The Great Fashion Designers (12 page)

He was proud to be descended from French Huguenot pioneers who arrived in America in the 1640s. Main Rousseau Bocher (he contracted his name in 1929) was born in 1890 in Chicago, growing up on Monroe Street in a close-knit family with a sister, Lillian. Music was his great joy as a young man, particularly the opera, to which he remained addicted for the rest of his life. He was also skilled at drawing, which drew him to study art. The death of his father when he was in his first year at the University of Chicago forced Mainbocher to grow up quickly. In 1909, he attended the Art Students
League in New York and took his portfolio around magazines looking for illustration work. But his real goal was to go to Europe, which had an exalted status in the mind of the young man, as it did for many young Americans.

Persuading his mother to sell their house in Chicago, Mainbocher set off in 1911 for Europe, where, he said later, he was ‘born again'. He studied art in Munich and travelled regularly to Paris, breathing in the music and culture of the Old World. The rococo period was a particular delight to him, a frothiness of style that as a couturier he chose to set against restrained shapes. The outbreak of war in 1914 sent him and his family heading back to America, where he made his first steps in the fashion industry, creating a dress for a friend for a charity fashion show and earning money from fashion drawings for a wholesale clothing manufacturer. By 1917, he was back in France, serving as a sergeant major in the American Expeditionary Force Intelligence Corps. In post-war Paris, Mainbocher determined to focus on music, studying voice and opera. But it was his sideline job as a sketcher for the Paris office of
Harper's Bazaar
that came to dominate, not least when Mainbocher lost his voice shortly before going on stage to sing (it took him three years to recover). His accomplished drawings and elegant writing, founded on a precise eye for detail and an innate sense of style, were highly prized attributes in the relatively new profession of fashion journalism. After three years at
Harper's Bazaar
, Mainbocher switched to
Vogue
, where he was both Paris editor and then editor of French
Vogue
over a seven-year period lasting until 1929. He was best known during these years for his discovery and encouragement of the photographer Baron Hoyningen-Huene and the illustrator Carl Erikson, known as Eric.

Many fashion journalists have attempted to make the switch to design. None has succeeded as triumphantly as Mainbocher. It was an abrupt decision, he later claimed. ‘It was nothing that crept up on me … It was an immediate and very agreeable explosion. It came from the unconscious. The whole idea was born and in 24 hours became absolutely upright.' He bought some mannequins from the Galeries Lafayette and positioned them in the library of his Left Bank apartment. Through cutting, pinning and fitting, he taught himself the principles of couture. He also swiftly showed all the skills of the natural-born marketer, contracting his name, most likely in emulation of Augustabernard, a couturier he greatly admired. His sumptuous salon at 12 Avenue George V was filled with mirrored mantelpieces, Nymphenburg china and flowers. An aura of exclusivity was established from the beginning, although Mainbocher preferred to serve his guests iced water rather than champagne. He imposed a caution—a guarantee of purchase, priced at the cost of the cheapest dress—on all those clients who attended his show. Only a handful of magazines and newspapers, including
Vogue, Harper's Bazaar
and
The New York Times
, were allowed to cover his collections. If featured, Mainbocher dresses had to appear on facing pages, he insisted. Although he disparaged the power of the fashion magazines, their favourable coverage in the early days created a momentum that swiftly enabled him to build a successful business.

He was influenced by the refined and deceptively simple designs of Augustabernard, who was forced into retirement in 1934 by financial problems. A more celebrated influence was Madame Vionnet, whose use of the bias cut and skill with draping were closely studied by Mainbocher. Fabric, twisted and run through his hands, was the prompt for his designs, which were then sketched by an assistant. Less was more, superfluous details were ruthlessly eliminated. These frocks were so pared down they became known as ‘don't dress frocks' by the press. Mainbocher's business grew rapidly on the back of four collections a year and a formidable client list including Elsie De Wolfe, Lady Mendl, considered the best-dressed woman in the world. Besides the social elite, Mainbocher was also favoured by the demi-mondaines, the mistresses who were openly flaunted in 1930s Paris. At its peak, the house employed 350 people and had sales of 100 million francs a year. His most celebrated client, the Duchess of Windsor, was, like him, an American living in Europe. For her wedding, Mainbocher designed a blue silk crepe dress with a wide inset corselet and fitted jacket—the most talked about and copied couture dress in European history, at least until the wedding of Diana, Princess of Wales. For the Duchess, he created a special blue, ‘Wallis blue'—the colour of her eyes. The wedding dress, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum collection in New
York, has since faded to grey. One fashion writer, Ernestine Carter, writing in 1980, described it as ‘one of the least happy of his inspirations and, unfortunately, one of the most copied.'

In 1939 the imminent threat of war spelt the end of Mainbocher's Paris period. His final collection, featuring nipped-in waists and corselets, was ill-timed but demonstrated his couturier's vision and anticipated Christian Dior's New Look by some eight years. Shortly afterwards, Mainbocher shut up shop in Paris and sailed for New York, together with his mother and sister. Profiled enthusiastically by
The New Yorker
in early 1940, Mainbocher quickly settled back into his native country. ‘He has spent twenty years of his life in Europe with Europeans, but his Illinois identity has remained intact,' concluded
The New Yorker
. Thanks to a contract with the Warner Brothers Corset Company, he had the funds to reopen his house near Fifth Avenue at 6 East 57th Street, replicating the atmosphere of the salon in the Avenue George V and swiftly picking up where he had left off in Paris. The client list swelled again, including iconic society ladies such as Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper, Barbara Paley and Ceezee Guest.

Mainbocher's contribution to fashion design was precisely categorised by the couturier in later life. He loved the idea that his clients could reuse his designs time and time again. He admired clients who were individualists and perfectionists, prepared to endure his famously long fittings without complaint. Top of his list of achievements were his black evening dresses, typically short and versatile. He designed simple dresses with tie-ons, such as lace or brocade aprons or overskirts, creating a radical transformation. Belts were frequently used for simple effect. Also much admired and copied were his beaded cashmere sweaters, perfect for an evening look that mixed formal and informal in one. Furthermore, Mainbocher enjoyed experimenting with fabrics, such as batiste, voile, organdy, and pique, creating surprising juxtapositions, such as a lumber jacket in lamé or an evening dress in gingham. The versatility of his work chimed with the mood (and the regulations) of America during the early 1940s, when the country was at war. Repetition was a core theme of his repertoire. Drawing on his musical experience, Mainbocher described his design development as similar to classical musical development, where themes are restated and revisited. Critic Dale McConarthy wrote: ‘For Main-bocher, there was nothing new in fashion. He possessed an extreme self-consciousness about his work that caused him to return again and again to his sources … He often repeated himself and glorified in the women who wore his dresses for twenty or thirty years and returned to have them copied.'

In America, Mainbocher maintained his status as a couturier and steered clear of Seventh Avenue and the ready-to-wear industry. He never licensed his name, although a fragrance called White Garden was released in 1948. While his costumes for Broadway brought his work to a larger audience, most notably for Mary Martin in
One Touch of Venus
in 1943, he showed no interest in reaching a broader market. Until her retirement in 1956, Carmel Snow, editor of
Harper's Bazaar
, was a champion of his work. In the early 1960s, Mainbocher was still a favourite of America's best-connected women, who adored his boxy suits worn with sleeveless blouses, his four-seam sheath dresses and, as always, his bias-cut evening wear that looked back to the 1930s and forward to the 1970s. He favoured simplicity over complication, decrying exaggeration in fashion (he had a particular loathing for Schiaparelli in the 1930s). ‘I dislike fashions that go off in your hands like fire-crackers,' he said. Fashion editor Bettina Ballard described him as ‘a sort of magic fashion mountain to climb for the woman who is sure enough of her money, her success, or her social position to wear his understated clothes.' But as the ready-to-wear sector developed through the 1960s, Mainbocher became increasingly irrelevant to the onwards march of fashion. By the time of his retirement in 1971, the years of his greatest triumphs were but distant memories.

Further reading:
The definitive account of Mainbocher's life up to his return to America is ‘Pioneer' (13 January 1940), an article by Janet Flanner published in
The New Yorker
. Mainbocher is also profiled by Dale McConathy in
American Fashion
(1975), edited by Sarah Tomerlin Lee, and features in Caroline Rennolds Milbank's
New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style
(1989).

He was known simply as Adrian, enjoying a rise to success that was meteoric by any standards. He was the American costume designer who dressed Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and a galaxy of Hollywood stars in the 1920s and 1930s, then switched to launch his own ready-to-wear fashion house in the 1940s. As chief costume designer at MGM during the golden years of Hollywood, he had a spectacular influence on a generation of American women and was copied relentlessly by the manufacturers of Seventh Avenue. Elsa Schiaparelli noted: ‘What Hollywood designs today, you will be wearing tomorrow.'

Designing for films far ahead of their release put particular pressure on Adrian to think into the future. In 1938, he explained: ‘With modern fashions, I get entirely away from current trends, for screen fashions must, of necessity, be designed so that they will be, dramatically, months ahead when they will be seen on the screen by the world at large.'

For all his talents, his inclusion in a roll-call of designer greats would probably have been questioned by contemporary American fashion editors. In her memoirs published in 1954,
Vogue
editor Edna Woolman Chase gave him merely one, somewhat patronising, reference: ‘There was a time when, in all conscience, I had to be severe with him about his designing.' The failure to appreciate fully Adrian's important role in fashion history might be partly ascribed to a collective sneer at his origins in costume design and the vulgarity of his more fantastical designs for the Hollywood stars. Then there was the issue of his location on the West Coast, always second best for American fashion, which was (and is) driven by New York's Seventh Avenue. Finally, his greatest work was achieved during a period when the American fashion industry was still in thrall to the fashion houses of Paris: the concept of an American designer was somewhat novel.

By the end of his life, the influence of Paris was less omnipotent, for which Adrian deserves some credit. This was the designer who faced up to Christian Dior in a much publicised public debate over Dior's New Look. That he would lose the debate was never in doubt, but he had struck a new defiant attitude for American fashion designers. Other design talents have emerged from Hollywood, including Bonnie Cashin and Irene of California. But Adrian, in the words of fashion historian Caroline Rennolds Milbank, proved that ‘America could have its own style and that it didn't have to evolve from sportswear but could emanate from Hollywood, bypassing Paris altogether.'

Adrian arguably created no look or style that changed the course of fashion, but he was an influencer for millions of women, both in America and beyond. In 1930, 8 million Americans were going to the cinema each week. By 1938,
Vogue
acknowledged that Hollywood ‘is certainly the most perfect visual medium of fashion propaganda that ever existed.' An outstanding example of Adrian's influence was the impact of a long dress in white organdy with extravagant ruffled sleeves, designed for the actress Joan Crawford in the film
Letty Lyn-ton
(1932) and widely copied on Seventh Avenue. The film studio even encouraged copying by leaking details of the dress before the film had been released: Macy's was reported to have sold 50,000 copies, which was probably an exaggeration, but not by much. Adrian himself did not believe American women should try to dress in his more fanciful Hollywood creations. ‘The average woman should limit herself to the costumes worn by the heroines of light comedies … in moderate-sized towns.' By switching from costume design to ready-to-wear in
the 1940s, Adrian made explicit the connection between Hollywood and the American fashion industry that continues to this day. He was also a superb publicist and spokesman for his own brand, always immaculately dressed and ready with a quote.