All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  Still, for many years, Madge was invited back to speak to students. “She’d arrive staggeringly dressed, usually in black, and was quite riveting about her experiences, the people she knew, her life on Vogue and at College,” said Tyrrell, who remembered her as “immaculately turned out, with wonderful hair and pearls, looking stunning, sitting on a large settee, the students crowded around.” Her influence also continued, as many of the designers hired to teach in the program were her ex-students. She made a point of buying from their collections and directing friends to their work; Ernestine Carter, the most powerful fashion journalist in England during those years and a close friend of Madge’s, helped publicize their accomplishments. Carter was an American trained in art and design who had worked at the Museum of Modern Art as curator of architecture and industrial art in the 1930s. She was the fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar in London after the war, then a writer and editor at the Times in the 1950s and ’60s. Like Madge, she was an intelligent advocate for fashion who was attuned to its connections to other forms of design.

  The School of Fashion was a novelty. It was dedicated to the idea of fashion’s significance. And it was invented in an atmosphere that verged on disdain. In 1951, in a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts, when the school was still viewed skeptically by many, Madge attempted to explain the school and to present a theory of English fashion. During the postwar years, a period broadly characterized by both aggressive investment in the future and nostalgic glances backward, she also continued to focus on the creation of the present. In this lecture, she linked the School of Fashion, the complex attention to the current moment that is the fashion designer’s purview, and the grammar of modernism: “The proper function of this School,” she said, “is not the dissection of motives, not the study of the past. Rather is it concerned with the translation of the immediate past into what Gertrude Stein called ‘The continuous present.’” Citing Stein, she was gesturing to a more respected art form, but she was also invoking an artist whose radical rethinking of representation affirmed the quotidian.

  Madge also argued that the endemic English “lack of professional expertize, brought about by our tendency to consider fashion as a frivolous subject suitable only for female amateurs, totally ignored the knowledge of the designer and the craftsmanship of the worker (let alone the number of people employed in the fashion industries).” Together, these issues did “much to account for the slow development of a national style.” Part of the problem was that “most people think they know something about fashion,” she said,

  and because they are clothed, are tricked into thinking they understand clothes. Yet eating an elaborate dinner does not confer the knowledge of a Brillat-Savarin…Habitual responsiveness of the eye in daily life is rare…Few of us have trained eyes…Few people can observe objectively the lines and colour of a new fashion…A trained fashion eye can translate: “She had on a loose sort of brown coat with rumpled sleeves” into “A snuff coloured three-quarter length facecloth coat with the folded sleeves from Balenciaga’s last collection.”

  Establishing an atmosphere of intelligent analysis was crucial: “The fashion writer is usually only a reporter; an informed critic is rare,” she wrote in 1962. “This creates a very different climate from the bracing cut and thrust of ordinary journalism and is largely responsible for the vast amount of nonsense written about fashion.”

  In Paris, in contrast, fashion was “based on a solid foundation of skilled workers, surrounded by artists, critics, and beautiful women, fed by a magnificent fabric industry, with a large home market and a big export trade, the inheritor of a long tradition of culture.” She had dramatized this seriousness in another description of a visit to a maison de couture in Britannia and Eve in 1930:

  I went—not on my official business—to see a certain collection with a rich and frivolous friend. She was a client of the house, and therefore “had” a vendeuse, who consented to our entry, although it was still early in the season and the collection was being shown to buyers rather than private clients. We laughed and chatted and carelessly watched the mannequins drift by, but my friend saw nothing which took her fancy. As we got up to leave the vendeuse reproved us and said: “No wonder you have seen nothing you like: you were not attending properly. How can you expect to know whether or not our collection pleases you if you laugh and talk while it is being shown?”

  The English ethos of antiprofessionalism influenced every aspect of the arts, Madge believed, and could result in work of real integrity. “The English have always been inspired amateurs,” she said, citing Beaton’s approach to his craft: “Cecil would come [to the Vogue photography studio]…and he’d arrange everything too beautifully and then he’d say to the boy underneath the velvet cape, ‘Well, now take it!’ He never was a technician,” and yet he was an example of “this English amateurism which has great quality.” Some of the “decorations done by Vanessa [Bell] and Duncan [Grant],” however, lacked that quality. And of the products of Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop, she said, it’s not “enough to paint a kitchen table, you’ve got to make the kitchen table first, and they hadn’t got the knowledge.”

  But her commitment was not only to a field of knowledge; it was to a way of being and feeling. Pleasure was as important as professionalism, and both were as powerful as her occasional dismissals of her work. Clothes were a place where emotion and expertise collided. Janey Ironside recalled “how sensually she adored colour and texture. She did all but eat her little [textile] samples” on her desk at the Royal College. “What woman does not know that comforting feeling of ‘looking her best,’ and the immense self-confidence imparted by a really becoming new gown?” Madge asked in Britannia and Eve in 1930. Much “serious” writing about the field—whether it described fashion as a reflection of social and political forces or as itself constituting them—was inadequate, she believed, because it did not account for the expressive experience of shopping for and wearing wonderful clothes: “There is a considerable body of work concerned with the history of fashion, and there is also what is known as the psychological approach to fashion,” she said in her lecture to the Royal Society. “But no amount of reading Veblen and Flügel has managed to give me that appalling sense of guilt which can be conferred by a mere gusset, or even allowed me that spark of excitement derived from a glimpse of vice discreetly indulged in.” She concluded her talk: “I can, with truth, say with Mme de Sévigné, ‘Dieu, comme j’aime la mode.’”

  If being the Professor of Fashion meant believing in and articulating, over and over, the importance of what she and others knew, and made, and wore, it also involved making visible as work what was seen as natural. “We admire a faultlessly dressed woman,” she argued, “without realizing that this deceptive simplicity hides a world of calculation.” Far from trafficking in clichés about women’s duplicitous surfaces, Madge was describing the work and affective experience of fashionable dress—acknowledging that pleasurable self-transformation involves physical, psychic, and intellectual labor. “Apart from money, the two chief requirements are time and attention,” she wrote in “How to Dress on Nothing a Year,” in the midst of the Depression. “Good dressing takes up a lot of time, and it also requires much concentrated thought.” In other words, style is thinking.

  In the late 1920s, she had assisted a friend who was a mannequin de ville, a socially prominent woman who was given an expensive wardrobe by a maison de couture that gained prestige and publicity when she wore its clothes to every opening and ball. Madge described the routine as “really hard work” for her friend. Each season, this woman received between twenty and thirty new models and returned the previous collection (which was then sold at a discount by the designer). “The selection of the shoes, coats, bags, gloves, and underwear to match the bi-annual new wardrobe was a work of patience and application which required two or three weeks in Paris,” she wrote, because everything was made to measure. Her friend had appointments all day long, going from one accessory firm to
another, bringing the patterns “pinned to a sheet of paper, and standing for hours under the arc lights of the salons,” so that everything “match[ed] perfectly” and “every line fitted.” Her point in describing this little-known practice was that all of these preparations for dressing perfectly in “three outfits a day, every day”—a morning suit, something for five o’clock to eight o’clock, and evening wear—were “done in a professional way.” Even being dressed “at no cost” by a couturier was not what it sounded like, she noted, since a mannequin de ville had to have a husband or lover with a ready reserve to pay for furs, jewels, and so on. In other words, at a time when it was neither ordinary nor politic to do so, Madge Garland wanted to make visible the time, effort, and money that went into creating public femininity—and to acknowledge the expert standard that was achieved. “In those days,” she wrote in 1962, “the job of being a fashionable beauty was a full-time one and entailed the wearer’s complete subjection to her appearance—everything else came second…There are few women today who would be prepared to undertake such an existence even if they had the necessary money.”

  As for herself: Being a woman who personified fashion at its highest levels and who also labored in the industry was a kind of oxymoron, since couture is all about the look of leisure. “To consume without producing has always been the prerogative of the privileged,” she observed in British Vogue in the 1960s; “to appear to do so was until lately the ambition of the middle classes whose women wished to ape the leisured lady.” Writing in the mid-1970s about the interplay of fashion, architecture, art, and the decorative arts in the first part of the twentieth century, she called the simplicity of twenties couture—the sweater suits and straight chemise dresses—“as deceptive as the [decade’s] plain furnishings. Chanel’s little cardigan suits were of the finest wool lined with the same rich silk as the accompanying blouse, belts had jeweled buckles with matching clips for neckline and the ‘cloche’ hat. It was a rich woman’s whim of pretending to dress like a poor one and demanded expensive perfection in every detail.”

  Even before the top-down model of fashion began to shift in the 1960s—when street fashion began to influence high fashion—imitation and exchange had been fundamental to the industry, in part because many of its practitioners were middle-class adepts who aspired to, and made careers promulgating, the image and actuality of haute couture, and the elite world on which it depended. Madge was one of those outsiders who moved up in what is called “the fashionable world.” She understood the industry’s dependence on the invisibility of labor and the visibility of leisure, but she was proud that she had worked all her life. She believed that the period between the wars had made possible “the best life for women,” but acknowledged that her freedom, by which she meant her ability to have a career, had depended on the availability of cheap domestic labor by working-class and immigrant women. As a fashion icon, she modeled aspects of femininity while distancing herself from others (domestic labor). And if her talents and lifetime of work made her an authority in the field, her position was also emblematic of many women’s relationships to femininity, in which distinctions between production and consumption, labor and leisure, often blur.

  Madge Garland dressed correctly, beautifully, professionally, and imaginatively for her own pleasure and others’, to set an example, and to achieve a certain social mobility. She did so balancing a deep ambivalence about the way she spent her life. In the process, she became one of the most interesting writers on fashion in the twentieth century. The trained eye, and how she trained it, and how she trained herself to be seen—none of these can be disentangled from the eternal English questions of class and status, and from the ways these impinge on desire. Which is to say that professing fashion for Madge was also about the habit, the advantages, and the costs of discretion.

  Notes on Discretion

  Madge Garland had a mesmerizing voice, “a vibrant voice, which woke everybody up and held your attention. Her whole personality was very flamboyant.” She camped it up, vocally, while maintaining her carefully wrought appearance of propriety. She leaned into her words: flirtatious and commanding, censorious and self-mocking, confiding and bemused, impatient and languid. When asked how she kept a circular planting of ivy in her garden so perfectly round and neat, she replied, “Darling, I get down every morning and trim it with a nail scissors and tuck it with hairpins.” Comparing sexual reproduction to the form of cultural production she knew best, she opined, more than once, “I like my children readymade, and my clothes made to order.” She referred to Ewart Garland’s second wife as her “wife-in-law.” (They had met and liked each other.) Athletic activity, especially anything to do with throwing or hitting a ball, was idiocy she wanted to be spared: “Sport is absolutely—ça n’existe pas. Ça n’existe pas,” she said. “If you want the damn ball, keep it, don’t throw it away.”

  Soignée and proper in her continental Britishness, she also used colloquial Americanisms to achieve the campy thrill of contrast. “She used to say—it came from a film—‘You can say that again, honey bun!’” recalled Patrick Woodcock, “and it was so strange coming from this frail little lady, who was a different kind of creature.” David Sassoon’s family connection to Siegfried Sassoon impressed her, and when he entered the Fashion School she asked him if he had read the poet’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. “My child, you should,” she said, when he told her he had not. “She always said ‘my child,’” he recalled. “And if she looked at a sketch she didn’t like, she’d say, ‘It’s so déjà-vu.’” When Sassoon was in a college production of Uncle Vanya, he powdered his hair, then came in the next day still wearing it. Madge sent for him and said, “‘Now, my child, you’re not in a circus.’ And I said, ‘Oh Mrs. Garland I can’t wash my hair every night.’ And she said, ‘Why not? Stars do!’ She was divine.”

  She also depended, for dramatic and comic effect, on expansive descriptions of her own inadequacies, including her encounters with voluminous female form. When she talked about her travels in Greece between the wars, she described herself becoming “hysterical” when confronted by an infestation of fleas and sleeping buried under every article of her clothing—coat, dress, underclothes, and hat all piled on the bed—in an attempt to keep the bugs away. She told a story about a postwar trip to Constantinople, where she attended a conference on Byzantine art and where, in the spirit of adventure and economy, she rented a room from mutual friends of the writer Theodora Benson, rather than staying with the rest of the group at a hotel: “It was interesting alright,” she said. She woke in the small hours to see

  an army, a small army of termites, coming up the bed, dear…I had leaped out of the bed and screamed of course, and my hostess came out of her room, and I was sobbing—I always sobbed—and I said “Awful things in my bed!” And she said—she was half-naked and very fat, and she put her arms round me and pressed me to her pneumatic bosom—very large pneumatic bosom—and said “Come and sleep with me.” Oh, I cried and I cried, louder and louder! I spent the night sitting up on a hard chair in the middle of the room.

  This, too, is camp, a way of creating a scene: the highly competent professional woman making a spectacle of her helplessness—and of the supposed awfulness of another woman’s body.

  Insisting that fashion had been nothing more than a way to make a living was another sort of performance. As was her sense of humor about her field: Despite her commitment to its rules, despite her belief in her expertise, despite the fact that it was her armor, livelihood, and pleasure, Madge wanted to send it up. Writing in Britannia and Eve about the autumn 1933 Paris showings, she noted, “The atmosphere is suffocating and there is an indescribable babel of noise; dozens of pretty and well-groomed young women are running about, apparently without any reason, and occasionally over the hubbub comes an agonized scream for Marguerite, Hélène or Renée. One never knows whether the cry, obviously that of a person in great distress—and, if you are new to the game, you think of someone about to be
murdered—is answered.” In the 1940s, when she made regular appearances on BBC radio and television, she proposed a number of program ideas that were meant to be instructive but that she seemed to enjoy most for their comedy, including one about what it was like to watch Parisian women wearing the New Look, with its volumes of fabric, trying to get into the tiny cars of the postwar period. This distancing irony was another way that her practice was allied to modernist aesthetics.

  But along with a flamboyant wit she had a profound commitment to discretion, which made her life a complicated dance of concealment and display, honesty and dissimulation. Her professional and personal being was made of her intimacy with and enjoyment of women, and she spoke fearlessly about her appreciation of female beauty. Four Thousand Years of Beautiful Women is the delicious, immodest subtitle of her first book, The Changing Face of Beauty. Describing her postwar travels in the United States, she would say that the girls in Texas were the most gorgeous she had ever seen. When Hugo Vickers interviewed her for his biography of Cecil Beaton, when she was in her eighties, this enthusiasm, “the way she spoke of other women—beauty in women and so on”—made him wonder whether she “might be a lesbian.” Having met a frail woman covered in a shawl, about halfway through their conversation he saw her toughness and passion emerge.

  Yet Madge said little directly about what it meant to work in fashion and to love her own sex. Her silence is no surprise: “She lived very much in society,” said Francis King, and had to be accepted in that milieu, “so she wouldn’t want to appear to be a rebel, which she was.” This caution was especially necessary for someone who had no money of her own and no family or social position to shelter her from opprobrium. Some complied with her reticence, hoping to protect her. When Anne Olivier Bell was editing Virginia Woolf’s diaries for publication, she deleted the phrase “Going to bed with Garland” from a sentence of Woolf’s about Dorothy Todd, feeling that “revelations or insinuations about her private life could have been both distressing and damaging at that time.” King, a generation younger than Madge, said, “People of that era, they learned discretion. You didn’t talk freely about your private life because it was often dangerous to do so.” Such constraint may seem obvious: Being perceived as a lesbian had damaged her career more than once and was incompatible with the higher echelons of social life, on which the fashion industry depends, so of course it was necessary for Madge to conceal her private life. But discretion depends on the distinction between public and private, a distinction in the name of which much violence is still done. It is a particularly white male vehicle for veiling power: where one’s money comes from, how one happens to have the job one has. Its successful practice requires being in a position to say, You can’t get to me.