The Great Fashion Designers (19 page)

She next went to work as design assistant to Robert Turk, an independent dressmaker, and, when his business was absorbed two years later into Townley Frocks, a mid-market Seventh Avenue dress and sportswear manufacturer owned by Henry Geiss, she went with him. In 1932 Turk drowned in a boating accident and Geiss allowed 27-year-old McCardell to complete the autumn collection—which she did successfully. Appointed chief designer, she adopted the habit of all contemporary American designers and travelled to Paris (and beyond) twice
a year to copy current ideas. McCardell was not disposed to copy Paris couturiers but did find inspiration in Europe—sometimes from portraits in museums, sometimes from folkloric dress—as when she adapted the Austrian dirndl skirt for the American market. On a different trip she bought mounds of coloured glass beads in a Hungarian flea market and piled them on to both her own simple dresses and those in the showroom.

During the 1930s she began to develop the themes she would perfect in the 1940s. Valerie Steele listed some of these ‘McCardellisms' or design innovations in her introduction to Yohannan and Nolf's monograph on the designer, ‘… her signature metal fastenings (such as brass hooks and eyes), double rows of top-stitching, spaghetti string ties, long sashes, wrap and tie separates and menswear details.' She also toyed with ideas for mix-and-match separates, the use of heavy tie silk for dresses and menswear tweeds and worsted suiting for women's coats, her deep ‘wasp-waist' belts in elasticised leather and her buckle fastening borrowed from contemporary cold-weather sports gear.

In the autumn of 1938 McCardell designed her first successful original silhouette, the Monastic, a dart-less, waistless, bias-cut, tent-style dress that could be worn with or without a belt. It sold out over and over again and was so widely copied that Geiss found his attention and fortune almost fully occupied suing copyists. Exhausted and impoverished, Geiss closed Townley Frocks in 1938. McCardell was immediately invited to work for Hattie Carnegie (already employing Norman Norell and Travis Banton) whose business was essentially copying and cannibalising Parisian styles. Although the job did not work out well, through it McCardell met Diana Vreeland (then at
Harper's Bazaar
) who was to become a lifelong friend and supporter. At this time she also met the man she was eventually to marry, Irving Drought Harris, a handsome Texan architect on the brink of divorce and not at all what McCardell's father would have had in mind for her.

In 1940 Townley Frocks reopened headed by Adolph Klein, a young imaginative manager who believed in McCardell's talent enough to invite her back, give her control over design and credit her on the label. This was the first marriage of cuttingedge design and mass production, and it birthed a new genre of clothing. It is possible that American designer sportswear would have taken a lot longer to establish itself without the Second World War which denied American manufacturers the opportunity to continue to plagiarise French designs. Thrown back on its own resources, however, Seventh Avenue eventually rallied and gave its designers their head. McCardell led the way, exploring the possibilities of the fine cottons produced in the Southern states and usually used for children's clothes, men's shirts and pyjamas and various household purposes. In 1942 she introduced the Popover, a wrap-around, unstructured, utilitarian denim dress to be worn over smarter clothes. This was a response to a request by
Harper's Bazaar
on behalf of women whose domestic help had left for wartime factory work. The Popover evolved in later collections into dresses, coats, beach wraps and hostess dresses.

In 1941 she showed her first Kitchen Dinner Dress, a cotton shirtwaist with a full skirt and matching apron for working women who liked to cook but did not want to look like a homebody housewife. Leather for shoes was heavily rationed, so McCardell promoted the ballet slipper as street wear, often covered in coordinating or matching fabrics to her clothes. A certain austerity in dress was appropriate for wartime, but as it drew to a close, McCardell understood the need for both femininity, prefiguring the New Look, and some lightheartedness, developing her sportswear and leisurewear and adding many new items to women's wardrobes, including braless halter styles, the hooded sweater, jersey leotards, shorts, bathing suits (including the famous Diaper) and playsuits.

In the late 1940s and through the 1950s McCardell's name, propagated by the doyenne of publicists, Eleanor Lambert, dominated American fashion. She died of cancer in 1958

Further reading: Claire McCardell; Redefining Modernism
(1998), by Kohle Yohannan and Nancy Nolf, is comprehensive, and Richard Martin's
American Ingenuity: Sportswear 1930s–1970s
, the catalogue to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's 1998 exhibition, is excellent for context and detailed illustration.

The first ‘Little Black Dress' (LBD) was probably Chanel's; when she introduced it in 1926,
Vogue
compared it to the Model T Ford (which you could famously get in any colour as long as it was black) and predicted that it would ‘become the sort of uniform for women of taste'. Balenciaga focused on it, refined it, sculpted it to become the byword for chic and social comfort that it is. But the iconic LBD is, without a doubt, Givenchy's. It is the one Audrey Hepburn wore in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. The conundrum for fashion writers is whether Hepburn recognised Givenchy's wonderfully well-bred, modern and unfussy style as a major force in fashion and wisely used it to cement her own image or whether the fact that a generation of women made her their role model precipitated her couturier and friend to an essentially unearned stardom. Certainly Hepburn's gamine look and breastless, hipless body was the one young women in the late 1950s and 1960s craved for their own. And certainly many critics of fashion have argued that Givenchy was no innovator. But, as Caroline Rennolds Milbank wrote in 1985,

The originality is there, but always under complete control; never could one of his dresses or ensembles be termed loud, overbearing or offensive. For over 30 years, Givenchy, the perfect gentleman, has dressed a clientele ranging in age from debutante to dowager in a style that has been young and mock-elegant, pure and sculptural, refreshingly ladylike as well as addictive. His clients are women for whom elegance is not an end in itself, but merely the way they do everything. For them, Givenchy is a last bastion of quality.

The clue, in a way, lies in the word, clientele. Although he created a ready-to-wear line in 1968, Givenchy was essentially a couturier, truly focused on making couture clothes for real (rich) women. While sacrificing nothing of quality or refinement (he is a demanding perfectionist to his fingertips), he modernised their wardrobe, introducing separates in 1955 and, a little later, easy-care synthetics such as Orlon. He thought of it as a youthful update of a classic way of dressing. Unlike some other couturiers working at this time, he allowed for the modern woman's busy, multifaceted, working life; his easy dresses, suits and coats were adored by women such as the Duchess of Windsor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, Princess Grace of Monaco, Gloria Guinness, Bunny Mellon and Capucine. When the assassinated President John F. Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in 1963, all the Kennedy women were wearing Givenchy, their mourning black flown in specially from Paris. It is said that at that time the Givenchy atelier possessed individual pattern sheets for every female member of the Kennedy family. In many ways Hubert de Givenchy, the discreet aristocrat, was nearer to the great events of a wider world than any other fashion designer before or since.

He is an immensely cultivated man, comfortable at the highest levels of any society, an expert on art, furniture, architecture and, perhaps his greatest passion, gardens, of which he has made many—including leading the restoration of the kitchen garden at Versailles. He is a man of great integrity, incapable of a self-aggrandising cheap trick of any sort. ‘I persist,' he said, ‘in not understanding flashy elaborations whose sole purpose, in my opinion, is to shock.' He has always been dismissive of mere notoriety, mere success, saying, ‘For those concerned about quality, prestige is what counts.
Success is not prestige; prestige alone is what endures after you've gone.'

The relationship with Hepburn was at the centre of his professional life. Theirs was a stylistic partnership made in heaven. In 1953 she had been cast in her second major film,
Sabrina
, with William Holden and Humphrey Bogart, and the director, Billy Wilder, sent her to Paris to pick up some chic clothes appropriate for the transformed chauffeur's daughter. Hepburn's first choice had been Balenciaga, but he was too busy preparing his collection and could not see her. Givenchy was her second choice. He assumed the actress coming to choose clothes for a film was Katharine Hepburn. He hid his disappointment. He too was in the throes of creating a collection and unable to design anything specifically for her. Undeterred, Hepburn rummaged through previous collections hanging in the workroom and found the pieces she wanted. The Paramount costume designer Edith Head was credited with them on the film, and at the premiere an embarrassed Hepburn promised Givenchy she would make it up to him. She did—by wearing his clothes in her private life from then on and insisting that only he could design her wardrobe for
Funny Face
(1957),
Love in the Afternoon
(1957),
Breakfast at Tiffany's
(1961),
Charade
(1963),
Paris When It Sizzles
(1964) and
How to Steal a Million
(1966). ‘His are the only clothes in which I am myself,' she said in 1956. ‘He is far more than a couturier, he is a creator of personality.'

The two earliest films in which she wore Givenchy focus on the transformative power of clothes and were a gift to a couturier. ‘In film after film,' wrote Givenchy in 1998, ‘Audrey wore clothes with such talent and flair that she created a style, which in turn had a major impact on fashion. Her chic, her youth, her bearing and her silhouette grew ever more celebrated, enveloping me in a kind of aura or radiance that I could never have hoped for.'

Hubert James Taffin de Givenchy was born in 1927 in Beauvais, the younger son of the Marquis de Givenchy, who died of influenza in 1930. Hubert and his older brother, Jean-Claude, were brought up by their mother, Béatrice, and her mother, the widow of the artist, Jules Badin, who had studied with Corot and was artistic director of the historic Gobelin and Beauvais tapestry factories. In fact, Hubert de Givenchy's maternal ancestors were a creative dynasty, involved in designing for the Beauvais factory and for the theatre. His grandmother cultivated his early taste for beautiful things. ‘When I was a schoolboy,' Givenchy wrote in
The Givenchy Style
in 1998, ‘my grandmother rewarded me for good grades by showing her treasures—whole cabinets filled with every kind of fabric, all of which left me utterly dazzled. Could I have sensed that one day fabrics in the hundreds and thousands of metres would pass through my hands?

‘During those many years of couture collections, there were always fabrics which I liked more than others. The allure, the odour of silk, the feel of a velvet, the crackle of a “duchess” satin—what intoxication! How truly wonderful! The colours, the sheen of a faille, the iridescent side of a shot taffeta, the strength of a brocade, the caress of a velvet panel—what bliss! What extraordinary sensuality!' Throughout his career, Givenchy remained enchanted by fabric; he often worked closely with the textile factories to create unique textures, colours and effects.

At ten years old, he was taken to visit the Pavillon d'Elégance at the 1937 Paris Exposition, and he decided that he wanted to work in fashion. He attended college in Beauvais and moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux Arts. He desperately wanted to train in the atelier of his great hero, Cristobal Balenciaga, but it was not to be. The seventeen-year-old's approaches were rebuffed, and it was to be many years before they met. In 1944, thanks to family contacts, Givenchy got a job with Jacques Fath, working at the couture house—a convivial place peopled by giggling mannequins and the generosity of spirit of Jacques and Genevieve Fath—in the mornings and going to class in the afternoons. On the recommendation of Christian Bérard he left Fath in 1946 to take a job with Robert Piguet, an altogether more sober establishment, leaving after a year to join Lucien Lelong. His stay at Lelong was even shorter, a mere six months before, on the recommendation of René Caron, he moved on to a covetable post as first assistant to Elsa Schiaparelli and director of her place Vendôme boutique. There he designed bright separates—often using up pre-war surrealist
prints—that were much admired by Schiaparelli's urban sophisticates. By anyone's standards, it was a meteoric progress.

In 1952, at just twenty-five years old, Givenchy opened his own design house near the Parc Monceau in Paris. He named his well-received first collection, shown on plaster mannequins because live ones were too expensive, after Bettina Graziani, Paris's top model who was handling his publicity. The collection was made chiefly in inexpensive white cotton shirting fabric and featured the Bettina blouse with bell-like bishop sleeves ruffled in white and black broderie anglaise. It was very widely copied (and even had a twenty-first century reprise) and established his name in America as well as Europe. He teamed it with a narrow, nutmeg-coloured skirt or a wide, black dirndl and flat shoes, sometimes woven from straw. Dior still dominated Paris couture and Givenchy was seen as the young challenger, his style marked by the insouciance of the simple fabrics and a youthful cleanliness of line that was to become his signature. ‘I've dreamt,' he said, ‘of a liberated woman who will no longer be swathed in fabric, armour-plated. All my lines are styles for quick and fluid movement. My dresses are real dresses, ultra-light, free of padding and corseting, garments that will float on a body delivered from bondage.' The boutique that he quickly opened on the ground floor of his building was inspired by his time at Schiaparelli and allowed his clients to mix and match his easy separates in a truly innovative way.