Schiaparelli in 1949, wearing her famous brooch (illustration credit 12.1)
In the days before photographs, French dressmakers had routinely used porcelain dolls, exquisitely attired, to demonstrate the latest fashions, since they were easy to transport, superbly equipped to show off the intricacies of cut, and beautiful objects in themselves. Why not use dolls to show the world that “the vitality of French fashion was as strong as ever and that it was ready for business”? But these dolls had to be freshly conceived. Everything hinged on the concept, and this one turned out to exactly reflect the mood of the moment. Since wire was one of the few items not in short supply that autumn of 1944, the dolls’ bodies, anatomically correct, would be made of wire. Their plaster heads would be entrusted to an artist, in this case the Catalan sculptor Joan Rebull, whose pert little women with their high foreheads, snub noses, and haughty little chins had the right air of arrogant self-assurance.
The models would show the latest Paris fashions, but that was only the beginning, since the presentation had been entrusted to Christian Bérard, that versatile artist, illustrator, and master of theatrical illusion. Edmonde Charles-Roux wrote, “Who could refuse anything to this magician of decor, this charmer, this prince of friendship?” He was the one who came up with the idea of creating tableaux around the theme of “Le Théâtre de la Mode,” the Theatre of Fashion. He persuaded top talents in the crosscurrents of art and drama, like Cocteau, Boris Kochno, Emilio Grau-Sala, Georges Geffroy, and others, to create improbable but delightful scenes from the life of a smart Parisian. Here she is at the Opéra, strolling the grands boulevards, at the Palais Royal, the café, the ball, or in an enchanted grotto. The overall theme, a great theatrical interior, would be created by Bérard himself. The wire figures were entrusted to a specialist, Jean Saint-Martin, and the design of the dolls to a talented young artist, Eliane Bonabel.
Each couturier was allowed to dress from one to five dolls for a collection total of almost 240 poupées. This is where the real art began, since the dolls were only two feet and three inches tall and everything about them had to be reduced to scale. That is to say, not just the outfits, but the wigs, hats, gloves, shoes, furs, buttons, safety pins, zippers, even handbags and jewelry. The designers had set themselves the heroic task of creating clothes that could be unfastened, underwear that could be taken on or off, hand-stitched buttonholes for handmade buttons, real pockets, even handbags that opened and closed, with inner compartments. Only Paris had the fine skills needed to even attempt such a task or the zeal to deal with the problems that arose. For instance, Carven’s model, “Sucre d’Orge” (all the models had names), was to wear a striped fabric to match the original. But it then transpired that the fabric was out of scale for the doll, so it was actually cut down and painstakingly reassembled to the proper scale. Hats and furs were a particular headache. The milliner Claude Saint-Cyr remarked, “For a dress the measurements are very important but for a hat they must be correct to a millimeter. A little too far forward, a little too far back and it’s finished—it no longer flatters the face … We fitted, we cut, we repinned, we started again.” As for furs, that freezing winter, with no indoor heat and constant cuts in electricity, “plying a needle, working a skin, wetting a skin in freezing water, was terrible …”
Still, nothing quite as audacious had been possible for years, and the burst of creativity unleashed on the project brought out the best in everyone, from the leather workers who warmed their fingers over candles every few minutes, to the fabric houses that made fabrics so that they would fold properly on the models. And since these were actual clothes for actual people, the Théâtre de la Mode ushered in the first postwar Paris designs. These showed, Nadine Gasc wrote, that skirts were becoming longer and shoulders more rounded. The waistlines were in, with a vengeance—all those wire girls had impossibly small waistlines, emphasized with belts and ribbons—which heralded the return of the corset. Bosoms were definitely fashionable again. The new fabrics were slowly emerging, full of color and pattern, particularly stripes and polka dots. The Parisienne’s staple item was still the suit, but these were ever so slightly less military and utility in feeling. Walking jackets were also very much in evidence, with slightly more ornamentation. Hats were less garish and more flattering. High heels were definitely in, and so were umbrellas that matched. At home, she swept the floor in yards of striped cotton hostess gowns, in a formally informal sort of way. But at night she emerged in all her plumage, wearing strapless and sleeveless ball gowns with huge skirts, made of layered flounces consisting of black tulle petals or in red satin, embroidered with ruby beads. She arrived at dinners and balls wearing amazing evening coats of black and silver brocade with black turbans ornamented with netting and feathers. This was a tragic period, Edmonde Charles-Roux wrote, “one we will always remember, a haunting period of doubts when the world lived in ‘the pitiable hope of regaining a lost paradise.’ Hence those ‘insensate efforts’ of which Aragon spoke, when luxury became part of a prestige to be reconquered.”
The effect of those beautiful dolls in their fantastic settings, after years of austerity, was hard to overstate. They were only dolls, but because so much passion and commitment had been expended in creating them, something lingered in the aura of the objects themselves that suggested individuality and character, as the photographer David Seidner found, many years later, when he was given the task of photographing each in turn. The exhibition that opened in March 1945 at the Louvre was considered so significant that the Garde Republicaine, in full regalia, flanked the staircase on opening night. However ephemeral, this audacious conceit “had insolently restored to its place the real, the rare, the beautiful, and the luxurious. And as if part of this audacious dream, Parisians forgot present or past misery and crowded to see these dazzling little figures.” In a few weeks the exhibition drew more than one hundred thousand visitors. The same success followed exhibitions in London, Leeds, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Vienna, and, in the spring of 1946, New York as well. (Thanks to the determined efforts of Susan Train, bureau chief of Condé Nast, the exhibition was revived and toured again in 1990.) Schiaparelli was represented by three designs, whether by her interim representative, Irène Dana, or herself is not known. But since they were eclipsed in the show by other, more imaginative entries, one suspects they were not hers.
In one sense, Irène Dana had served Schiaparelli & Cie well. She had kept the doors open, kept the staff employed through some hard times, and kept the name of Schiaparelli alive. The other piece of good news was that she turned out to be a less imaginative designer than her patron; the reverse could have been disastrous. The news that was no one’s fault was that haute couture had only just survived the Occupation. There was a further, unknown factor: how much Schiaparelli’s clouded wartime activities, and the suspicion of her role as a collaborator, had affected public opinion about her. For many reasons, five years had been lost.
In characteristic fashion Schiaparelli immediately began a one-woman campaign to restore her, and her house’s, former status. Bettina was at her side, thinking up her inimitable schemes for public relations and displays; so was Hortense MacDonald. Not all of their old contacts had been swept away by the war. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar were still following her work, and so were Women’s Wear Daily and the New York Times. She was still appearing everywhere, at concerts, lectures, operas, plays, films, and balls. Wherever she went, she would be seen and photographed. The Washington Post columnist Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer wrote, “Within a week or so of the May-June season in Paris, Schiaparelli made an entrée at an assortment of fancy-dress balls in a weird variety of costumes—as a popular song, a radish and a mineral water queen.” At a Red Cross charity ball in the palace of the late Count Boni de Castellane she also appeared with a birdcage tied around her neck containing a live canary. The ceaseless round was a kind of testament to her stores of energy, psychic and otherwise. She was soon back in the news. The message from the Théâtre de
la Mode had been influential. A softer look, longer skirts, rounded shoulders, and a greater emphasis on bosoms and waistlines, was in vogue. So it was something of a surprise, as the New York Times reported, when Schiaparelli’s first fall collection in September 1945 held no surprises. She continued her own tradition: square shoulders, straight skirts, short jackets, and stiff silks and suits for every moment of the day.
If there were no surprises, there were some handsome designs. A chocolate-colored jacket trimmed with black braid motifs came with a slim black wool skirt. For afternoon there was a dressier suit in black crepe with interesting trims in hot pink. There was a profusion of beautiful plaid silks, ostrich plumes, boots, and bonnets. There was a long black evening coat which seemed to be on backwards—an intermittent joke with Schiaparelli, who had previously designed a back-to-front jacket. There was a neckline addition that got much comment: a scarf tied around the neck and covering the chin, in the fashion of Regency dandies.
A scarf that covers the neck and chin—most women over fifty would just as soon hide their necks—adds another minor detail to the argument that Schiaparelli designed for herself. However, one sartorial conceit certainly would not have suited her unless she had ambitions to look like Queen Victoria. It was the bustle. A revival of interest in the Gay Nineties, and her own admiration for Mae West, led her to introduce this anachronism in 1939. Being Schiaparellis, they were highly original works in striped fabrics and figured satins, gathered and draped in unexpected ways and worn with long gloves and ostrich-feathered headdresses, but bustles nevertheless. In the collections shown in February and August 1946, she brought them back for day wear, and the resulting jackets and coats looked for all the world, as Vogue aptly commented, as if a bowler hat had been tucked underneath. There were more evening gowns with bustles, including one of bronze green faille embossed with velvet flowers, and other echoes of the Gay Nineties in, for instance, some clever dress prints: one was of some nineteenth-century dandies wearing top hats and straw boaters. The whole vexed issue of how to travel continued to haunt her. One of her coats, generously cut with a flared or “swing” back, had huge pockets thoughtfully lined in plastic. She also invented an entire trousseau that could be fitted into an airline carrier bag. There was a reversible coat for day and night, six day dresses and three hats. The whole thing weighed less than ten pounds, and she was enormously proud of it, but the idea sold poorly.
In 1946 Vogue reported, “She is back to her old button tricks—using Napoleonic coins, barometers and such amusing nonsense.” Of surrealism, this was the only lingering trace. In the long fight to establish herself as an artist and designer, what had sustained her was everything De Kerlor represented: the world of the spirit, psychic phenomena and unseen forces. She found those ideas again in surrealism and its emphasis on poetic invention and unconscious urges. Mystical causes, magical effects; unexpected juxtapositions and nonsequiturs: she was exploring, as Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “the lacy fringes of consciousness.” Such preoccupations spoke to the dreamer in her, the gambler and the rebel. Richard Martin wrote, “She was ever the artistic designer, seizing at ideas, grasping many with a quickness of gesture” that was the secret of her success. Qualities of “verve, vivacity and the supreme instantaneous moment” informed her best work. Her artistic responses found their answering chord in the needs of women just then: not simply to be elegant or even attractive but self-assertive, willing to experiment boldly and enjoy the startled reaction.
The influence of surrealism, which was beginning to fade as early as 1939, had disappeared altogether. It is hard to know why. The movement had certainly lost some of its vitality along with its ability to shock. Still, Hollywood had taken up the theme and was using it successfully as the war ended, as, for example, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Gregory Peck–Ingrid Bergman film, Spellbound, with its Daliesque references and dream landscapes. True, Dalí was about to move away from his favorite themes and launch himself on his new academic period. Magritte, Duchamp, Delvaux, and others continued to explore the possibilities. Why not Schiaparelli? Her memoir gives no clues. It is a safe guess, however, that as an artist she would have known that the next big movement was hovering in the background. Whatever its acceptance of the spontaneous act (as, for instance, Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings), abstract expressionism hardly lent itself to clothes design in the way surrealism had done, or, for that matter, to any interpretation. There were so many reasons to feel unsure of the future, and she had not designed anything for five years. She wrote, “The frightening point was how to start again. How was I to pick up the arrow left lying there … and cast it accurately towards the next targer?” Exactly how could she make women look, as she wrote, like Parisians again? A certain image was forming in her imagination. “I continued to have a vision of women dressed in a practical yet dignified and elegant way, and I thought of the ancient wisdom of the Chinese and the simplicity of their clothes.”
This elliptical comment seems anticlimactic in the light of Schiaparelli’s bolder fantasies, and certainly did not correspond with the mood of the moment. James Laver, that authority on the history of costume, thought that every great crisis, such as the one World War II represented, was succeeded by a return to what he called “little girls’ clothes.” That the postwar trend was drifting in the direction of a softer, rounder, younger look, as reflected by the Théâtre de la Mode, was clear. Still, no one was quite prepared for the phenomenon that burst upon the world of haute couture in the spring of 1947.
Christian Dior arrived on the scene in the unlikely guise of a “pink-cheeked man with an air of baby plumpness still about him, and an almost desperate shyness augmented by a receding chin,” Bettina Ballard wrote. In Paris in the Fifties Stanley Karnow described him as “a balding bachelor of fifty-two … [who] resembled an ambassador or a banker in his charcoal double-breasted suit …” As one of four children of a wealthy manufacturer of fertilizer, Dior had an independent income and endless hours to devote to his favorite pastime, dress designing. In the world of haute couture he was known as a freelance sketch artist, selling ideas to various houses, as he did to Schiaparelli. When he returned to civilian life after the war, he was hired to design clothes, along with Pierre Balmain, for Lucien Lelong, who never pretended to be a designer. Then he met Marcel Boussac, a millionaire textile manufacturer who was looking for a figurehead. He chose Dior.
Boussac’s deep pockets provided a sumptuous hôtel particulier on the discreet and chic Avenue Montaigne, where Dior’s name, in elegant black lettering, was inscribed over an ornamented doorway. Boussac also paid for advance publicity so that the stage was set, that twelfth day of February 1947, for a huge crowd. Dior also had some influential friends, including Comte Etienne de Beaumont, Marie-Louise Bousquet, Christian Bérard, and Michel de Brunhoff of Vogue, who also attended that momentous event. There was so much demand for seats that “some people attempted to get in through the top of the house with ladders.” Seeing the crowd, the panic-stricken Dior escaped to his office and would not come out. Similarly, the first mannequin to appear was “so agitated that she stumbled.” But as one splendid creation succeeded another, it was greeted with audible gasps and applause. At the end, when Dior did venture to appear, he received a tumultuous ovation. Carmel Snow marvelled, “Your dresses have such a new look!” The description stuck.
The New Look was, in truth, not particularly new. It followed the immediate postwar trend, as evident from the models in the Théâtre de la Mode two years before: a feminine, romantic, rounded look. What Dior did was elaborate on the idea and intensify its effects. Harper’s Bazaar noted that bodices and jackets were tightly fitted to outline the bust, and where the lady lacked the necessary curves, the dress provided it with falsies. This was not exactly Dior’s creation; Schiaparelli had long ago decided it took a curve or two to make a dress hang properly. There were corsets and girdles to come; even, for a fashion nanosecond or two, the hidden torturer needed to produce a wasp waist. Pleats w
ere stitched down about ten inches from the waistline and then released into fullness.
Dior’s New Look was as much artifice as art, requiring not just corsetry but horsehair padding and canvas interfacing if the vast skirts were to billow out properly. Extra padding on the hips was unnecessary, thanks to the yards and yards of fabric: a manufacturer’s dream. Dior was challenged on that score and hotly denied its crass implications. But it was true that the rustle and swish of those huge, beautiful skirts, standing or seated, with their fabulous sheen, their melting floral patterns, and their ravishing hues, made the most unlikely-looking woman look as if she were sitting in a flower border. And with the right accoutrements: hats, gloves, and jewelry, the ladylike look was complete.
Laver wrote that the New Look represented “a desire on the part of women to return, after the austerities of wartime, to a more settled and, it was thought, more agreeable age.” The debut of this collection reasserted the dominance of Paris as fashion center, despite the increased cost of the clothes, and the attempts to tighten the free export of ideas that were a constant preoccupation of the French authorities postwar. The New Look could not last—nothing in fashion ever does—but its influence continued for a surprisingly long time. The father of Stephen Sondheim, Herbert Sondheim, who ran a select New York fashion house that reflected these trends, was still showing tight-waisted, petticoat-supported, vast and beautiful skirts and suits in 1953–54. There was even a model or two in 1957, although by then fashion had moved on to the A-line, the H-line, the Trapeze, and all kinds of other temptations to buyers in later years. What also killed the New Look was the fact that it was so constricting. Tight arm-holes limited movement. Tight waistlines made a decent meal almost impossible, layers of heavy skirts discouraged rapid walking, and corsets really hurt. As Laver predicted, the silhouette was loosening up, and within ten years the waistline would disappear; some think it never came back. Women did not really want to go backwards. If the truth were known, they wanted to look emancipated, confident, and self-aware, the kind of woman Schiaparelli had designed for. But by the time the emotional pendulum had swung back in that direction, it was too late—for Schiaparelli.
Elsa Schiaparelli Page 29