Dictator by Demand
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The bone-wet chill of winter lifted, and pale sunlight laid shadows of the leafless chestnut trees in fine tracery on the cobbles alongside the Champs Elysees. The swank Ritz cocktail lounge and the grave Plaza Atheeneee bar were shrill with the sound of American females emitting the ritual cries of greeting as they hailed each other from divan to divan. In the lush Victorian plush of Maxim's, stumpy men from Manhattan's Seventh Avenue sat heavily, resting weary feet. Fashion reporters, department-store buyers and manufacturers, they were gathered for the annual rite of Paris' spring collections --the mystic and sacred time when Paris' top couturiers reveal to a tiptoe world the latest variations and dissonances on the theme of the Eternal Feminine.
Every day. morning and afternoon, the visitors seethed back and forth across the small Right Bank area where most of the 30 important houses of Paris' haute couture are concentrated. They sat through the collections of Patou and Heim, of Balmain and Fath. But most were waiting for the showing of a plump, pink, innocent-looking son of a fertilizer manufacturer. His name: Christian Dior. This year Dior celebrates his tenth year as a couturier, and every buyer in the trade has learned that it is unwise to buy in quantity before seeing the collection of Christian Dior.
Guarded Luxury. Dior gives them a show worth waiting for. On the big day, they go to the old private mansion in the
Avenue Montaigne, entering by twos and threes. Their credentials are carefully checked, and they are assigned seats according to a rigid protocol based on the prestige of their publications or the extent of their purchases in the years before. This year the Duchess of Windsor came late and unexpected, had to settle for a seat on the staircase.
To guard against frivolous visitors and suspected pirates, every manufacturer has to deposit $1,500 (deductible from future purchases) just to get in. Store buyers deposit $430. In the grey-and-gold salon the atmosphere is as tense and excited as a first night on Broadway. Smart, lean women in the toque hats of the latest-
till-now look lean forward expectantly. Dumpy ladies in basic black sit corset-upright and clutch stout, thick purses; the men from Seventh Avenue flick at their silver-white ties, exchanging grunted comments. The babble quickly hushes as the first model appears, and upon each face falls a stolid mask of calculated indifference, for any flicker will betray the spectator's interest to watching competitors.
The model, lean and remote, seems rapt in some asexual trance. She walks with a swift, gliding walk, and twirls once, as a girl assistant in nondescript black announces in a flat, noncommittal voice: "Colombine, quarante-et-un, fawr-ty-wan." The model hovers, slips off the jacket and hands it to the assistant, who accepts it in silence, impersonal and invisible as an attendant on some ancient hetaera. The stolid faces stare C'l listen for a certain quality of silence." says Dior). The model twirls again and is gone.
For nearly two hours the models perform their ritualistic dance, ending with the traditional wedding dress. Then, with a spatter of conventional applause, the audience erupts from the gilt seats and flows down upon the black-clad vendeuses stationed at every step on the stairway. Each buyer has her personal vendeuse, each vendeuse her jealously guarded clients. Many will return later to make their decisions. But others, momentarily unhinged, corral their vendeuses, rush off to a grey-curtained alcove, get out of their street dresses and demand to try on themselves one of the creations they have just seen modeled.
Soon the mansion is oppressive with rampant femininity. Curtains part to reveal a feminine world of black bras and girdles, as a woman, whose soberer decisions may mean hundreds of thousands of dollars to a U.S. clothing firm, peers into a mirror with the teetering look of calculated indecision, the peculiar mark of a woman buying a dress for herself. Outside, a thousand newspapers and a hundred periodicals were beginning to thunder the word to the limit of the known world. This year the word on Dior is: "The line is free, free as the Paris air ... free from making a choice between wide and narrow . . . free to wear or not to wear a belt."
Looms of Discontent. Dior and his Paris colleagues deal in a perishable commodity--novelty. The result is an obsession with secrecy that makes the trade as security-conscious as a guided-missiles plant, its workings as carefully timed as an amphibious landing. Early last week the dresses ordered by U.S. buyers were actually delivered to them in the U.S., heavily guarded and wrapped against spying. Not until this week will the curtain be lifted to let U.S. women get their first glimpse of the actual dresses, in magazines or newspapers. Working frantically against that deadline, swank stores prepared custom-made copies, to sell at $300 and up, from originals that may have cost them from $500 to $3,500; manufacturers on Seventh Avenue trimmed and compromised to produce a $39.50 version of a simple $600 day dress to be ready for Easter sales.
Though the $1.500,000 worth of Paris designs brought back each year by U.S. buyers are a tiny item in the U.S.'s annual $4 billion dress sales, they stir the whole massive bulk of the industry to new life. Even as U.S. women flip through the fashion magazines, other manufacturers will be studying the photographs, devising ways of changing materials, reducing fullnesses, simplifying cuts so that they can present a copy of a design they never paid for. In three months the $300 custom-made copies will have been copied in their turn to sell for $49.50. and by the time the copy is copied and further simplified to reach Union Square in an $8.95 version, every stenographer will be muttering about that old thing she is wearing, and every loom from Massachusetts to Alabama, every Manhattan sewing machine and cutting table from 25th Street to 41st will be humming merrily to the tune of her discontent.
Bone Is Unattractive. The relationship between Christian Dior and Seventh Avenue is based on mutual need. Ten years ago last month Dior brought out the New Look and Seventh Avenue joyfully discovered that every dress in every closet in the U.S. had been outmoded at one stroke. Every year since then, Seventh Avenue has looked to Dior to do it again. Dior duly assumed the accents proper to a dictator. "The women who are loudest for short skirts will soon be wearing the longest dresses. I know very well the women." He banished knees: "This part is never to be seen. It is bone, and I do not find bone particularly attractive." On occasion (1953) he changed direction without breaking stride, declaring: "I'm just itching to pin up women's skirts."
To Seventh Avenue's manufacturers, he was a guiding lamp in an uncertain world; he could tell them not what women had liked (they knew that), but what women would like in the next months, and they could make their plans accordingly. More than any other man, Dior has succeeded in making the Paris couturier, a man dedicated to painstaking and individual design for wealthy and exacting customers, a prime factor in the 20th century era of mass-produced clothes.
Why should U.S. buyers travel to Paris for their designs? Not all of them do. But the plain fact is that Paris has a reservoir of skilled needleworkers and a tradition of craftsmanship that no other nation can match--a tradition established largely by the simple fact that no other people have been willing to devote so much time and thought to their clothes.
Dolls for Britain. Christian Dior is a product of three centuries of elegance that run back to the reign of King Louis XIV. To control the restive feudal nobles he subdued, Louis built the huge palace at Versailles, turned it into a vast gilded cage where the aristocracy, cut off from their lands, were reduced to an idle group waiting on the Sun King. In that sumptuous court, elegance became an obsession, and Louis put the obsession to use. He organized Paris' dressmakers and tailors. Two life-sized dolls, dressed in the latest fashions, were shipped monthly across the Channel to London.
The fact that Britain was engaging the French army hotly in battle over the Spanish succession did not deter George I from ordering a whole Paris trousseau for his daughter-in-law. Marie Antoinette's dressmaker, Rose Bertin, maintained Paris' reputation for extravagant whims, and after the Revolution, aristocratic ladies carried on with the macabre fancy of dressing '`aa la victime,' their hair shorn off as in preparation for the guillotine and their necks bound by a thin red ribbon to simulate the cut of the knife. Trade thrived, and soon Louis' chief minister was declaring: "French fashions are to France what the mines of Peru are to Spain."
The great 19th century dictator of fashions was a onetime draper's apprentice from Lincolnshire named Charles Frederick Worth. When the Empress Eugeenie protested that a dress Worth had designed for her made her look like a curtain, Worth went to Emperor Napoleon III, argued that if Eugeenie accepted the design, it would revive Lyon's silk-weaving industry and forestall revolution. The Emperor ordered his Queen to wear the dress, a new vogue was set, and the number of looms in Lyon more than doubled. In another Worth fashion, women glided through life for 20 years in cages of circular steel hoops because Eugenie fished to conceal the signs of her pregnancy and Worth obliged by inventing the crinoline.
Worth's spell was broken by bearded Paul Poiret, who made Paris bright with harem skirts, fringes and beads. "I waged war on the corset," he cried, "and, like all revolutions, mine was in the name of liberty--freedom for the tummy." Poiret was the first to hire beautiful mannequins. He gave exotic parties in which Madame Poiret received in a cage of gold, while live cockatoos and monkeys scrambled among the guests and a dancer performed wearing only a pearl in her nostril.
The designer who shaped the flat-chested, emancipated woman of the 1920s was a wine merchant's daughter, Gabrielle Chanel, called "Coco." She invented the genre panvre, or poor look, put women into men's jersey sweaters, created a simple dress based on a sailor tricot. She used a ditchdigger's scarf, a mechanic's blouse, a waitress' white collar and cuffs, popularized slacks, backless shoes, cotton dresses. She had no use for the couturiers who insisted that they were geniuses. "We are not artists--we are furnishers," she insisted. "A work of art is something that at first seems ugly and becomes beautiful. Fashion first seems beautiful and then becomes ugly."
"Dior Go Home." Paris' new dictator of fashion is about as undashing as a Frenchman can get. Plump and pink, with the look of a startled rabbit, in Chicago he once walked unnoticed through a picket line of angry women carrying signs urging, CHRISTIAN DIOR GO HOME. None of them recognized him.
His parents came from some of France's oldest and richest bourgeois families; an uncle was Minister of the Interior under Poincare. Christian was born, the third of four children, on Jan. 21, 1905, in the huge family house perched over a cliff on the Norman coast. Petted by German nursemaids, learning from his mother to love flowers (he always decorated the dining-room table when guests were coming), the fat little boy took an early delight in designing costumes for his playmates, and in organizing fancy-dress parties. When he was ten he drew reprimands from his teachers for his habit of drawing a woman's leg in a high-heeled shoe on his books, examination papers and worksheets. "Something made me do it in spite of the scoldings. I derived such pleasure from the shapes I drew," he says.
At 14, Christian had his palm read by a fortuneteller. She said: "You will find yourself without money, but you will make your living from women, and it is by them that you will succeed." His family laughed, moved to Paris and tried to train him to be a diplomat. Instead, Christian plunged into the arty life of Paris of the '20s. Velvet-collared, bowler-hatted and rich, Christian hobnobbed with advanced musicians like Poulenc and Satie, artists like Jean Cocteau, Christian Berard and Salvador Dali, opened an art gallery with his father's financial backing.
In 1930, within a few months his-brother was struck down by an incurable nervous disease, his mother died, his father went bankrupt, and Christian had to go south to recover from a lung ailment.
He returned to Paris in 1935 with no money but with a new interest in embroidery, which he had learned while convalescing in Majorca. A friend taught him to make fashion sketches, and, to Christian's astonishment, succeeded in selling several to a fashion house for 120 francs. "At the age of 30," says Dior, "I was about to begin my real existence." He worked successively for Robert Piguet and Lucien Lelong as a designer, a period interrupted by a year's service in the army in the south of France, where he mostly dug ditches on a railroad track gang.
Fishmonger Look. At war's end, French couture was in the dangerous doldrums. New York was claiming to have supplanted Paris as the wellspring of fashion; Italian designers were asserting presumptuous claims. Rich Marcel Boussac, France's biggest owner of textile mills, became concerned. He reasoned that the prestige of Paris' couturiers directly affected the sale of textiles produced by his mills. He set out to find a. new designer who could inject fresh vitality into Paris' sluggish salons. Friends sent him Dior.
In December 1946 Dior retired to the home of a frieod in. Fontainebleau, spent 15 days in heavy thought, and emerged with the sketches that formed the basis for the New Look. He explains: "We were leaving a period of war, of uniforms, of soldier-women with shoulders like boxers. I turned them into flowers, with soft shoulders, blooming bosoms, waists slim as vine stems, and skirts opening up like blossoms." More informally, he has admitted that the New Look was based on a glimpse "of the heaving hipline of a female Paris fishmonger."
Never in the history of fashion had a single designer made such a revolution in his first showing. "God help the buyers who bought before they saw Dior!" said
Harper's Bazaar Editor Carmel Snow--"This changes everything." Cried another fashion oracle: "Dior has done for Paris couture what the taxi drivers did for France at the Battle of the Marne." His pink face smudged with congratulatory lipstick, even Christian Dior was stunned. "My God, what have I done?" he cried, and burst into tears.
Backed by Boussac's millions, Dior has branched out faster and farther than any other couturier ever has. In 1948 he launched Dior-New York, a wholesale house for which he designs twice-yearly collections derived from Paris motifs but aimed at the U.S. taste. There are Dior branches now in London and Caracas. He has installed a line of accessories, organized a perfume company, gone into hosiery, gloves and men's ties. He has designed cashmeres for Scotland's Hawick looms, bathing suits for Cole of California. In all, Dior enterprises in 24 countries gross $15 million a year. But the mainspring remains the painstaking, scrupulous design and construction of custom-made dresses in the headquarters on the Avenue Montaigne. Of the 12,000 dresses turned out each year, Dior sells more than $1,000,000 worth abroad, comprising more than half of all Paris couture's exports.
The Time for Masking. For all Dior's success, Paris couture in general is in parlous economic shape. Eastern European markets (except for exiled royalty) have dried up. Currency and import restrictions have cut purchases from Britain, Spain, Scandinavia, Brazil and Argentina. Since war's end eleven major houses have closed (among them: Molyneux, Lelong, Paquin, Worth, Schiaparelli). The big houses make their money on sales to the U.S. and abroad, or on sidelines--perfume, hosiery, etc. But most depend on private individual customers, who even at Dior account for more than 60% of the total dress sales. Nowadays, few couturiers do much better than break even on their sales to individuals. On a $400 dress, Dior reckons on a profit of only $30 (manufacturers who plan to reproduce it must pay much more for the same dress, sometimes a royalty on each copy sold). Since Paris dressmaking is almost entirely a handcraft industry (at Dior, one sewing machine serves 30 seamstresses), the couturier cannot cut costs by increasing production.
Despite their dependence on private customers, Paris' couturiers are apt to be haughty. An American visitor must show her passport before a showing, to assure the couturier that she is not a pirate in disguise. If she balks at the price, the vendeuse is apt to display a cool hauteur. "When they hesitate, I always advise them to buy elsewhere," says Dior's chief vendeuse. "Remorse is better than regret."
If the visitor is to be in Paris only a short time, she is stripped to her bra and girdle (preferably to her skin, but some are bashful). Measurements are taken in every conceivable direction, with especial attention to the size and disposition of the bosom, and a form is made to her shape. At Maison Dior, stuffed dummies are piled tidily atop closets in ghostly and lumpy array, all carefully anonymous but numbered.
The woman whom all dressmakers must finally please is the elegant and well-to-do Parisienne--a woman, says Dior, between the ages of 35 and 40, after she has won a few races and knows how to pace herself. "Since few women ever pass 40, maximum fascination can continue indefinitely. A woman does not really need chic until the animal has lost some of its spring and the mind begins to prowl. That is the time for masking."
Such Parisiennes, numbering perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 in all, are the couturier's most exacting critics. They live in a closed, intimate world, scarcely visible to the passing visitor, slipping silently across Paris in their limousines, disappearing behind the iron gates of Paris' aristocratic and ancient mansions. With them, manners and grooming are topmost; with enough of them, one of the couturier's necessary secrets is who pays for the lady's dress. An elegant Frenchwoman will spend hours searching for the exact shade of stocking to go with a certain dress, spend days debating the choice of a dress or a hat. At her couturier, she will sit down, stand, squirm and wiggle to test her dress for an unsightly wrinkle here, a crease there, for she knows that when she dines out, every eye that is turned in her direction will be educated and practiced.
The Spaniard. In this close, inner world of high fashion, Dior is sometimes deprecated as "the General Motors of Fashion." For the few women who can wear his severely elegant suits and dresses, the designer's designer is a handsome Spaniard named Cristobal Balenciaga. His admirers speak of him as of a dark, mysterious priest in an inner shrine. Said one elegant Parisienne: "Dior is a great publicist, a kind of Barnum of fashion. He has superb workrooms, everything is beautifully and interestingly done. But the only real designer is Balenciaga." Son of a Spanish boat captain, 61-year-old Balenciaga refuses to admit the press to his showings, avoids all Paris society, appeals to women who like his austere, sculptural designs. Enormously respected by his fellow designers ("We all call Cristobal 'seigneur,' " says Pierre Balmain), Balenciaga usually scorns to institute a new "line" for every season, but last week he startled Paris by showing skirts cut off right at the knee, defying nearly every other designer's trend.
The man who claims the largest private clientele in all Paris is sturdy, bristle-haired Pierre Balmain, who is charming in several languages. Balmain numbers among his customers Actresses Vivien Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, many South American millionairesses. Some of his biggest customers are Italian designers, who reproduce his dresses for the Italian market. On Italian designers' claims to rival Paris, he is tart: "Their ambition is to design dinner and cocktail clothes, but their ability is to design sport clothes."
There are other top couturiers, each with his champions. There is young (30) Marquis Hubert Taffin de Givenchy, a gangling giant (6 ft. 7 in.) with a title more than four centuries old, whose gambit is daring colors and bizarre fabrics. In the Rue Cambon, Coco Chanel has staged a comeback with soft, clinging suits that suppress the bosom ("Madame Chanel doesn't like it--since 30 years, she doesn't like it"). At Lanvin-Castillo, the place where Parisiennes used to go if they wanted to be sure they would not be mistaken for Americans, Designer Antonio Castillo made a hit last month with 180 variations on an Oriental theme.
There He Soaks. Christian Dior, assiduously unassuming, rarely appears at theaters, operas or balls. Mornings, he starts the day with a cup of mint tea, served in his crimson-canopied antique bed by his sinisterly handsome Spanish butler. When he is preparing his collections, he then repairs to the bathroom with its Empire tub of green marble lined with silvery metal and fitted with swan's-head faucets. There he soaks. Hours later, he has covered hundreds of tiny scraps of paper with tiny figures, a kind of hieroglyphic reverie of contours and silhouettes.
From these sketches, Dior and his staff select the "line" for the season--some 150 to 200 models. They are assigned to various workrooms, which make up "toiles" --replicas in plain muslin.
Each dress is reviewed by the patron himself, sitting in a straight chair, clad in a long white butcher's smock. With a long, gold-tipped cane, Dior points and criticizes, orders a bow changed, a seam moved. Scattered through the collection are the five or six models which are called, because they may prove to be disasters, the "Trafalgars"--the dresses which are the most extreme and will make headlines or covers in the fashion magazines. Dior deliberately plans them to startle and shock, thinks of them as trial straws in the wind, to be developed if the wind is favorable next season. Being a good businessman as well as couture's best showman, Dior is always careful to include also soundly designed dresses in more conservative, bread-and-butter styles.
His "Flat Look" of two years ago created an uproar; but in fact, only one dress out of five actually incorporated the flat line. The rest were soundly rounded, and sold very well while the Flat Look fell medium flat.
As the day for the opening approaches, nerves grow tense in the studios. Assistants throw tantrums, models faint from exhaustion, Dior himself bursts into tears of emotion. On opening day, he takes refuge in the models' dressing room, a madhouse of half-clad models, hurrying dressers, seamstresses making last-minute adjustments. As each girl hurries back in, gets out of one gown and dons a new one ("girdle-to-girdle" time is calculated at three minutes), Dior questions her anxiously about the reaction, kisses her warmly if her model has been a success.
At the last the applause ripples out, and Dior timidly parts the curtain to face the onrushing ladies.
The Ephemeral. Dior has no illusions about the permanency of his creations. "We are placed under the sign of the ephemeral. Rigorous construction, precision of cut, quality of execution alone separate us from the travesty of fancy dress." But he is nonetheless serious about his ephemeral trade. "In a machine age," he says, "dressmaking is one of the last refuges of the human, the personal, the inimitable. In an epoch as somber as ours, luxury must be defended inch by inch."
For hundreds of years, savants have grumbled and moralists thundered against the "private luxury" of fashion. But inexorably the tides of fashion have rolled on their way, now exposing a pleasant vista with a plunging neckline, then snapping it shut; now swelling bottoms into the massive promontories of the bustle, then strapping them down into the sleek foothills of the girdle, in an age-old and tireless coquetry with the male eye.
In the age of the ready-made and the copyist, private luxuries are now public domain. Because of the curious liaison Dior has wrought between the shrewd operators of Seventh Avenue and the damask-hung salons off the Champs Elyseees, U.S. women may deplore or applaud the plump little man from Normandy, but they cannot ignore him. The woman has not yet been born who, shopping for a new dress, asks for "something just like what I have on"--and men would not like it if she did. Few women have the social assurance to trust their own taste completely. Dior's great service is to raise a standard to which the faint of heart can repair. He points a way to be different, but not too different; different in a way which will be imitated and not laughed at. What woman could ask for more?
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