Something Wholesale (21 page)

On the day I left the Partnership only two suppliers of the host that had besieged me during my reign wished me well, and they were the least affluent. Returning one evening to the buying office when the rest of the staff had gone home I had a revealing conversation with one of the richer ones who thought he was talking to my successor, who had not yet been appointed.

During my stewardship of M.G. Buying I received offers of weekends in yachts (but never sailing yachts), holidays in the South of France (‘Mima and I are just going down to the Carlton for a few days. We would very much like you and your wife to accompany us.’), offers of dinners in penthouses in St John’s Wood and outings to night clubs, offers of theatre tickets and offers of expensive objects – one of the most expensive was a crocodile bag from Hermès which I knew, because I, too had an eye for merchandise and had window-shopped in the Faubourg St Honoré, cost something in the region of four hundred pounds. At Christmas I was offered cases of wine. One buyer was offered the childrens’ school fees.

The Partnership’s penalty for accepting any material offerings except for a smoked salmon sandwich and occasionally a glass of champagne, which could be regarded as a sort of viaticum, was instant dismissal. I used to accept wine at Christmas from manufacturers with whom I did business. It made not the slightest difference to what I bought from them, although neither they, nor my employers would have believed this. As one old buyer, revered within the Partnership and outside it said: ‘It’s a wonder and a credit to us, that with a rule like this, there are any of us left at all.’

In August, 1963, on a nasty, grey morning at six a.m., I arrived back from Italy where I had been attending the showings of the high fashion collections in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence to find a letter from the Chairman awaiting me, giving me the sack. My family were all abroad. No one enjoys being given the sack at dawn on an empty stomach and I was no exception.

Eventually, I went with Wanda to India and we floated down the Ganges, with another advance on royalties. Then, when I was again wondering how on earth I was going to live while writing
Slowly Down the Ganges
, I was offered the job of Travel
Editor of the
Observer
. My ten years at the
Observer
, one of the few jobs I was not sacked from, were amongst the happiest I can remember.

In January 1985, I went back to Paris with two senior editors from British
Vogue
to attend the showings of the Spring and Summer Haute Couture Collections. In doing so I was partly inspired by nostalgia, partly by a genuine enthusiasm for fashion, which in spite of the very different way of life I have pursued since abandoning it, has never been extinguished from my, I hope, still fairly manly bosom.

We put up at the Lotti, the old, rather stylish hotel preferred by
Vogue
in Rue de Castiglione between the Place Vendôme and Rue de Rivoli, in which some seventy years previously my parents had spent their honeymoon, insulated from the fury of my father’s partner, the awful Mr Lane. I had also stayed in it on the occasion when my father had sent me to consult the almost blind seer, the couturière Madame Havet, at her premises in the Place Vendôme in the Autumn of 1946 in order to confirm his own conviction about fashion being ‘on the change’. At that very moment, unknown to any but his workroom staff, Dior was mixing the ingredients for the succession of bombshells which he was to launch in the Avenue Montaigne on the morning of 12 February, 1947, until that moment unseen even by his own vendeuses.

Now, in 1985, we arrived at the Lotti from Charles de Gaulle
to find that the Lotti, itself one of a chain of more or less venerable hotels, had been bought by an Italian company whose hotels rejoiced in the name of Jolly Hotels and that the Lotti had become the Jolly Lotti, something that the staff did their best to conceal from us. So recently had this happened that the ashtrays, soap, book matches, toothpicks, bath towels and other such ephemera left about for the convenience of guests still bore the simple device
Hotel Lotti
and for this reason became instant collectors’ items.

We were very upset. It was as if some food chain such as Wimpy had bought Maxim’s and renamed it the Wimpy Maxim’s. As someone said, ‘I mean to say you simply can’t go around telling people who ask you where you’re staying that you’re at the Jolly Lotti. It’d be like saying you were at the “Jolly Hockeysticks”. People would fall about.’

That was Sunday night. Outside it was dam’ cold. There was a perceptible air of tension in the city. General Audran, Director of International Affairs at the Ministry of Defence had been shot dead by terrorists outside his residence two days previously and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia was paying what might well prove to be his last visit anywhere. By Tuesday the whole of Europe was on Red Alert.

The first collection we had seats for that Sunday night was Nina Ricci’s. It was to be shown in the Pavillon Gabriel, in Rue Gabriel, a street that bisects the rarefied area which has the Champs Elysées on one hand and the British and American Embassies and the Palais d’Elysée in which M. le President makes the best of a nasty job, on the other. Always a street with more gendarmes and plain clothes men in it than ordinary Parisiens, on this particular night their numbers had been increased by whole coach-loads of armed reinforcements who were now disposed along its length from the Place de la Concorde to the Rond Point.

Few, if any, of the grand couturiers held the first showings of
their collections in their own salons anymore, however grand, not because there was insufficient space for their customers but because of the demands made by television and the press. Instead they hired, at God knows what cost, large halls such as the Pavillon Gabriel, or the great, glittering Salon Opéra in the Grand Hotel in Rue Auber, with its gilded caryatids supporting tiers of mirrors, or the equally astonishing Salon Impériale in the Inter-Continental on Rue de Castiglione. The latter is one of three salons in the building declared by the government, as is the Salon Opéra in the Grand Hotel, to be
monuments historiques
. Luckiest of all was the couturier Pierre Cardin who actually owned a Pavillon in Rue Gabriel in which he was able to show his seventieth collection in thirty years and his 20,000th model, rent free. In addition to other chunks of Parisian real estate he also owned Maxim’s and therefore didn’t have to worry about where to eat after the show.

Later, when all the collections had been shown and everyone had gone home, and everything that could be written about them of any news value had either already been published or sent to the printers, I realised that that first showing of Nina Ricci, less memorable in fact because at such an early stage I had not, as it were, got my eye in, was an epitome of everything I subsequently saw in the course of the next three days and nights. Some houses showed more models. Some had more flamboyant customers. Whether one was a better or worse collection than the others was a question of taste or a matter of opinion. With such high standards, anyone who condemned a couture collection in Paris in January 1985 in its entirety was a fool.

Above the catwalk a maze of currently modish, high-tech girders supported the lights that would soon pour down on it and the photographers of both sexes who crouched on either side of them. Some were Japanese using German Leicas; everyone else used Japanese Nikons. Up there, under the lights, it was terribly hot
and some of the photographers wore beat-up old safari jackets that could have done with a visit to a laundrette. Others wore sleeveless vests, displaying, when they raised their cameras, expanses of armpit that made me feel a bit off-colour on an empty stomach. Some took long, lingering looks at the distinguished guests who were mostly also distinguished customers through their 150 mm lenses. One was reading a newspaper piece headed
Accusé D’Avoir Tué Un Travesti Pour L’Amour D’Une Femme On Avait Retrouvé Découpé Dans Le Bois De Vincennes
, which didn’t make me feel so good either. Facing one another across the catwalk were the rows of seats which, when the showings used to take place in the couturiers’ own salons, would have been occupied by the big-store buyers, now booked solid for the world’s press, about ninety-five per cent of them women in all shapes, sizes and colours, all now currently engaged in talking away to one another nineteen to the dozen. The only one who wasn’t sitting with them was Hebe Dorsey of
International Herald Tribune
, doyenne of Parisian fashion journalists, who always occupied one of the
places d’honneur
at the head of the catwalk where she sat amongst the customers. Because of this, like some ungrizzled courtier, she knew almost as much about the private lives of those she sat with as she did about fashion, which was why the arrival of the
Herald Tribune
under one’s bedroom door was an eagerly awaited event. The only big, international store buyer she identified as being present at these showings was Sonja Caprini of I. Magnin, San Francisco who admitted that she liked them better than the ready-to-wear, which presumably meant she was going to buy some of them. ‘Sit there,’ said Liz to me, indicating a little gilt chair with a card on it which read VOGUE G.B. MADEMOISELLE BEATRIX MILLER. ‘What,
me
?’ I said. After all, Miss Miller was Editor of
Vogue
G.B. and had been since 1964. I felt unworthy to occupy her seat. ‘Yes,
you
,’ she said. ‘She hasn’t arrived yet. Maybe
she won’t come at all this time.’ So I did, feeling like Walter Mitty on Olympus, more or less the only man within sight among an awful lot of girls.

Then all at once, when it seemed that the Ricci faction had lost interest in starting the proceedings, some unidentifiable signal was flown, the lights came on, the plastic sheet intended to keep the white catwalk free from the hoof marks of people like me who take size twelves was whisked away, the men with the armpits picked up their cameras, adjusting their fully thyristorised dedicated flashes, or whatever they were, and to the strains of what was in this instance celestial music, equally otherworldly model girls came streaming up the runway. Taller than real girls even in their socks, they were now wearing stiletto heels, eight centimetres taller than that, and slimmer than anything you ever meet in real life. Girls of every sort of colour: the white of the drifted snows of the Caucasus, the palest of sangue melées, the malarial yellow of the extrême-orient and the deep black of the jungle. Girls so ungirllike that you could forget that they were girls and concentrate on what they were wearing – as well as one could with the photographers’ flashes flashing brighter than a thousand suns – which was what I knew was intended.

And what would the customers be wearing after ordering from Nina Ricci? Amongst other wonders they would be cloaked in long, broad-shouldered jackets with inset belts in houndstooth checks, teamed with long, contrasting houndstooth pants, draped blouses in black and white striped satin silk with black and white turbans to match – the sort of outfit that Garbo might have worn for a meeting with Barrymore in
Grand Hotel
; headgear impossible to buy unless you’ve bought the rest of the outfit, and although very swish, a tiny bit vulgar. And there were dresses in lots of spotted silks, in yellow and fuschia, and black and white, and écru and rose, in mousseline and crêpe de Chine; there were satin
sheaths with straps that appeared to be embroidered with precious stones and one beautifully draped, embroidered orange satin number with an orange stole, that received some applause. Here, at Ricci, there were none of the transports that greeted some of the outfits shown by Yves Saint Laurent, or Ungaro, or Chanel, later in the week.

What were they for? Where could they be worn, these and other clothes I subsequently saw? For yet more shopping, probably in the Place Vendôme; for travelling in Rolls Royces fitted with purdah glass to deter the curious from looking in; for holidays in yachts that never weigh anchor; for the sort of people who, someone himself rich (was it Onassis?) is reputed to have said, have no need for overcoats.

What do they cost, these garments? No one who hasn’t bought one, or doesn’t know someone who has, sufficiently well to ask them, really seems to know. A consensus of not necessarily well-informed opinion suggests that that simple
tailleur
might begin around 30,000 francs (say £3,000), rising through to 60,000, 100,000, or even 150,000 francs for a grand evening dress, at the time of writing in the region of £15,000.

How can such prices be justified? In terms of time and materials consumed dresses of this sort must be almost as difficult to cost as, for example, a definitive model of a sailing ship, of which the maker can never hope to recoup in money what he has put into its construction in terms of man hours. In time alone a great evening suit or dress can consume between eighty-five and 100 hours in the making, not counting the time it took the designer to first create it in his imagination and then put it on paper, plus sixteen hours to sew ribbons round a big skirt. In the Autumn of 1976 British
Vogue
photographed a collection of evening dresses made by Lanvin, Saint Laurent, Ricci, Ungaro, Givenchy and so on, of really exceptional beauty. One of these, by Jean-Louis
Scherrer, was a floor-length black taffeta tent-shaped dress embellished with a wide band of gold braid and emerald embroidery, and to be worn over it, an equally long, all-enveloping taffeta cape with a high shawl collar. The dress took ninety-two hours to complete, the cape sixty hours and the embroidery, which was only a deep band, ninety-seven hours. And there are dresses that can swallow up twenty-five metres of satin and embroideries.

For anyone brought up in Britain it is difficult to realise what the Couture means to France. When, on the Monday morning following the Sunday evening showings of the first two of the twenty-four fashion houses,
Le Figaro
ran a front page which read ‘
Triomphe
…
leur heure de gloire
…
un moment prestigieux
…’ they were not referring to some such moment as when General Galliéni saved Paris and saved France in 1914 by sending taxis loaded with soldiers to hold the line on the Marne. They were simply rejoicing in the fact that a M. Mouclier, Président of the French Chambre Syndicale had announced that the couture business for 1984 had totalled 270,000,000 francs, an increase on 1983 of thirty-five per cent. This was the week, too, in which Saint Laurent, after a triumphal show, announced that with an after tax profit of $5,000,000 last year, which derived from everything from boutiques to cigarettes bearing his name (but not the perfumes which belong ultimately to Squibb Pharmaceuticals) he was going to turn his business into a public company and offer his shares on the Bourse.

And who wears these clothes? Women as different as Madame Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Paloma Picasso and Sylvie Varton. Dior alone has 500 faithful clients.

With uncountable thousands dying in the Third World, with millions unemployed in Europe, should such extravagances be permitted? But it is not only an industry, it is an art form and one that employs thousands, many of them women. Dior alone
employs 130 seamstresses. The Couture also supports a great textile industry.

The workers are not rich, but if by some mad decree they were dispersed, their skills would vanish from the face of the earth. I still remember the girls in our own model workroom, high up in our house in Great Marlborough Street with its big glass window overlooking the rooftops in which the light cast no shadow and the quiet, withdrawn expressions that they wore, expressions of an incommunicable satisfaction.