spite of it all, she wrote to Gerald, “the clothes in Paris are heaven, it is unbelievable that they should have so much taste and flair even in such conditions—a real pleasure for me to see good hats.” She bought one at Legroux, which she intended to use as a model. The artificial silks she saw in Lyons “you would have to see and above all to feel…to believe—and the maisons de couture say they handle and make up better than real silk. All very interesting.” Prices were still too high to do business with France during that trip, but she was back at the end of the year to supervise hat buying when Bourne and Hollingsworth was granted its first import license. In the autumn of 1947 the Council of Industrial Design, founded in the last years of the war to improve design across British industry, appointed her “to set up a prototype design center” covering all types of clothing, fabrics, and accessories. As part of this job, she returned to Paris with £1,000 of government money to acquire the accessories of the New Look for British manufacturers to copy, buying gloves, shoes, and underwear to accompany the fitted jacket and long, full skirt that Christian Dior had introduced to such acclaim (and censure) that year. On this trip she also found Marie Laurencin and other friends; in a gallery on the rue des Saint-Pères, she found Laurencin’s still life The Lemon and the Rose and was able to buy it. Several times in the past fifteen years she had had, as she wrote to Gerald, “to remake my career from top to bottom (or rather the other way up).” Now she was “in the thick of the export drive…only a temporary civil servant & have joined the Council just to put on this demonstration—& after I don’t know what I shall do.”
Professor of Fashion
Look at her again: It is London in the early 1950s. She is teetering down the street on enormously high Ferragamo shoes (“as soft and easy to wear as a pair of gloves,” she said), draped in a broad-shouldered coat of skunk pelts, drenched in Worth’s Je Reviens. Her students at the Fashion School of the Royal College of Art peer out the window, watching her. “Madge is coming!” they cry. They laugh but are also afraid. She is in her early fifties, but owning up to her forties. They are young queer men with a feeling for fabric and drape; talented, driven young women; and good girls from good families who are there to raise the tone of the school, many of whom will end up casualties of what Madge called its “high marriage wastage.” Madge is coming—and she seems to have appeared from nowhere. Has a taxi dropped her around the corner? Is she taking a bus but not using the stop closest to the College, so as not to be seen descending from something so plebeian? She is preceded by these questions; by this mixture of respect, anxiety, and scorn; by her perfume; and by the vision of her outrageous coat and precarious-looking, cantilever-heeled shoes. She is “London’s most unusual professor.” She is “The First Professor of Fashion.”
When she left Bourne and Hollingsworth, she turned her experience in the United States into a way to earn a living, working as a freelance representative of five English textile and fashion firms, promoting their products in the United States and reporting to them on the American market. She continued to appear on television, to give radio talks, and to lecture on textiles and fashion to industry associations all over England and Ireland. She imagined that she would do this kind of freelance work for the rest of her career. But in June 1948 she began work at the Royal College of Art. During the war, the College, founded in 1837, had evacuated to Cumberland and scaled back. Now, led by Robin Darwin, a painter and descendant of the scientist, its mission was to produce graduates in design who could revitalize devastated peacetime manufacturing. When Darwin realized that the College did not train students for the fashion industry, he consulted Victor Stiebel; Audrey Withers, who had become the editor of British Vogue during the war; and Allan Walton, who had his own textile business and had directed the Glasgow School of Art, and whom Darwin had just appointed head of the Royal College’s textiles program. Walton recommended Madge and persuaded her to take the job. Darwin made her Professor of Fashion and Principal of the School of Fashion, which she then created. She took one more long trip to New York, where she did her usual consulting, but also studied the curriculum at the Parsons School of Design. Walton’s sudden death in September 1948 was a blow that almost deterred her, she said later, but she did not give up the chance for this new sort of legitimacy.
What did it mean to profess fashion? For Madge, it meant, first, being what she had been denied: a woman associated with higher education. In 1949 the Royal College of Art gave her an honorary degree. Proud, self-deprecating, and still angry, she wrote to her brother:
My dear Gerald, I enclose a cutting from yesterday’s Times which may interest you and which will I hope, give you pleasure. I must say I do wish Mama had lived until now. I know she would have been so pleased. In 1917 I gave up the prospect of a degree at Cambridge in order to accompany Father to Australia because Mother could not go while you were at the front. It was the most bitter renunciation of my life. I think Mama knew this and now, 30 years later, I have got what I wanted. It isn’t really of importance but I must admit it is pleasant. I think you get English Vogue regularly so I am not sending you the June copy which has two photographs of me by Cecil Beaton and a blurb about my work as I expect you have already seen them. So enough of my egotism.
It isn’t really of importance: The Fashion School was “not only the first thing of its kind” in England, noted Harper’s Bazaar in a profile of Madge, but also “the first official recognition of fashion as a serious industry.” Designing the school, Madge Garland was creating a program that would produce a crop of native English designers. She did not teach courses, but she invented the curriculum, critiqued students’ work, ran the school, promoted it, and sat on the College’s governing board. Her knowledge, contacts in the industry, and style made it a success. The only competition was a program at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, started by Muriel Pemberton at around the same time, which focused more on art training than on training for the fashion industry.
Like many passionate autodidacts, Madge had strong views about education. The College was under government supervision, and she began her tenure by fighting with “the civil servant stuffed shirts”: the Ministry of Education and Sir Stafford Cripps (former president of the Board of Trade, then minister for economic affairs and chancellor of the exchequer). The dispute took place because she insisted on hiring professionals in the field, not teachers of art: Digby Morton’s tailor gave the instruction in tailoring; a cutter from Berketex taught designing wholesale clothing to scale; Victor Stiebel’s dressmaker trained students in pattern making; a representative from Wolsey taught knitwear. She also hired a number of refugees, Jews who had worked in textiles or design in Europe and were starting over in England. “I wanted people from the trade,” she said, but “trade was a dreadful word to use in connection with art.” It was, in many ways, a revolution in her own thinking. But it was also another version of the sort of mixing she had worked on early in her career. “I tried so hard to marry art and industry,” she said. The curriculum included “costume history, cutting, designing with a price limit, millinery, accessories, embroidery,” toile making, children’s clothing, and lingerie. Madge studied fashion magazines with the students. She arranged for them to sit in on editorial conferences at magazines and in business meetings at manufacturers. She required them to work for a designer, in a textile mill, or in a factory for at least two months. To help place graduates, she appointed a committee that included representatives of the top wholesalers. The year-end student fashion show, first presented in July 1949, became an annual tradition—in high style and including royal guests.
Along with these intensely practical requirements and goals, she wanted the students—who had grown up during wartime and postwar austerity and had often completed degrees at their local art colleges, but hardly knew London, let alone the rest of the world—to learn things that may not have been teachable. She wanted to create for them something like what she had experienced at school in Paris,
to impart not only “facts and technique,” noted Harper’s Bazaar, “but…that rare, undefinable but essential quality—sophistication.” She arranged for them to see plays as well as fashion shows, clothing factories, milliners’ workrooms, and beauty demonstrations. She invited them to her home, “to train you how to behave in society,” noted Joanne Brogden, an early graduate who went on to direct the school from 1971 to 1989, and who found these occasions “frightening…awful.” Every year, she took two students with her to the Paris collections. (She would see Esther Murphy on these trips.) “She was an entrée to anywhere you wanted to go,” recalls the couturier David Sassoon, who matriculated in 1955. David Watts, a student of the early 1950s who designed for Jaeger for forty years, concurred:
You had visits to the collections in London—in the ready-to-wear, such as it was in those days, like Dorville, Susan Small, Frederick Stark, Brenner Sports, Matita, and to a few couture houses, like Hardy Amies, Digby Morton, Victor Stiebel. And they all did such great clothes in those days. In the coronation year we went to Victor Stiebel’s collection. Of course all the peeresses who had to go to the coronation had to have gorgeous gowns underneath their robes, and there were about twenty of those at the collection, like you couldn’t imagine these days…We learned about quality, which just didn’t exist at the time.
Madge’s own look and taste were also a lesson. “She wears clothes with an easy authority,” British Vogue noted, in the article to which she referred Gerald, and “educates with intelligent wit.” In one of Beaton’s photographs for this feature she wears a wasp-waisted “late-day suit of blue-black brocade” by Bianca Mosca, a version of the New Look. There are multiple strands of pearls around her neck and wrist. A straw cartwheel hat by the milliner Rose Vernier frames her face, and there is an eruption of blond curls on her forehead. With her hands in her pockets, her shoulders thrown back, her gaze calmly meeting the camera, she is the image of cool, intelligent, feminine postwar style. Set against the intact, ornate moldings and marble mantel of Londonderry House, the image is also one of personal and architectural endurance in the face of the ravaged reality of London in the 1940s. Another profile from this period described her “original approach to fashion” as the “easy elegance of the woman who seizes instantly upon each new trend and stamps it with her individuality.” When she had students to her house for dinner, David Watts recalled, she would appear in “a very glamorous house coat”—evening wear, not something in which to do housework—“with an enormous black satin skirt and a fitted blouse…buttoned all the way up the front with long tight sleeves.” “She was what fashion was about,” said David Sassoon. “There was a woman actually walking around in couture clothes…That to me was heaven.” It was “the way she was, not just her clothes,” said the designer Gina Fratini; she “epitomized everything to do with fashion, with style…and I sat in awe.”
Because of Madge’s predilections, the Fashion School was referred to as “Paris, Kensington.” It was set apart from the main College buildings—in a town house in Ennismore Gardens, behind the Brompton Oratory, on a square where lamplighters still illuminated gas streetlamps every evening—and was separate in other ways, too. “We were a very precious little society of our own,” recalled the designer Anne Tyrrell. The building contributed to this atmosphere: Students worked in a huge L-shaped space, a Victorian reception room that had two fireplaces and extended the length of the building. This room was also the setting for parties to which Madge “would invite all sorts of amazing people.” And then there was her own setting: “Madge’s office I can never forget,” said Watts. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It was like a drawing room; it wasn’t like an office at all.” The walls were pale pink and covered with paintings and sketches, including the work of Marie Laurencin. The curtains were thick hangings of pink glazed chintz, lined and interlined. The cornices were ornate, and the space was lit theatrically. Her desk was placed on the bias. She sat there in front of a bay window, often playing with fabric samples from Miki Sekers’s factory with her “immaculate scarlet varnished nails—this fair, well-coiffed person with astonishing blue eyes,” said Joanne Brogden. “If you came from the suburbs of London,” this mise-en-scène was “frightfully impressive and grand…I really was so bowled over.”
She had continued to consult about experimental textiles for Sekers (rayon) and Imperial Chemical Industries (their polyester was called Terylene), helping to develop these fabrics for women’s clothing and interior decoration. On breaks between terms, she traveled all over Europe to promote Sekers’s and ICI’s materials and to learn about innovations in French textiles. She also represented a French textile company in England. She traveled regularly to the North of England and at one visit to the mills “addressed 600 locals,” showing them the clothes that had been made from their materials and exported. Writing later about the history of these fabrics, she noted bluntly, “The early attempts to create synthetic materials date back to the last century, but for a long time ‘art silk’ was as repellant as its title was vulgar; it was harsh to handle, had a sleazy surface, and creased abominably…the rude forebear of the delicious materials which have transformed women’s clothes today.” Edward Molyneux and Bianca Mosca in London, and Dior, Pierre Cardin, Givenchy, Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath, Jean Patou, and Balenciaga in Paris were among the houses supplied by Sekers. Some of these fabrics were “staggeringly beautiful,” notes Brogden, and favored students were allowed to use samples. There was a sense in which it “was never a favor, because no one really knew how to use them, but they were exciting because you didn’t see them anywhere else except at couture houses.”
A newspaper article from the period noted “the rigorous self-discipline which Mrs. Garland has displayed in allowing her students freedom of experiment,” which produced “twenty personalities, instead of twenty reflections of Mrs. Garland’s personal, powerful and professional taste.” Still, if some students found her inspiring and supportive, to others she was terrifying and autocratic. The school was run like a couture house, and dicta about hair and clothes and makeup were part of the program. Madge’s secretary told the students when to arrive and leave and had them sign in to a book opposite her desk and door. Joanne Brogden remembered “walking in one day with what I thought was this wonderful new color of lipstick on, and Madge came wafting down the carpeted stone stairway: ‘My child, go and take that terrible lipstick off.’” The place had the air of a finishing school, said one student from the early years:
Professor Garland and Lady Ashton, photographed by Paul Tanqueray (MGP, courtesy Estate of Paul Tanqueray / NPG)
We were “her girls,” and there was the feeling that it was important how you conducted yourself. Sometimes she would swan into a studio and say, “My dear child, your hair is perfectly atrocious.” Or, “What a lovely color your legs are. Where did you get those tights?” She was very critical of how we looked. I remember showing up in trousers one day and a third-year girl said to me, “If Madge sees you she’ll be furious,” so I had to go home and change. I was twenty-two at the time; I’d done five years of art school already and worn trousers practically all the time. We were terribly fifties Vogue.
The Professor of Fashion was tough, she was a snob, and she was sometimes intimidated by her students. Some were clear favorites, which demoralized those who were not. “I definitely would say that I was one,” said Sassoon, “and that’s why people laughed at me. Because she was terribly cruel to some people. She came into the room one day, and I said, ‘Oh Mrs. Garland, what a wonderful hat!’ And she said, ‘Do you like it? It’s by Aage Thaarup.’ And when she’d gone out of the room the others said, ‘You jammy bugger, fancy telling her she looked good in that hat.’…A lot of students were frightened of her and therefore didn’t like her.” “She was really very mean to some people that she took against,” said Brogden, and was disconnected from the reality of students’ lives—she “thought that she wouldn’t intimidate.” It was that “she thought s
he had to play that grande dame part,” said Sassoon. “When I left college she was much nicer and warmer.”
However they felt, the effect of this visionary program was that by the end of the 1950s, and with shifts in social life and improvements in the economy (rationing was in effect until 1956), the College had become recognized for its training in fashion, and companies began to conceive of “employing a designer, and a young designer,” as Tyrrell put it. As a result, men and women could now plan careers in fashion, and many of those who had studied under Madge began to make their mark. The excitement of the London fashion scene in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is in part a result of her work. By the end of the 1950s, however, she had resigned from the College, saying that she was ready to move on to other projects. “In 1948, when I took over,” Robin Darwin wrote to her, “I believed that a School of Fashion Design here might eventually make a real contribution to industry, but I knew it would be a tremendously uphill task, and if Allan had not told me all about you and I had not met you…I very much doubt whether we would have gone ahead with the project at the time. In the event, your success and that of the School far outstripped my most optimistic dreams and everything has been due to your vision and energy.” This was his gracious goodbye, on paper. But they had argued, or she had, and she was privately unhappy to leave. Certainly she was combative, or not afraid to stand up for herself. She also seems to have taken offense at decisions he made, some seemingly minor, to do with protocol concerning the Queen Mother’s visit to the Royal College. He may have pressured her to go, wanting to appoint Janey Ironside—formerly Madge’s assistant, with whom he was having an affair—in her place. As soon as Madge resigned, he made Ironside the new principal of the school.