All We Know: Three Lives (28 page)

In the spring of 1925, Woolf noted that she had just been photographed by Beck and MacGregor for the magazine:

Frock consciousness
is apparently an oxymoron: The first word refers to a winsome sheath, something for the outside, while the second describes the quality of mind we imagine inhabits our insides. But clothes, as Madge knew from a young age, both constitute a boundary to the self and suggest its permeability. Lying between what we understand to be public space (the social world at large) and what we consider private (the body of an individual), they depend on and challenge this distinction. Frock consciousness, a state of dress and of mind, also issues an invitation and presents an obstacle to vision and visibility. As an articulation of the modernist conundrum of how to represent character—another person’s life and mind—it is a key to Woolf’s understanding of consciousness as a social phenomenon, not simply a rarified vessel for private concerns. In the same way, although biographies tend to focus on a single life, that life owes everything to milieux and influences—in Madge’s case, ineffable and concrete networks of artists and of women.

“My love of clothes interests me profoundly,” Woolf wrote in her diary in 1926, “only it is not love; & what it is I must discover.” After the success of
Mrs. Dalloway
, Madge said, Woolf “knew that she didn’t look right” and she told Madge “that she would not be afraid to enter any restaurant if she was as beautifully dressed as I was.” Woolf particularly admired the ensemble by Nicole Groult, so Madge procured a version of it for her, in blue rather than pink, taking her measurements, consulting with Groult, and arranging for fittings in London. “So there is a real history attached to that outfit,” Madge said. To Woolf, Madge was someone “there superintending a display,” but she was also a brain to pick, a personal shopper, a provocation, and a conundrum. To Madge, Woolf was a venerated writer who was scared of and moved by clothes. Both women were fascinated by how we wear what we wear, by the effects of clothes on the body and mind, and by the effects of corporality and consciousness on clothes. They shared an appreciation of the awkward details to do with dress and character—a sense of elegance spiked with glee—and an understanding of fashion’s powers of humiliation and conversion. When the fashion expert who was never really that interested in fashion and who made of herself a kind of resistant modernist text first glimpsed Woolf, at a lecture by Roger Fry, she saw “a very beautiful woman…But what also attracted my attention was that she appeared to be wearing an upturned wastepaper basket on her head”—a comically unflattering hat. One night at a party, Woolf was interrogating Madge and they ended up in a “hilarious conversation about corsets,” the clothing convention of their mothers’ generations, trying to fathom how people who had always worn them managed in the mid-1920s, when dresses were meant to be moved in, slouched in, danced in.

As sympathetic, provocative representatives of the fashionable world and of a certain kind of journalism, and as a visible couple, Madge and Dody not only excited Woolf’s thinking about and through clothes but also incited her thinking about the relationship between her fiction and her journalism, about fame and literary reputation, and about intimacy between women, including “sapphism.” The two of them stand in Woolf’s writing of that period for the knot of art, commerce, and sexuality that haunts and defines both modernism and fashion. The making and marketing of British modernism is often understood as emerging from intimate ventures: little magazines, small presses, personal relationships. But it also depended on commercial enterprises such as British
Vogue
. The contact between British
Vogue
and Bloomsbury was an exchange that provoked and benefited all sides: editors, writers, and those written about. The conversation between the art now called modernist and the equally vital products of popular and consumer culture of the time includes the fact that the latter were often the stuff of the former: The advertising and shop windows that Woolf uses to represent consciousness in
Mrs. Dalloway
are just one such example.

Woolf agreed to be photographed for “We Nominate for the Hall of Fame” and to write several essays for
Vogue
, was excited about the high fees the magazine paid, and was intrigued by the thought of greater exposure: “I asked Todd £10 for 1,000 words: she orders 4 articles at that fee.” At the same time, Woolf worried about “the ethics of writing articles at high rates for fashion papers like
Vogue
.” When Raymond Mortimer invited Woolf to a party, she despaired at her desire to go and equally strong wish to stay away: “Why,” she wrote to Vanessa Bell, “do these young men all run to vulgarity, snobbery, shoddery, Toddery?” When a friend told her she was demeaning herself and cheapening her work by writing for
Vogue
, she did not take the accusation lightly, but concluded that the censorship a young writer of her acquaintance had encountered at the hands of
The Times Literary Supplement
was “perhaps worse than the vulgarity, which is open and shameless, of
Vogue…
Todd lets you write what you like, and its [
sic
] your own fault if you conform to the stays and the petticoats.” To Vita Sackville-West she wrote: “And whats [
sic
] the objection to whoring after Todd? Better whore, I think, than honestly and timidly and coolly and respectably copulate with the Times Lit. Sup.” The stays and the petticoats are a metaphor for rhetorical constraint and for a kind of “feminine” writing supposedly practiced in such magazines. But as Woolf’s conversation with Madge about corsets suggests, the phrase also refers to an interest in the actual objects, their effects, and their meanings.

Complaining about demands made on her time and attention, Woolf wrote, “I want as usual to dig deep down into my new stories, without having a looking glass flashed in my eyes—Todd, to wit.” The irony of this grievance about
Vogue
as a mirror, annoyance, and social demand is that the stories Woolf refers to are precisely those in which she explores “the party consciousness, the frock consciousness,” which, if they were impeded by Dody and Madge, were also stimulated by them. In “The New Dress,” written in 1924 and first published in 1927, the protagonist, Mabel Waring, commissions a new frock based on an old design, watches her dressmaker produce it, and tries it on in the squalid intimacy of this woman’s workroom, where “an extraordinary bliss shot through her heart. Suffused with light, she sprang into existence.” But when she wears it out to a party, she is humiliated. The story shows how easy it is to think of certain clothes, like certain behaviors, as inevitably belonging to certain people; it exposes how the ineffabilities of taste are a function of class, but are often passed off as part of the natural order. “It seemed to her [Mabel] that the yellow dress was a penance which she had deserved, and if she had been dressed like Rose Shaw, in lovely, clinging green with a ruffle of swans-down, she would have deserved that.” Mabel is both transparent to the other guests, who always “saw through” her, and able to see “through [them] instantly.” Woolf also makes Mabel and her dress hypervisible by putting her experience of being watched on display—which experience, ironically, has a great deal to do with what other people look like. We don’t see Mabel so much as see her being seen: someone else’s “marked” gestures, “their eyelids flickering as they came up and then their lids shutting rather tight.” The dress’s crime seems to be that it is long out of fashion, but if Mabel is marginalized because of her frock, her predicament suggests graver social dislocations. Woolf describes Mabel feeling “like a dressmaker’s dummy standing there, for young people to stick pins into”; she writes of “the misery which she always tried to hide”; she makes us privy to her sense “that she was condemned, despised.”

“The New Dress” is a story about clothing, class, social aberration, and the visual paradox of discretion: the way in which all concerned pretend not to see what is perfectly apparent. It was exactly this set of problems that Madge confronted in her professional life. While British
Vogue
represented commerce to Woolf and others, Condé Nast believed that Dody and Madge had produced something excessively bohemian. In the beginning, the New York office seems to have supported the changes they made. “
Vogue
is going to be altered considerably,” noted Harry Yoxall, the young business manager of British
Vogue
, in 1923; “the percentage of fashion pages is to be cut down, the fashions shown are to be more in keeping with the present economic stress of this country, and the rest of the magazine is to be considerably broadened and humanised and brought into keeping with the apparent taste of the British public.” But by 1926, Nast, Yoxall, and Chase were arguing that Dody’s preferences—aesthetic and, it was implied, sexual—had perverted the magazine. Chase’s description of Dody as “naturally of a literary and artistic bent” (like the epithets
bookish
and
highbrow
that she and other chroniclers of Condé Nast use to describe Dody’s editorial stance) always seems to stand for less mentionable terms. “Fashion Miss Todd all but eschewed,” wrote Chase, incorrectly. “The British edition was not intended to be the advanced literary and artistic review she was turning out.” (Decades later, the magazine’s hierarchy was appalled by another, very different visionary editor, Diana Vreeland.) Woolf and Nast were each wary of being tainted by the other, whereas Dody and Madge were interested in—and Madge herself was made of—the mixture. Madge’s wearing, unlike Mabel Waring’s, was resolutely of the present, a way of
being
what writers and artists were investigating in their media.

If
Vogue
succeeded in the United States by targeting an elite demographic and pioneered using marketing that limited appeal rather than trying to reach everyone, it nevertheless, as Nast knew, could work only by a double standard. On the one hand, he wrote, “the publisher, the editor, the advertising manager and circulation man must conspire not only to get all their readers from the one particular class to which the magazine is dedicated,
but rigorously to exclude all others
.” On the other, the magazine must “attract readers
who did not yet belong to the class which he had chosen, but who aspired to it
.” He and Chase thought that British
Vogue
had neglected the service elements of the magazine (“Seen in the Shops, Smart Fashions for Limited Incomes, and the Hostess and Beauty articles”), which were attempts to attract this second group of readers. Dody and Madge, however, interpreted the “apparent taste of the British public” as what they should like and what they did not yet know they wanted (as Vreeland did in the 1960s at American
Vogue
). Still, the idea that made
Vogue
a success in the United States (we shall cater to those with money while presenting the high life for the aspirations of the middle class) may not have been viable yet in England, with its more rigid understanding of social class.

Nast and Chase also accused Dody of failing to turn a profit. But the magazine had lost money for years before her tenure, and Nast had often been on the verge of abandoning the whole venture. Most recently, British
Vogue
had struggled through the crisis of the General Strike of 1926, when production and transportation were shut down all over England. Still, if Dody was a brilliant editor she was probably not a good manager. Edna Chase had appeared in London more than once during her tenure, trying to whip the staff into shape. Harry Yoxall, who found Dody stimulating if difficult, was startled by her swings of temper in the office and described her borrowing money from him in order to invite someone else to lunch. Madge suggested at the end of her life that Dody had mishandled Nast’s money. But she also said, “The world was changing and he [Nast] wanted much more space given to commerce. In those days, I’d never been inside a store. It was quite another world. We went only to court dressmakers.”

In September  1926, Yoxall fired Dody, on instructions from Nast, who was himself invariably “difficult to find” when “situations became too fraught,” as Madge later observed. Several days later, Yoxall dismissed Madge; he referred to her in his diary as “Miss McHarg (Mrs. Garland), the
maîtresse en titre
” (favorite or official mistress). Yoxall had written to Nast, annoyed at Todd’s “prolonged absence at a crucial time, with all her fashion staff too” (a reference to Madge), and he had long been troubled by the difficult “play of personalities” in the office, but he had never expected “such drastic consequences” to follow his complaint. Yet he also said he believed that both firings “should have been done long ago, and would have been but for Nast’s fatal procrastination when any unpleasant doing or thinking is required.” Musing on Dody’s personality, he predicted that she would “end on the Embankment [i.e., in the gutter] one of these days, or in some similar situation.” Dody consulted a lawyer, who advised her to threaten a suit to obtain a settlement for breach of contract. Nast and Yoxall responded by threatening to publicly attack her “morals.” Trying to protect herself, her daughter, and Madge, she backed off. “For details of the Todd developments see files of my private correspondence with Nast,” Yoxall noted in his diary in November 1926—but we cannot see; these files have not survived.