About fashion

Couture houses survived by cut-backs and staff reductions, by getting credit from textile manufactures and using capital accrued during the rich years of the Twenties, and because of the faithful patronage of the 'Best Dressed List'. This list was, to borrow a phrase of Ernestine Carter's, a 'tongue-in-the -chic' poll, taken by the leading couturiers in the Twenties, to decide which of their distinguished clients were the most elegant. Said The New York Times,'A candidate must do more than invest the sum of $50,000 with the Paris dressmaking trade. She must have brains, poise and vivacity.' Fashion journalist Brigid Keenan, writing in 1977 in The Women We Wanted To Look Like, said that couturiers in those days designed for 'a handful of rich Society women who rivalled each other in smartness, snobbery and wealth. These women were fashion. Every bow or bead they wore was reported in the papers, and the loveliest among them were in constant demand as the subjects for glossy magazine photographs.'

Schiaparelli and Poiret were two of the great entertainers of fashion, and, along with Patou and Dior, laid the foundations of our modern fashion scene-the razzmatazz style of presentation, the catwalk capers, the media hype. The media has had a profound influence on the way that fashions are marketed, and the fashion artists, editors and photographers have played a major role in shaping public attitudes.Right from the first popular fashion plates of the late 18th century, the aim of the artist has been simple: to show the dress in detail and at the same time create an appealing image ( usually impossibly slim-waisted), a reflection of the feminine and masculine ideal.
The fashion artist, as we understand and recognize him today, began when Lucien Vogel founded the delightful magazine La Gazette du Bon Ton in 1912. Vogel gathered a coterie of avant-garde illustrators such as Paul Iribe, André Marty, and Georges Lepape, who were encouraged by Poiret and did much to popularize the Poiret style. By the 1920s, fashion reporting had become a branch of journalism in its own right, and artists created an entirely new style of graphic art, enhancing the pages of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Femina and Jardin des Modes.

Poiret had shown how it should be done, with his beige coloured Torpedo Renault and matching chauffeur. Patou owned Hispano-Suiza sports autos, and so did Molyneux, but if they raced each other down the Rue de Rivoli it isn't recorded.
The American mannequin Lillian Farley, who modelled as Dinarzade, remembers those un repeatable, far-off days in her memoirs: 'A Hispano-Suiza was sent to fetch us...A footman opened the door and led us upstairs to a dressing-room. Palatial was the word for this. The walls were inlaid with minute squares of gold mosaic...a dozen heavy crystal and gold perfume bottles, graduating in size, stood on the dressing table. In the hall Patou's butler was shaking cocktails, and the others were already in the library talking to Madam Lucile.'This was not Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon, but Patou's premier, the top-ranking dressmaker in a couture house who translates a couturier's ideas into reality.

Patou came from a comfortable, bourgeois background. His family were tanners, but himself became first a furrier, then a dressmaker and fin ally in 1911, a tailor, so he had a solid grounding for couture. Indeed, such was the quality of his workmanship that his clothes, like those of Chanel, wore well even after being well worn. His style was of rigorous simplicity and neatness, and a clean-lined, almost geometric elegance. It was very much in the Cubist, Art Deco manner of symmetrical design broken by oblique seams; the style was very pervasive in the Twenties, when even patisserie was decorated in what was called the 'New Style'. Patou used Cubist motifs on bathing costumes, on beautifully tailored day dresses, sweaters, blouses, skirts and jackets, some bearing, as part of the intrinsic design, his monogram,JP.
In his immaculate, dark suits, spats and grey Homburg hat, Patou was the acme of masculine elegance, a playboy par excellence and according to his close friend and associate,the Society columnist Elsa Maxwell, a passionate gambler.

Fashion is perpetually sensitive to the kaleidoscopic patterns registered by the shifts, changes and caprices of everyday life, exploiting the latest fads to its own purpose.In the decade before World War I, America was dancing the Boston Two-Step, the Turkey Trot, the Bunny Hug and exciting new dance called the Tango, which inspired the shoe industry to produce suitable footwear-the cuban heel of 1904, and the tango shoe of 1913 with its louis heel and laces around the ankles.The average woman-if the ever was such a person-bought her dresses from department stores-with tango shoes to match.

From the end of the seventeenth century shows the development from the trained mantua through the various robes, and the chemise dress, to the bellshaped crilonine, the back-fullness bustle, and finally the tubular or linear style that, give or take a few brief departures such as DIOR's New Look of the late 1940s, is still with us today.

The spell cast by fashion has remained undiminished, from the excesses of Marie Antoinette two centuries ago, to the lady who recently admitted to owning over two two hundred pairs of shoes with matching handbags, and wardrobes crammed with suits and dresses, many of which had never been worn, nor were likely to be since she bought, on average, one complete outfit every week! Fashion is one of the more rewarding expressions of a vigorous consumer society, that is, a society that demands and find stimulus in variety and constant change.Fashion in clothes, as in autos, electronics, household appliances, and other goods, reflects economic growth and social progress.

The clothes that we wear, our shoes, our hats and other accessories, indicate our class and nationality, and can date us to within a decade or sometimes to within a year or even a brief season, such is the rapid rate of change in dress.Most people follow the styles of contemporary fashions either because they wish to avoid being singled out...What is it all about? What is the purpose or meaning of fashion, if anything?

The 1920s heralded the age of functional fashion, as opposed to the rather Grande Dame styles of the previous decades, and the extravagant, theatrical designs of that great individualist Poiret.His decline and fall occured because he was unable to adapt to the post-war mood and its demand for simplicity.Women wanted easy-to-wear clothes, and responded to the tomboy look exemplified by that other great individualist who practised what she preached-Coco Chanel.