About fashion

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.

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 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.