The Great Fashion Designers (18 page)

He was selling designs to several of America's most important stores, including Marshall Field, Bergdorf Goodman, Lord & Taylor and Best & Co, so the ground was prepared when, in 1940, he abandoned Europe (Paris was occupied by the Nazis and London was suffering the Blitz) and returned to New York and opened Charles James Inc. on East 57 Street. He was contracted to design couture for Elizabeth Arden's ‘Fashion Floor', a relationship that ended in 1945 after he had shown twenty-five gowns at a Red Cross benefit evening for the opening of Arden's new store. He opened another house under his own name on Madison Avenue and, in 1947, made a brief, triumphant return to Paris to show his collection there, his lush gowns completely in step with Dior's New Look. ‘His eye for colour,' wrote Annette Bissonette who curated an exhibition of James's work at Kent State University in 2007, ‘resulted in unexpected combinations, in which pumpkin and mauve coexisted, linings added drama, and layers of tulle in many colours produced mysterious results. His ability to drape cloth, at times directly on a person, was at the heart of some of his most important work. Yet his legacy in the twenty-first century lies overwhelmingly in his ability to cut the cloth to produce abstract and complex shapes brought to life through experimentation and imagination.'

Despite the turmoil in his business life and despite the way he treated his clients, he retained some very important ones. Among them were Austine (Mrs William Randolph) Hearst, Mrs Harrison Whitney, Dominique de Menil, and Anne, Countess of Rosse as well as the wives of two rival designers, Mrs Lucien Lelong and Adrian's wife, Janet Gaynor, and powers in publishing such as Claire Booth Luce, Mrs Condé Nast, Elsa Peretti, Carmel Snow, Diana Vreeland and those two feuding couturières, Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel. You can almost
hear the chuckle as Milbank points out that Schiaparelli got a bill but Chanel did not. Richard Martin wrote, ‘He offended some of his most loyal clients, who longed for the designer's dresses and paid dearly for them, not only in money but in tolerating insults and abuse.' One of James's best customers was the beautiful, magenta-haired Standard Oil heiress, Millicent Rogers, whose extravagance, according to Cecil Beaton, outstripped that of all the other ‘poor little rich girls'. He considered that her talents did too and in
The Glass of Fashion
pronounced them squandered. During one period in the 1930s, however, she patronised Charles James exclusively. Beaton wrote,

Charles James is a superb tailor in satin and has affinities with the French in his master craftsmanship and attention to detail. He was naturally delighted that her orders should be so extensive, for it kept his business thriving. But after having put so much time and effort into the making of four dozen blouses which he felt were designated for the Manhattan Storage, he rebelled. When Mrs Rogers's maid telephoned for a further order, Charles James complained, ‘Why, Mrs Rogers is nothing but a hoarder!'

The maid replied, ‘Not a hoarder, Mr James, a collector!' True to the maid's words, in 1949 Millicent Rogers presented to the Brooklyn Museum a collection of clothes created for her by Charles James.

In 1948 the Brooklyn Museum had mounted a retrospective exhibition entitled Decade of Design to display the dresses. It is upon these clothes that much of James's rescued reputation rests and why costume historians know so much about how he achieved the structure of his gowns. He named many of his designs—Petal, Swan, Tulip, Butterfly, Four-Leaf Clover, Tree—in a system that had more to do with an abstract shape, a curve or a plane, summoned at some remove by the object than anything representational. His most famous dress was probably the Sirene, where soft silk is wrapped, draped and gathered round a slender, rigid inner sheath. He, however, regarded the Four-Leaf Clover gown of 1953 as the culmination of his career.

The grand gowns James conjured were imagined in great rooms with high ceilings and classical decoration. In 1948, for a photograph entitled ‘The James Encyclopaedia', Beaton, who shared his background, grouped nine of them in just such a salon, its decor pale cream carved panelling in the Second Empire style. The ladies, their bare shoulders and elegant, vulnerable necks glowing in the soft, pinkish light, their vast skirts jostling for space, are taking coffee while they wait for the gentlemen, still around the dining table passing the port and smoking, to join them. It is a pre-war world which the nostalgic yearned to return to and the socially upwardly mobile longed to enter. It may have appealed to Beaton, but Annette Bissonette wrote, ‘Like those he inspired, such as Christian Dior … he generated garments that, although visually intoxicating, returned women to an era of discomfort and subjugation. His talents were nonetheless widely sought and his custom-work for clients and collaboration with manufacturers led to new silhouettes that had enormous impact on the fashion industry.'

In 1955, James, who was known to be homosexual and rumoured to go dancing in his own frocks, astonished everyone by marrying Nancy Lee Gregory, with whom he had two children. In 1956 he started to design children's wear, but in 1958 he found himself bankrupt once again. The marriage failed in 1961, and by 1964 James had moved into the Chelsea Hotel where he established a small studio. He attracted few clients; his reputation for falling out, failing to deliver and reneging on deals was, by now, poisonous. He did, however, make the acquaintance of the illustrator, Antonio Lopez, who, over the next few years made it his private project to draw the best of James's designs. In 1975 he held a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. New York. Three years later Charles James died of pneumonia in the Chelsea Hotel. He was alone. In 1980 the Brooklyn Museum mounted a second larger retrospective.

Further reading:
Richard Martin's
Charles James
, part of the Fashion Memoir series, is a good analytical account of James's career and character, and Caroline Rennolds Milbank's account in
Couture: The Great Fashion Designers
(1985) places James in context.

Impatient for a modern style of dress that reflected in both practical and conceptual ways the way women wanted to live and dress in the twentieth century, Claire McCardell invented it. Her ideas have so influenced and pervaded contemporary fashion that in 1990
Life
magazine named her one of the 100 most important Americans of the twentieth century. Four years later, Bernadine Morris of the
New York Times
referred to her as ‘this country's finest designer'. A quintessentially American designer often compared to Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy and Martha Graham, Claire Mc-Cardell's democratic approach to fashion gave style to everyday clothing and led the way towards shaking off the long-distance, often vitiated, French dominance of American fashion—Richard Martin even characterised it as a ‘thralldom to Parisian design'.

In her book,
What Shall I Wear
, published in 1956, McCardell looked back on her early days in the 1920s on Seventh Avenue. ‘I did what everybody else did,' she wrote, ‘copied Paris.' In particular she copied Molyneux, Maggy Rouff and Alix (not yet known as Madame Grès) and took apart the dresses of Alix and Vionnet to discover their structure—a structure she simplified for the mass-manufacturing techniques with which she worked. But her instincts could never be satisfied by second-hand inspiration. McCardell was a questioner of basic precepts, a revolutionary. ‘Clothes,' she told one interviewer, ‘ought to be useful and comfortable. I've always wondered why women's clothes had to be delicate—why they couldn't be practical and sturdy as well as feminine.' She coopted easy styles and hard-wearing fabrics from all kinds of work wear and children's wear and made them smart: suits in denim, big-pocketed shirts in ticking or cotton calico, loose dresses and jumpsuits in gingham, madras check and flannel. Her guiding principles were clean-lined, utilitarian design that satisfied the modernist dictum that form should follow function, that a product should be fit for its purpose, and that one should have respect for the fabric. She produced instant classics which were to form the basis of the fashion genre known as American designer sportswear and within which she had many successors. Richard Martin wrote:

Significantly, they re-thought fashion from its very roots, not simply paring away some of the accretions of traditional prettiness but founding a new standard for a practical, modern style more in accord with the lives of the women of their era. Furthermore the chief impetus came from women designers, not from men. The sportswear tradition in America includes male manufacturers and a few early-generation pioneers such as Sydney Wragge and later John Weitz, but the driving force of fashion's fresh invention resides with the women who answered women's needs.

It is a long roll-call; among these women were Elizabeth Hawes, Anne Fogarty, Muriel King, Emily Wilkens, Tina Leser, Frances Sider, Carolyn Schnurer, Jo Copeland, Bonnie Cashin, Ceil Chapman, Louella Ballerino, Vera Maxwell, Mollie Parnis, Clare Potter, Nettie Rosenstein, Pauline Trigere and Valentina. In the 1930s and 1940s, as American women made their way into the workplace in ever greater numbers, enjoyed an active social life often based on a
sporting activity—golf, tennis, cycling, swimming—and demanded affordable, mass-produced clothes to look good in at all these times, these were the designers who, also living that life, answered their needs. Of them all, however, McCardell was the most creative, the leader in what was really a whole paradigm shift in fashion.

Claire McCardell was born in 1905 in Frederick, Maryland. She was the first child of Adrian Leroy McCardell, a state senator and president of the Frederick County National Bank, and Eleanore Clingan McCardell, daughter of a Confederate officer from Jackson, Mississippi. Three brothers followed, Adrian, Robert and John. Claire's first exposure to fashion was through her Southern belle mother who subscribed to all the American and European fashion periodicals. A school friend remembered five-year-old Claire cutting out pictures from the magazines and, with her scissors, remaking them, grafting a bodice from one on to the skirt of another, changing a neckline, editing out some sleeves. This was the point at which, McCardell remembered half a century later, ‘my eyes began their training'. She would also, of course, dress up in her mother's clothes and reflected as an adult, ‘It wasn't me in the clothes, or just wearing them that interested me—it was the clothes in relation to me—how
changed
I felt once in them.' Perhaps her most powerful influence was Annie Koogle, the family dressmaker who was a skilled adapter of Vogue patterns, often draping and fitting on the body. From her, McCardell learned to understand clothing's relationship to the body and its construction. A sporting girl, she was soon taking apart and remaking her clothing and that of her brothers in not always successful attempts to make herself more comfortable clothes for an active life. However, this intimate knowledge of men's clothing was to shape her approach to designing for women. She found men's wear infinitely more rational than contemporary women's clothing and was to filch for women generous side pockets in trousers, deeper armholes in jackets, sturdy topstitching borrowed from Levi's jeans, and practical, washable fabrics like cotton shirting.

In 1923, with graduation from Frederick High School approaching, McCardell announced her intention to study fashion illustration and costume design in New York. Her father would not hear of it and she spent the next two years studying home economics at Hood College, a liberal arts college conveniently close to the McCardell home. She dropped out towards the end of her second year and, with the support of her mother, convinced her father to let her go to New York to study at the School of Fine and Applied Arts which would, in time, become the Parsons School of Design. In her foundation year she shared a room with two other students at the Three Arts Club. To her delight the wealthy members would sell the students in residence their cast-off Paris originals—for a few dollars. She bought as many as she could afford and took them apart to discover their construction before remaking them. This was a practice she continued in her second year when she finally got to study fashion design and construction in Paris, arriving there in the autumn of 1926. Madeleine Vionnet, whose training as a lingerie designer gave her an intimate understanding of the sensuous possibilities of cloth on the female body, was a particularly strong influence on McCardell, who began at an early stage to explore several of her techniques including the bias cut and the sashes used for wrapping and tying. From Vionnet, McCardell said she learned ‘the way clothes worked, the way they felt'.

Back in America McCardell graduated in the spring of 1928 and had a few false starts, including some modelling engagements and a short stint designing knitwear, which ended when she was fired after eight months for making clothes ‘to please herself'. Yohannan and Nolf point out that this very tendency was to be the basis of her success and her status as a major fashion innovator. In 1965,
Time
magazine quoted her saying she had designed things she needed for herself, and ‘it just turns out that other people need them too.'