She was one of the trend setters, and another was Nancy Cunard, who also wore creations by other designers—in this case Patou and Chanel—before deserting them for Schiaparelli. Nancy’s mother, Emerald Cunard, was one of the great London hostesses between the wars, and a favorite of the art historian and author Kenneth Clark. He loved and humored her although he found her habitual lateness exasperating, along with her conversational habit of flitting, dragonfly-fashion, from one topic to another. Lady Cunard had a long and very public love affair with the conductor Thomas Beecham. She once asked Lord Clark, not what he thought of extramarital affairs (a subject he knew something about himself) but incest. He replied he was in favor, and she was delighted. He wrote, “To be one of Lady Cunard’s regular guests was to have reached somewhere very near the top of unstuffy, new world society.”
Her daughter Nancy’s world was, if possible, even less stuffy. She turned her back on her mother’s social whirl to marry a black musician and devote herself to socialist causes. She fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, published Negro, an indictment of racial prejudice and, after the fall of France, worked tirelessly as a translator for the Free French. In between she was something of a fashion addict, with her own eccentric ideas of what was chic. Nancy Cunard favored sleeveless dresses with wooden bracelets up to the armpit, male haircuts, tough leather jackets worn with lots of expensive jewelry, and a glowering expression.
Schiaparelli’s biggest coup in those years was in picking up the endorsement of Daisy Fellowes, tantamount to becoming, in the nineteenth century, the person who whispered in the ear of Beau Brummell and told him what to wear. By the time the two met, Daisy Fellowes had become the undisputed leader of society in London and Paris, in fashion, taste, and lifestyle, whom to include and whom to ignore, the very model of a rich and benevolent tyrant. She was born in 1890, the same year as Elsa, as Marguerite Séverine Philippine Decazes de Glücksberg, daughter of Jean Élie Octave Louis Sévère Amanieu Decazes, third duke Decazes and Glücksberg, and Isabelle-Blanche Singer, daughter of the American sewing machine pioneer.
Daisy’s mother committed suicide at age twenty-seven, and after that her children were put in the care of their aunt Princess Edmond de Polignac, otherwise known as Winnaretta Singer, a noted patron of the arts. Romaine Brooks, the American expatriate portraitist, fell in love with Winnaretta and painted her, but was fearful of what seemed to be a ruthless trait, and Robert de Montesquiou detested her. He would write in Le Figaro that the princess looked rather like Nero, only much more cruel, “one who dreamed of seeing his victims stitched up by sewing machines.”
It is easy to see, from this dramatic black silk crepe evening dress with giant white appliqués, why Schiaparelli’s designs seemed ideal for the Hollywood films of the 1930s. (illustration credit 6.4)
A similar quality is evident in the character of her niece Daisy, so copied and admired. Palmer White records that Daisy Fellowes once asked a man to prove his love for her by jumping into a swimming pool that had just been emptied. When it came to men, she was invariably predatory and whether or not they were married hardly mattered. “A female dictator of untouchable severity,” wrote Harold Acton, who was well aware of her biting tongue. “Saint Daisy, speak ill for us,” the saying went. The same devil-may-care attitude extended to her clothes. She took delight in wearing black to a wedding and red to a funeral. As with Elsa, some deep need of her psyche made her compulsively rebellious, which made her reactions all the more perverse—and secretly admired. She had dozens of linen dresses and suits cut along the same simple lines, and it was her pleasure to wear them at events when full dress parades were decreed. But she would wear these modest outfits with blazing jewelry, which, being an heiress, she could afford: cuffs of emeralds, earrings dripping diamonds and sapphires, necklets of Indian stones and huge ruby pins.
This figure-hugging evening dress in rose satin had the novelty of a train that could be looped to the wrist to make walking slightly more possible. (illustration credit 6.5)
To Carmel Snow, long-term editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Daisy Fellowes became “the personification of the hard Thirties chic that came in when Schiaparelli became the rage.” Her beautifully shaped head, assertive profile and slim, lithe form were perfectly suited to clothes that trembled on the edge of daring and went right over it; thanks to her authority and strength of character no one dared laugh. She was perfect for Schiaparelli, and they both knew it. She was constantly being photographed in the fashion magazines as a reigning beauty and also a novelist—she wrote convincing romances—until she became an editor herself, of the French Harper’s Bazaar. This made her, if anything, even more useful to Schiaparelli. Her poise was celebrated. When, at a ball, she suddenly realized both she and a guest were wearing identical Schiaparelli outfits decorated with coq feathers, she summoned a pair of scissors, cut off all the feathers from her own outfit, and continued to dance, waving her bunches of feathers in the air.
Daisy Fellowes was irritating, a bully, and in later years addicted to opium, but one could hardly ignore her, because she was at the head of every parade.
After her first husband, Prince Jean de Broglie, died of Spanish flu in 1918, she married the Hon. Reginald Fellowes, a cousin of Winston Churchill’s, and became more formidable than ever. Her interior designs were celebrated for unique combinations of wit and extravagance. At Neuilly she designed a huge garden interspersed with statues by Jean Cocteau and entertained nonstop. The interiors of her mansion were decorated by Louis Süe and André Mare, whose specialty was eighteenth-century forms seen through an art deco filter; the result was oddly agreeable. One room, a salon lined with silver leaf and hung with sand-etched mirrors, was particularly successful and much admired. Daisy Fellowes summed up all that was smartest and to-the-minute about society. And she belonged to Schiaparelli.
Bettina Bergery recalled that in Paris there were three reigning beauties. Daisy Fellowes was the first. Then there was Isabelle Roussadana Mdivani, or “Roussy,” Sert, second wife of the talented and socially ambitious José-Maria Sert, who was, Bettina wrote, “as radiant as an archaic Greek Apollo” when she first married Sert. “Her brother Alexis married Barbara Hutton and was killed in an automobile accident. Broken-hearted Roussy looked exactly like Vermeer’s portrait of a girl in a blue turban from then on.” Bettina Bergery, who fell in love with her, continued, “A Russian from Georgia, she was half oriental … Her extraordinary charm was indescribable. One talked of nothing but Roussy’s rubies, monkey, shiny raincoats and luminous flannel-gray eyes.” The third was Natalie Paley, born Princess Natalia Pavlovna Paley, Countess de Hohenfelsen, a member of the Romanovs, first cousin of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II. Natalie, a sometime movie actress, was then married to the couturier Lucien Lelong. “She was an ethereal, feminine version of the last Tsar, with the same delicate features, high cheekbones and slightly slanting eyes.”
In those days, Bettina wrote, Paris was a “leafy village,” Jean Cocteau was the curé, Monsieur Antoine was the coiffeur, the Ritz bar was the café, and Schiaparelli was the dressmaker. Life was cheaper, and Americans like Eleanor Wylie, Carl Van Vechten, and Dorothy Parker could be found in the Ritz’s bar nearly as often as at the Algonquin’s. Servants were cheap and people entertained constantly. “All the English and American debutantes were to be found at some time during the day in the Ritz bar, and in the evening at Florence’s, Le Grand Écart or Brick Top’s. They even became so Parisian they went to the Boeuf sur le Toit and observed Nancy Cunard with her gray top hat, gloves, ivory bracelets and black escort, Cocteau with ‘Janot’ [his lover, the film star Jean Marais], Henri Sauguet with Max Jacob, a few French duchesses and princes and Russian princesses.” The piano duo of Jean Wiener and Clément Doucet played on and on, and Moïse, the omnipresent maître d’, who “looked like a benevolent whale,” kept the party moving.
For the French, what counted was to be invited to the Comte and Comtesse Etienne de Beaumont’s parti
es. Bettina Bergery, who was, said that to be invited “one had to be in the ‘Gotha,’ or titled, very talented, very famous, very amusing, very smart or very beautiful.” Everyone’s social status was precisely graded by whether or not they were included in the guest lists at the Beaumonts’, even how often they were invited. The atmosphere was positively Proustian and, Bettina added, “The disgrace of not being asked was only equaled by the honor of being invited.”
The fine eighteenth-century house, with a courtyard in front on the Rue Masseron and a garden that went down to the Boulevard des Invalides, was the scene of constant lunches, tea parties, garden parties, dances, and costume balls. The comte, who was continuing the aristocratic traditions of Comte Robert de Montesquiou, the eccentric poet, art critic, and supposed model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus in Remembrance of Things Past, had been a friend of Diaghilev’s. “He had organized ‘Les Soirées de Paris,’ a sort of ballet,” Bettina wrote. Picasso, Jean Hugo, and Matisse did the decors, and the best ballet people danced. A theatre curtain by Picasso took up a wall in one of the house’s gold-and-boiserie salons; Etienne’s portrait by Picasso hung on the organ pipes in the ballroom. Etienne was “enormous, luminous, superb.” His wife, Edith, was “not pretty but she was also superb, simple, very intelligent and kindness itself. They were a devoted couple.” When Edith died, the count’s heart was literally broken. He had a heart attack and died two years later, in 1956. After that the house was taken over by Baronne Elie de Rothschild. “It has become more opulent, but nothing can equal its importance during the 1920s and 1930s as a centre of social and artistic life in Paris.”
Life was very gay in Paris, Vogue wrote in the summer of 1931. The new restaurant Les Ambassadeurs was packed every night; there were society weddings, “amusing little dinners,” cocktail parties, concerts; Ruth Draper, the popular radio satirist and comedian, had a new program; and the portraitist Giovanni Boldini, recently deceased, had a retrospective exhibition. Of that shameless flatterer of rich ladies and their corpulent husbands, the Vogue chronicler wrote about “lovely mothers in long, sweeping skirts, black gloves, black stockings over slim feet and ankles and ropes of pearls. They wave huge eagle fans … Movement, shadows, such air, such elegance!” Unlike in England, the dining table of a formal dinner was not smothered in flowers—there might be a tasteful vase or two of roses—but arrayed with wonderful Sèvres dishes to complement wonderful food served by footmen in mustard-colored velvet breeches. The grandeur of it all, during which ladies were escorted into dinner on a gentleman’s arm and cigarettes were banned before the port, got to the chronicler. One simply had to have one of these dinners every season or Paris just wasn’t amusing anymore.
But it was always the costume balls for which invitations were most eagerly sought, and the summer of 1930 had been one of the great seasons for events that, Janet Flanner wrote, were once as minutely chronicled as a diplomatic crisis. The parties attended by the Duc de Saint-Simon at the court of Louis XIV filled twelve volumes in the days when entertaining was an art. While the Pilgrims were “still settling” on Plymouth Rock, Flanner wrote, the duc was visiting chateau after chateau, where he described room after room that might be decorated, for one night, for the maskers, another for musicians, a third for actors, and so on. Through it all the splendidly dressed hostess would glide with perfect poise, pretending it had all happened with the flick of a fan. The duc wrote, “One diverted one’s-self extremely, nor did one leave till after eight in the morning.”
Janet Flanner continued: “The parties just given in Paris were not so ultra-modern as Saint-Simon’s, nor so elegantly démodé as those for which Boni de Castellane rented the entire Bois de Boulogne to receive his guests, and Paul Poiret, another fabulous (pre World-War-I) host, dressed an actor in seed pearls, served a thousand liters of champagne, and three hundred hen lobsters, to divert his friends at his great ‘Arabian Nights’ fête. The 1930 Parisian parties, however, by being unusually frequent, fantastic, and mostly foreign, were remarkable for representing the true spirit of their time.”
Costume balls were, of course, command performances when given by the De Beaumonts or even someone like Daisy Fellowes for Elsa Maxwell’s birthday, and everyone was obliged to appear as someone else. Elsa Maxwell settled on the role of Aristide Briand, a former prime minister of France, which suited her perfectly. Daisy was a préposée du vestiaire, that is to say a cloakroom attendant, another sly choice. The young Cecil Beaton, who enjoyed cross-dressing as much as anyone, came as the novelist Elinor Glyn, and Jean-Michel Frank, Schiaparelli’s irrepressible protégé, was the Comtesse de Noailles. It would be useful to know what role Schiaparelli chose, but there is no clue.
Elsa Maxwell shortly returned the compliment by dreaming up a ball in which everyone had to arrive as they were when the charabanc, or bus, that was conveying them to the party arrived. The time of arrival was, of course, an open secret, and elaborate plans were hatched to make the most original entrance. One gentleman appeared in a hotel towel, his face lathered with shaving soap, and several ladies boarded the bus in various stages of déshabillé. Since each of the buses had a well-stocked bar, the undressing was fairly well advanced even before they got to the party. Residents of the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where the event took place, were reasonably prepared for startling sights because of the great life-class atelier of Montparnasse in their neighborhood. But, Flanner wrote some months later, they were “still discussing the charabanc party.”
Perhaps the most literally dazzling party was the one given by Jean Patou in which absolutely everything was encased in silver. His garden was roofed for the occasion in silver, silver walls went up, and those trees and branches that were included in the decor similarly disappeared under flamboyant cascades of silver. Flanner wrote, “from the metaled boughs hung silver cages, as tall as a man, harboring overstuffed parrots as large as a child.” Not to be outdone, Elsie de Wolfe, otherwise Lady Mendl, a former actress, noted interior decorator, and hostess of the Villa Trianon in Versailles, went one better, inviting a thousand guests to her Gold Ball and covering her interiors with bolts of gold cloth and her tables with gold lamé. The menus were gold, there was gold ribbon around the napkins, and even the champagne was gold.
Perhaps the most exquisite was the Bal Blanc given by the Pecci-Blunts (she was the grandniece of Pope Leo XIII) in the former quarters of the Sporting Club off the Champs-Elysées. Dilys Blum wrote, “It was organized by six of the élite young men of Paris society—a prince, a viscount, three counts, and a baron—earning it the alternate designation of the ‘Bal des Gigolos.’ ” The theme was relentlessly white: white evening wear, white waiters’ costumes, white flowers, and even Gypsy musicians uncomfortably dressed in white. Some people made their entrances wearing white plaster wigs designed for the occasion by Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard. Schiaparelli was, for her, staidly dressed—she might decide to, and often did, show up as a goat or a carrot. This was one of her popular apron designs, in full-length white ciré peau d’ange jersey, a matte fabric she had launched that season, accompanied by a necklace of coq feathers.
The great Paul Poiret attends to the final details of a 1925 creation while his tailor, kneeling, adjusts a seam. (illustration credit 6.6)
Nevertheless, as the Depression took hold, life in Paris was becoming more sedate. American and other tourist trade was disappearing fast. Women’s Wear Daily observed tartly in 1931 that the Paris of the can-can had become the Paris of the cloister. Even the relentlessly upbeat Vogue was charting the decline of flamboyant balls, and first nights at the opera and ballet had dwindled to the modest little cocktail party, the small supper for friends, or the cheap night out at the movies. But a slower, less hectic pace had its compensations. To begin with, newspapers that once reported all the high jinks and ignored the clothes were now writing about such trifles as who was wearing what, at leisurely length. That, for the embattled fashion industry, had to be a plus.
Everyone knew that
the unchallenged dominance of Paris in matters of elegance and taste, which began with Louis XIV, could never be taken for granted. Even Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895), the little Englishman who single-handedly transformed the role of the humble dressmaker into that of dress dictator, was aware that his status at the top of a complicated pyramid was tenuous at best. As for Paul Poiret, who once ordered three hundred hen lobsters for the delectation of his guests, he had disappeared from view, a fact that still grieved Schiaparelli when she wrote her memoir in 1953. This “Leonardo of fashion” had been a generous mentor and dear friend. “I remember especially a lunch at ‘Chez Allez,’ a low place in the heart of the Paris markets where we sat from noon to late at night … telling wonderful stories and drinking white wine.” In 1934 Poiret was living on charity and ten francs a day. He died in 1944. Schiaparelli wrote, “He died as Mozart died with not a single friend to follow his coffin. For the trouble with great creative artists is they give everything all the time and very often are left at the end with nothing for themselves.” At the time she was writing these words her own star was in decline, as she well knew. Had they ever thought, she wrote to her female audience, how just a few people, perhaps fewer than a dozen, controlled their destinies? “Do not think of a leading Paris couturier merely as a person who designs a dress. She or he creates the very appearance of contemporary women.”
Elsa Schiaparelli Page 14