By degrees Schiaparelli was inching away from her romp through surrealism, with all its inferences and metaphors and impudent jokes, toward something equally attuned to the moment but not half as much fun. These designs seemed to reflect a kind of mass hedonism, or what Janet Flanner thought was “ ‘a fit’ of prosperity, gaiety and hospitality.” The ubiquitous slim, fitted line was erupting at the back in a plethora of frills, loosely associated with an apron shape. One can imagine how that would go over nowadays. That was all very trompe l’oeil, because when the apron ties were released, half the skirt fell down and formed a full-length evening outfit. So it was quite practical in a way, an idea that was canceled out by a determinedly silly knot of turquoise-blue velvet, worn perilously over the forehead and kept in place by a strap, that called itself a hat.
If surrealism was mostly out, a nostalgic salute to the Gay Nineties was obviously on the way in, with plenty of tulle and ostrich feathers around the neck and diamond-pane plaids worn over trailing black dresses. The threat of a corseted waist and a new kind of bustle hung ominously in the air, along with smaller and smaller hats perched even farther over the eyes, elongated jackets, leg-of-mutton sleeves, and lots more skirt. As “K.C.” commented in The New Yorker that fateful summer of 1939, “Couturiers are reviving the days when it was a man’s world and women suffered discomfort making themselves decorative.” Outfits could not have been prettier or more empty-headed.
That summer, too, Janet Flanner wrote, “There have been magnificent costume balls and parties, with dancers footing it till early breakfast, hitherto a dull meal people got up on rather than went to bed after.” (She obviously had not yet met Bettina.) “There have been formal dinner parties in stately houses; there have been alfresco fêtes held in the salon because of the sunspot storms; there have been garden parties that couldn’t be held in the garden but were not dampened in spirit by the rain … French workmen are working; France’s exports are up; her trade balance continues to bulge favorably; business is close to having a little boom. It has taken the threat of war to make the French loosen up and have a really swell … time.”
The orgy of extravagance lavished on costumes and balls that summer of 1939 was extraordinary even by Parisian standards, Bettina Ballard wrote in In My Fashion. Some of the best theatrical designers were handsomely paid to create backgrounds for these displays of wealth and status: Bérard, Valentine Hugo, and Ira Belline among them. The actual work of making the costumes was executed by Karinska. Hours before the event, customers in her crowded studio would be “scrambled together” with their designers, “solidly locked in pins and confusion and the nightmare that their clothes would never be done in time.” These ethereal triumphs had to be memorialized, and the privileged would troop into the studios of Vogue to be photographed, either before or after the event, accompanied by their coiffeurs and dressmakers to adjust every curl and smooth every wrinkle for posterity. It was amazing, Ballard wrote, how many were willing to pose for hours, happily lost in the roles they were playing. Eventually one might see, in the pages of the fashion magazines, Daisy Fellowes wearing a white Chinese robe and a blue-and-black lacquered wig. Denise Bourdet would assume the persona of the Baroness Maria Vetsera; Nicky de Gunzburg was the Crown Prince Rudolf. Roussy Sert appeared as a masked thief from The Arabian Nights, and Schiaparelli herself, her delicate figure poised on a pedestal, had been transformed into an eighteenth-century Venetian page, complete with turban, cloth-of-gold jacket, and black stockings and carrying a “blackamoor” mask mounted on a fan.
That June of 1939 Elsie de Wolfe gave a second circus ball in her gardens at Versailles and imported horses from Finland, which she decorated with jeweled harnesses. Her biographer, Jane S. Smith, noted that “despite some amatory and sanitary indiscretions” on their part, and the refusal by the three elephants to allow Princess Karam of Kapurthala on board, the evening was another triumph for the indomitable hostess.
According to the Vogue correspondent, M. Embiricos gave a sensational ball for Princess Alexandra of Greece in which the motif of blue and white was taken from the Greek national flag. This theme was used to transform Mrs. Harrison Williams’s house, thoughtfully lent for the occasion, into a string of hothouses more or less filled to the rafters with blue and white flowers of every kind. For instance, chandeliers were painted white for the occasion and smothered in white carnations, as were the tables with their white-and-blue theme. As for the guests, tulle and organdy in the reigning colors transformed the elegant and quite sophisticated crowd into drifts of flowerlike sylphs descending the stairs.
Then there was the party given by Louise Macy, an American editor and socialite and sometime dress designer, which caused considerable comment because she decided to hold it in the deserted Hôtel Salé. This was arguably one of the most beautiful seventeenth-century houses in Paris, but in such a stage of disrepair that there was no running water or plumbing, let alone electricity. It seems emergency repairs were made, and the contrast between the elegance of the scene design and the semiruined space gave a certain delicious frisson to those who enjoyed visual metaphor. Ladies by candlelight nodded and beckoned in their crowns and diadems of aigrettes while the male guests arrived in all their regalia. “Real Dukes wore real orders; two women’s garters hung from Fifi Fenwick’s lapel. The Marquis de Polignac and the Comte de Castéja came in court dress, the elegance of their knee breeches and silk stockings perfectly in order in those stately halls.”
The most important social event that summer was, as usual, the annual fête of the Comte and Comtesse Etienne de Beaumont. It was the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Jean-Baptiste Racine, and the guests were instructed to come dressed as characters from the plays of the great dramatist, or his period. This was a scholarly challenge requiring much anxious research and creative decisions. Chanel chose to appear as a male dancer performing a minuet in a painting by Watteau, L’Indifférent. This was a brilliant stroke of public relations, since that painting had been stolen from the Louvre. (It has since been returned.) The dancer’s delicate figure would have set off to perfection her own lean contours, wearing his gray satin jacket and brief pantaloons, his swinging cape and flower-decked hat, “half bird and half fawn,” as an admiring art historian wrote.
Baron Maurice de Rothschild was Bajazet, in an exact replica of a Racine costume, to which he had added some priceless examples from his collection of Renaissance jewels by Benvenuto Cellini. Someone else had the splendid idea of staging the entrance of Racine himself, accompanied by three men in red wigs. Cristóbal Balenciaga contributed some exquisite reproductions of Spanish court costumes, as painted by Velázquez. Unfortunately it rained that night, so entrances that should have been made in the garden, transformed for the occasion into an open-air theatre, had to be made indoors. Bettina Ballard wrote, “Herded into the house, with no place to sit, little to drink, a cold, dank atmosphere of people misplaced from their century without a proper theatrical background descended on the party.”
For Schiaparelli, the evening was a disappointment for other reasons. She had decided to take over the character of Prince Henri de Condé, an actual historical figure from the court of Henri IV, who was for a time heir presumptive to the crown, and continued to hold the rank of First Prince of the Blood Royal afterward. The title included an income, precedence, ceremonial privileges, and the exclusive right to be addressed as “Monsieur le Prince” at court. Was there some aspect of self-identification in the choice, as Schiaparelli set out that evening in blue and white, with an enormous headdress of sweeping ostrich plumes? She will only record that nobody knew who she was.
When Loelia Ponsonby married Hugh “Bendor” Grosvenor, the fabulously rich Duke of Westminster, in 1930, Winston Churchill was their best man, and she became mistress of a Gothic palace, Eaton, in Cheshire, as well as houses in Scotland, Wales, and France, not to mention yachts. She was twenty-eight years old, one of London’s brighter-than-usual young things, with a sparkling
turn of phrase and an undeceived eye. She tried to follow the latest fashions and judged the interiors of the great London houses as banal and worse. “The rich were extraordinarily Philistine and unintellectual, low-brows were very much in the ascendant …” Yet when she came to choose a wedding dress, it was in such spectacular bad taste it is hard to think of anything comparable except, perhaps, the frills and bows that almost smothered the young Diana, Princess of Wales, the day she set out to marry Prince Charles. Loelia’s dress, of sagging satin, was covered with lugubrious frills in the skirt and also dangling from the neckline in large, limp bunches. The outfit was married to a satin jacket apparently meant to match but that added to the load at the neckline with a massive fur collar further adorned with a corsage. About the unflattering hat, the less said the better. On the other hand, her playboy husband, benefitting from the exquisite tailoring of Savile Row, was a model of dapper elegance. He even wore spats.
Loelia, the Duchess of Westminster, in her 1930 wedding finery (illustration credit 9.3)
Schiaparelli would have rescued her in a second (“Lose the hat! Bury the frills!”), but Loelia’s complacent expression in the photograph makes it highly unlikely that she would have listened. Such dismal bad taste was not going to be reformed in a few years despite Daisy Fellowes and the fashion magazines. In the face of such obtuseness, Schiaparelli was powerless. Was it the fault of her clientèle or a miscalculation on her part? She explained that English ladies “never had much money” for clothes. By the time they had taken care of their houses, horses, dogs, and gardens, there was nothing left over. Or perhaps they took a look at her new “cigarette” silhouette, wondered what the vicar would think, and went back to their twin sets. Schiaparelli also complained, rather pettishly, that great ladies never paid their bills. Anyway, Wicked Uncle Henry had seduced her into it, the man with the huge guffaw, oversize cigars, and eternal, evergreen belief in Lady Luck. After she closed her salon at 6 Upper Grosvenor Street in 1939 he was still in her life, personally and professionally. He was her mentor in chief, her strategist behind all the perfume sales in France, the UK, and the U.S. He picked up a share of the profits from the American company and also seems to have had a financial stake in her couture business. No doubt she was thinking of him when she wrote that “my London years had been the happiest in my life.”
Schiaparelli was constantly travelling that year. She left London in March with Gogo, bound for Tangier, again giving Henry’s office address at 19 Buckingham Gate as her own. Two months later, on May 7, she again left London, this time for Lisbon, saying she was not coming back. On August 23, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact. A week after that, after conquering Czechoslovakia, Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France declared war on the Third Reich. The war no one was ready for began.
In his study of the arts in wartime France, And the Show Went On, Alan Riding examines the effect the declaration had on life in the capital city. “With memories of World War I still fresh, Paris was initially swept by fear,” he writes. “Trainloads of children were evacuated to the provinces, gas masks sold out, Métro stations were readied to serve as air-raid shelters, anti-aircraft balloons were hoisted above the city, evening blackouts were ordered and sirens were tested … Many movie productions were halted, since most actors and technicians had been mobilized.” The Place Vendôme fitted up its basement as a shelter. At the first sign of trouble all work stopped and the Schiaparelli staff descended. Schiaparelli herself recalled that the first air raid came one lunch hour. “The aeroplane flew so low that they nearly cut off Napoleon’s head,” a revealing comment. Maybe she remembered to duck.
Everyone was prepared for the immediate bombardment of Paris, as had happened during World War I, but none came, and along the Maginot Line, the one that would protect the country from another invasion, all was quiet. It was a lull that was not broken until Hitler’s offensive against France nine months later, in May 1940. Little by little panicked residents returned, children who had been evacuated came back from the country, and shuttered shops, restaurants, and theatres reopened. Schiaparelli wrote, “We went round town with our useless gas-masks or hiding bottles of whisky or gin in them, thinking that in the event of an alarm a stiff drink would be more reviving than gas.” Her establishment was open for business but there was little to be had. The staff was working half-time and the men were gone. There were no tailors. There were only three mannequins left, and even the hall porter, a White Russian, had joined up. His large red umbrella, the one that had sheltered so many customers coming and going between their limousines and the front door, was left behind.
Belgium was under attack and refugees were streaming into Paris and arriving in the hundreds outside the Belgian Embassy and jamming the Rue de Berri. There were vehicles of every size and shape, from limousines to bicycles, their flat tires leaning against the railings, carts and baby carriages. Most of all people. The embassy, its courtyard and gardens, was besieged, and there was nowhere to lie down. At one point, Schiaparelli had thirty refugees sleeping in the house. They were everywhere, Gogo wrote, even in the garage. With her usual decisiveness Schiaparelli put in orders that bread and hot coffee were to be always available for the new arrivals. Her downstairs canteen became a meeting place for British officers, volunteer American ambulance drivers, and women in the French Mechanized Transport Corps who were ferrying troops to the front. Gogo volunteered. Fairly soon she was drivi ng a huge truck, although, her distressed mother said, she was so short (just five feet) she had to sit on pillows in order to reach the steering wheel. Gogo ended up working eighteen-hour days as an ambulance driver near the battle lines. “Our job was to meet every hospital train of wounded soldiers and transport them to base and field hospitals. And oh, the horror of it. I shall never forget the torture of the wounded, and the smell: there were large numbers of gangrene cases.”
Materials were in short supply but life went on. Schiaparelli’s spring 1940 collections were coming up, and what was she to show? Her European clientele had stopped ordering clothes, and many of her colleagues in the small world of haute couture had closed their doors. Mainbocher fled to the United States. Madeleine Vionnet, that wizard of the bias cut, had stopped designing, and so had Chanel, who retired to the country. Others, like Christian Dior, Charles Creed, Marcel Rochas, and Robert Piguet, had been recruited, and Schiaparelli’s irreplaceable publicity agent, Hortense MacDonald, was back in the U.S. Schiaparelli stayed.
A Paris department store had constructed an air-raid shelter complete with table, lamp, benches, and sleeping bags, as a backdrop for a range of warm clothing: padded waistcoats, fleecy hoods, and all-in-one outfits. These could be donned over one’s pajamas and zipped up in a matter of seconds. Schiaparelli, as ever on top of the news if not in front of it, was ready with her own version of what would be called the siren suit. It had wide legs and a fitted bodice, with pockets large enough to carry identity papers and flashlights. There was also a carryall, more than a handbag, to encompass a gas mask, a first-aid kit, and the regulation powder puff and lipstick. Another of her ideas was a three-piece ensemble: pants, bloused jacket, and hood, in a transparent, blue-green waterproof material that presumably left the wearer prepared for anything. But to be chic—and being chic became a matter of pride in the years that followed—it was lined in violet flannel.
Schiaparelli’s spring collection, presented at the end of October 1939, consisted of only thirty designs and was shown on her three mannequins. Like other houses, she emphasized the military theme in silhouettes, details, and colors. Especially colors: there were torch pink, Maginot Line blue, aeroplane gray, trench brown, and Foreign Legion red. Everything was pared down and covered up. Necklines were higher and sleeves longer, as if in an instinctively protective human need. Shoes themselves covered up. They metamorphosed into booties up around the ankle, but since they were also Parisian they were also undeniably chic. One of her most popular models was a bootie made in a leopard-skin
print that fastened up the side and accompanied a whole outfit, including dress, jacket, and jaunty hat. Schiaparelli liked these booties so much she wore them often, and her personal pair, showing considerable wear, was donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
By the time the new designs were shown Schiaparelli’s staff of 600 had dwindled to 150 workers, and the whole collection was put together in three weeks. This was much too short a time for accessories like handbags and the like, so Schiaparelli came up with some ingenious alternatives. Women were, after all, having to do without their cars, travelling in buses, down in the Métro and on bicycles. Instead of bulky carryalls, why not give them nice roomy pockets? A case in point was a hooded greatcoat of stunning red wool, which had sizeable rectangular pockets attached to each side of its skirt. Or there was a black wool suit with a large pocket on the waistline to resemble a handbag. To complete the trompe l’oeil effect, a built-in strap ran diagonally across the front and down the back of the jacket. Evening clothes also received the pocket treatment. One black dinner ensemble had pockets that were almost a decorative accessory in themselves, being large, elaborately embroidered in gold, and provided with button-down flaps. Another evening jacket had a bloused front with gathers that continued below the waistline to become capacious pockets. One could use the pockets as an impromptu muff or surreptitious doggy bag.
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