The Great Fashion Designers (13 page)

His family background was ideal for a designer. He was born Adrian Adolph Greenburg in 1903 in Naugatuck, Connecticut, the son of milliners Gilbert and Helena Greenburg. Taught sewing by a Swedish nanny, he displayed exceptional early talent as a draughtsman, encouraged by his uncle Max Greenberg, a scenic designer. A place at Parsons School of Fine and Applied Art in New York beckoned by 1921, where teachers quickly agreed that his undoubted talents might be more challenged and developed in the Paris branch of Parsons. Changing his name to Adrian, he arrived in Paris in 1922 and stayed a mere four months—time enough to create a costume for a friend at the prestigious Bal Du Grand Prix and secure an invitation from Irving Berlin to design costumes for his New York revue.

That commission took Adrian back to America in double-quick time. Although Adrian's contribution in the revue turned out to be much smaller than he had hoped, it was not long before other theatre folk were taking notice of the confident young man. Natacha Rambova, the flamboyant wife of Rudolph Valentino, gave Adrian his first major break, inviting him to Hollywood to work on a Valentino film. He bought himself a white suit and a black cape lined in red satin and prepared to take the West Coast by storm. At the tender age of 24, he found himself designing costumes for Cecil B. De Mille's
The King of Kings
, a biblical epic on which no expense was spared. Adrian had arrived.

The popular new costume designer was blessed with exceptional confidence in his own abilities and a talent for charming people that made him a social hit in Hollywood. He was swiftly headhunted by Louis B. Mayer, the autocratic but perceptive boss of MGM. His first movie for Mayer was
A Woman of Affairs
, starring Greta Garbo. Right from the start, Adrian caught the eye of Seventh Avenue, too: Garbo's slouch hat and belted trench coat made the pages of American trade newspaper
Women's Wear Daily
. During Adrian's twelve-year stint working for MGM, Hollywood emerged as an important influence on American women's style, arguably as influential as the fashion houses of Paris.

Adrian's output was extraordinary, regularly amounting to fifty or more sketches in a day. The work pace was relentless, particularly for the period epics, such as
Marie Antoinette
, which required some 4,000 costumes, including 34 for leading lady Norma Shearer. He designed virtually everything Joan Crawford wore both on and off the screen, including her signature square-shouldered suits, from 1929 until 1943. Rather like a method actor, Adrian spent time thinking his way into the period of each movie, determined to capture the essence of the era before creating his costumes. His way of working was punctilious and disciplined, aiming to fit his actresses early in the morning before they were tired out by shooting. No expense was spared, no director's fantasy left unfulfilled, from the spectacular coronation robe worn by his favourite actress, Greta Garbo, in
Queen Christina
to the bugle-beaded negligee with twenty-two inch ostrich-frond cuffs worn by Jean Harlow in
Dinner at Eight
. His futuristic costumes for Garbo in
Mata Hari
drew particular attention; perhaps only an actress of her stature could have carried them off. By contrast, he also designed Judy Garland's blue and white gingham pinafore and sequinned red shoes in
The Wizard of Oz
.

Hollywood studios worked directly with retailers for tie-in deals. At Macy's in New York, a Cinema Shop was opened where imitations of the clothes worn by actresses could be bought. For example, suits, coats and hostess gowns inspired by the film
Queen Christina
were offered for sale in 1933. Academic Anne Massey notes that sewing and knitting patterns were also created to imitate the fashions of the big screen. She points out that ‘Hollywood cinema played a crucial role in creating and disseminating a streamlined
moderne
style that made a massive impact internationally.'

Adrian's lifestyle was comfortable and lavish, buoyed by a salary of $1,000 a week. He hosted lunch parties and oversaw an antiques shop on Sunset Strip. He also bought a ranch shack in the desert at Palm Springs, which he used as a retreat for painting and for visits by favoured friends who could handle the rudimentary facilities. Marriage to
Fox star Janet Gaynor completed the picture of a designer who lived life to the full. A colourful paisley print smock he designed for her pregnancy caught the attention of the media, and Seventh Avenue's copyists were not far behind.

The good times did not last. As MGM and other studios sought to impose cost controls in the late 1930s, the nothing-spared atmosphere was replaced by a more cautious attitude to film production. Garbo's last film,
Two-Faced Woman
, was also Adrian's last at MGM. Depressed by the new mood, one afternoon Adrian tore up his sketches and walked out. His next move, long nurtured and discussed with Woody Feurt, a friend with fashion industry experience, was to launch Adrian Ltd in Beverly Hills. The beginnings were not promising, with the rest of the world at war and America, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, poised to play its role, too. Struggling with the logistical and financial challenges of launching a fashion house, Adrian was obliged to show his first collection on the patio of his home. For a second collection, shown in August 1942, Adrian decided to pull out all the stops. The result was a storming success, with orders flooding in to the fledgling house. His broad-shouldered suits were applauded, and a black dress went on to become a long-term best-seller.

Adrian realised that the war, which had forced most Paris fashion houses to close their export operations, presented an opportunity for American designers. Together with the publicist Eleanor Lambert, he urged his fellow designers to take advantage. Material, particularly wool fabric, was in short supply, forcing designers to use all their ingenuity to keep the look fresh. Adrian responded to the L-85 regulations, introduced to restrict the use of materials for the fashion industry during wartime, by narrowing sleeves and introducing self-piping ties on jacket fronts to replace buttons. He mixed materials to conserve the finest for the key pieces. His broad-shouldered tailored silhouette was the wartime favourite, establishing Adrian as a household name—despite little support from the East Coast-edited fashion magazines. In 1944, he won a prestigious Coty award.

Adrian's skill with fabric was exceptional. Pola Stout's striped and geometric woven fabrics were a favourite for jackets, skirts and dresses. He enjoyed cutting the fabric into panels and resewing them in patches on jackets. He also combined similar fabrics in one look to dramatic effect. His suits often comprised long collarless jackets with a single closure at the waist worn with a straight skirt with a kick pleat. His evening dresses, perfectly draped, reflected his experience in creating show-stopping dresses for the MGM stars. His cocktail dresses and ball gowns sometimes tipped too far towards his roots in costume design, certainly way too far for the tastes of the arbiters of style at
Vogue
and
Harper's Bazaar
. Fashion historian Caroline Rennolds Milbank considered him at his best when working within the restrictions of a theme, such as for a Greek collection with columnar white dresses or for a Gothic collection with jersey dresses and trailing medieval themes. The link with the disciplines of his Hollywood career was self-evident.

After the war, Christian Dior's New Look, with its return to full skirts and restricted waists, caught a new mood. Adrian's response was to clash with Dior in a broadcast debate and to stick to his broad-shouldered look. ‘I do not like padded hips,' he told
Life
magazine. ‘To try and make women pad their hips in this day and age is a little like selling armour to a man.' Determined not to lose momentum, he showed his collection for the first time in New York in 1948 at the department store of Gunther-Jaeckel, prompting a buying frenzy from public and store buyers alike. What ultimately stopped Adrian was not the changing tides of fashion—uncomfortable though they were for the designer—but ill health. In early 1952, he suffered a heart attack and, after some soul-searching with his business partner Woody Feurt, decided to close the business. Thereafter, he spent much of his time with his wife and family in Brazil, where he designed a jungle hideaway. Tempted by friends back into designing costumes (for a stage musical, this time) in 1958, he was poised to re-enter the world of work again, only to suffer a second and fatal heart attack in September 1959.

Further reading:
Christian Esquevin's
Adrian: Silver Screen to Custom Label
(2008) is a long overdue summary of the designer's career. In
American Fashion
(1975), edited by Sarah Tomerlin Lee, Robert Riley contributes a section on Adrian.

In the history of dress, shoes have never been accorded quite the consequence they deserve. In the drama that is fashion, shoes are quite literally accessories, supporting characters, there to facilitate the action and way down the cast list. True, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, they elbowed their way centre stage but that was probably more the result of marketing than a real shift in our perceptions. Yet, when it comes to defining gender, class and erotic intent, shoes have, through most of history, packed a bigger punch than mere clothes. It's safe to argue that nothing else people wear has been quite so thoroughly and repetitively fetishised—a factor exploited by designers and marketers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Even so, fashion and its contemporary commentators have tended to overlook it, regarding shoemakers as artisans rather than artists or designers.

Many shoemakers have been great designers and innovators, but the first to break through those barriers of anonymity was Salvatore Ferragamo, the Italian born in respectable poverty in Bonito, near Naples, the eleventh of fourteen children, who left behind a dynasty that became a luxury goods empire. He wrote in his autobiography that he did not so much learn how to make shoes as ‘remember', as if in an earlier life or many earlier lives he had already been a shoemaker. ‘I was born to be a shoemaker,' he wrote. ‘I know it; I have always known it. As I look back now on the long lesson of my life I can see quite clearly how strong, how remorseless, how unrelenting is the passion within me that has driven me on and on, along a path strewn with so many hardships. Many are the times when I wondered why I was not as other men … content with the things they possessed, hankering not after the fruits of tomorrow. Yet I could not swerve from my predestined path, no matter what the cost. It was against Nature, It was against God.'

His explanation of his unlearned skill was mystical.

… but from whence does my knowledge come? It is not inherited. In later years I searched the records of my ancestors through 400 years. There was no shoemaker among them. I found many humble property owners, I found a poet, I even found an alchemist; but no shoemakers, not one. Nor have I had to learn in the accepted sense. From my first day with shoes—yes, even with the little white shoes I made for my sisters—I have remembered all about shoemaking. I have remembered: that is the only way to describe it. I have only to sit down and think, and the memory comes to me out of the days—it can only be this—when in some previous existence upon this earth, I was a shoemaker.

A lifelong experimenter with materials and structure, Ferragamo invented wedges, the rounded toe, Roman sandals, the invisible nylon shoe, the crystal-soled shoe, sculpted heels, the ‘gloved' arch, shell soles and the stiletto heel (he called it the ‘spike'). The political and economic exigencies of his century forced his ingenuity beyond even his fertile inclination, and he developed ways to
use the unlikeliest materials in shoes of seductive beauty: crystal and cellophane, fish skin, feathers, crocheted silk, satin, embroidery and mosaics of gem-cut crystals and Venetian glass beads, mirror glass, pearls, diamonds and diamond dust, raffia and cork, wood and rubber, Bakelite and nylon thread, felt and all manner of animal skin, including antelope, kangaroo and lizard.

He was certainly a determined and driven individual, certain from his childhood what he was destined to do. His parents were poor farmers, and two of his brothers trained to be tailors but, in village society, the cobbler was ‘the lowest of all the classes' and for their son to become apprenticed to him was beneath his family's dignity. ‘It would bring the family into disrepute,' he recalled. It was only after he had played truant from several other apprenticeships and then, without training, sat up all night making his little sisters' First Communion shoes from canvas and cardboard (his parents were too poor to buy any for them) that they finally relented. Long before he was ten years old he had learned everything the village shoemaker could teach him. That year his father died and, in 1909 when he was eleven, Salvatore left home to go to Naples to attempt to learn more advanced skills. Moving from shoemaker to shoemaker, spending a day here, three there, he absorbed knowledge, before borrowing money from his mother's brother, a priest, and setting up as a shoemaker in his home village of Bonito. He was indeed a prodigy, not only in terms of skill and talent but also in his precocious business acumen. Rapidly he developed a good business making shoes for the local gentry. In 1912, he was persuaded to join his older brothers and sisters, all of whom had emigrated as they became old enough, in America. At fourteen he made the long sea journey alone, pausing only briefly on the East Coast to dismiss the shoe factory where his brother-in-law worked and head out West to join his brothers in Santa Barbara, where they opened a shoe-repair shop and Salvatore began his meteoric career as shoemaker to the stars—first on set and then in their private lives.