The Dress Thief (58 page)

On to the 1930s: the decade of
The Dress Thief
, when the boys grew up. The economic crash of 1929 marred the fun anyway, arguably producing the conditions that led
to the next war. Fashion reacted.

Hemlines dropped by 1930, as they seem to do in financially stringent times. The waist, one of the markers of female sexual maturity and fertility, returned to its
natural level – though on the whole, it wasn’t particularly defined. That had to wait for the belt-tightening forties. The thirties silhouette is spare, slender and tall.

Having said that, after studying
hundreds of photographs and illustrations of dresses, suits and coats, the 1930s seems to defy stereotype. Just as you tell yourself that skirts are all straight and narrow, you find some that aren’t. Just as you decide that the defined waist was shunned, you find a dress with an inset panel showing off a woman’s middle with anatomical accuracy. Some of Madeleine Vionnet’s evening gowns of
the late 1930s have hand-span waists and big, Cinderella skirts. Chanel’s farewell collection of 1939 featured red, white and blue gypsy dresses with an hour-glass middle. I have a picture of a 1938 Callot Soeurs dress that is as nipped in as anything that appeared ten years later. But the prevailing mood was not for fairy tale romance, it was for stylish sobriety by day, slinky sexuality by night.

I will say this with conviction, however: shoulders are key in the thirties, whether puffed or padded for daywear or exposed in the evening. They are defined and wider than the hip. Bared shoulders are satin smooth, sexy and strong. Maybe, strung between wars, dealing with economic collapse, women needed a strong pair of shoulders.

So, at the tail-end of the 1930s, Alix builds a business in the
most exacting of industries in the least forgiving of cities. She knows it can be done. The boulevards of Paris are dotted with elegant outlets owned and run by women. She
has no lack of drive and skill, her experience grows with each season but she knows that funding will be a continued struggle. Couture gowns carry a hefty price tag, then as now, but customers expect credit and are often slow
to pay. Borrowing from banks, even having a bank account, is not seen as a natural right for females. Without family money, acquiring capital is almost impossible.

Coco Chanel in 1909 had a wealthy lover to provide the initial funding for workrooms and shop premises. Nothing can take away from Chanel’s triumph, rising as she did from peasant poverty to become one of the most successful female
self-starters of all time. But that early support allowed her to scale up pretty quickly. For other female couturiers, the only option was to start small, work hard, and capture the imagination of the fashionable elite. Jeanne Lanvin, who struck out at the age of eighteen as a milliner, had only her small savings, the backing of one client, and three hundred francs’ worth of credit with suppliers.
By 1918, she occupied a whole building in Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré producing the gamut of couture clothes, accessories, lingerie and perfume. After a disappointing start at the couture house Doucet in 1907, Madeleine Vionnet went solo. She began with a modest initial investment. By 1910, she had premises on Rue de Rivoli.

The couture business was – and no doubt still is – money hungry. Every
garment that ends up pressed and hung on a rail is the fruit of hours of labour. Of designing and trialling, fitting and finishing. Before the machine age, that
pretty much meant hand-sewing, hand embroidering, hand beadwork, hand button-holing etc … and all this skilled manual labour was expensive. Individual seamstresses were paid very poorly, but a couture house needed a great many of them.
Hundreds, in the case of the bigger houses.

Alix’s backer advanced her enough to start up, but survival took tenacity and luck and a loyal workforce willing to work long, weary hours to sustain the dream. What Chanel, Lanvin and Vionnet and most female couturiers had in common, apart from their creative genius and drive, were traditional dressmaking skills. All were taught the fine art of sewing
from a young age: Chanel in a convent school, Lanvin with the milliner Madame Felix and Vionnet at Callot Soeurs, a leading Parisian couture house. They knew cloth, they knew how to cut it and put it together. Their designs flowed from technique.

They also shared a devotion to detail and to their art. Paris in the early to mid twentieth century was full of neat-fingered girls who could sew invisible
seams. Only a few became queens of their trade. Fashion was a low-paid ghetto for women who, if they didn’t have education, family money or qualifications, were starved of choice. For all that, it was one of the few industries where a woman could truly rise on merit and dictate her own terms, and where great wealth was possible. There were sacrifices to be made, of course. It’s no coincidence
that the leading female couturieres all had a reputation for being remote, even lonely, women who operated strict discipline towards their business, employees and themselves.