‘The cut of his coat, the shape of his hat, even the colour of his gloves, were like laws.’
James de Chambrier, French writer, on Bertie’s clothes
EVEN IN HIS new format – rounder and balder – Bertie was still a popular sight around Paris. The locals were, overall, glad to see him return. As one of his French biographers, Philippe Jullian, expresses it, his attitude during the difficult period they had just lived through ‘proved the Prince’s loyalty to France’. Though Jullian was lucid about the reason for this fidelity: ‘To people of a superficial nature, the strongest ties are those of pleasure. And he showed that he was not ungrateful to us for having amused him.’
Bertie was a very recognizable sight, even in the days before the omnipresence of photographs. Having little to occupy him other than his personal habits, he was maniacal about his clothes. Wherever he went, he was always careful to dress exactly comme il faut. Parisians kept an eye out for him not only to see what mischief he might be getting up to, and with whom, but also for hints as to how they themselves should be dressing. It seems incredible, but at that time Paris looked to a plump Londoner for fashion tips.
But Bertie was more than a simple fashion victim. He had enough money to make his every sartorial whim a reality, as well as the self-assurance to wear what he liked. In short, as a style icon he was a sort of male, nineteenth-century Princess Diana – the ironic thing about this being that he had originally learnt his fashion sense from the very people who now admired him for it.
Bertie had first witnessed the French in all their finery when he came to Paris with his parents in 1855. However, the real importance of being sharply dressed would only have dawned on the Prince when he began visiting Napoléon and Eugénie as a young man, and realized how high the fashion bar was set.
The imperial couple were strict taskmasters, demanding precisely the right dress for each occasion. It was a fashion dictatorship. At each of their six annual balls, the invitation specified that men should be ‘en uniforme’, so that all the officers turned out in their regimental colours, sporting the kind of braided jackets that the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix would adopt a century later as their own psychedelic uniform. Meanwhile, at every official function, the foreign dignitaries would be smothered in sashes and medals, and usually dressed up in some kind of national army uniform, even if they had never drawn a sabre in anger. Civilian men had to follow a strict dress code that was subtly different for each type of occasion, consisting of a variation on black tails, tight white waistcoat and high collar, black knickerbockers and knee-length stockings – all of which spawned a highly profitable costume rental industry in Paris. Bertie was a guest of honour at almost every Parisian reception he attended, and would therefore have received a detailed briefing before each event so that he would be perfectly attired. For men at the imperial court, there was no room for improvisation.
Standards of dress were just as demanding for the women guests, though they were freer to personalize their costume, because the principal role of a female at Napoléon’s court was to look stunning (though not quite as stunning as Eugénie, of course). A single ball gown could make or break a woman’s reputation. In his memoirs of life during the Second Empire, the Comte de Maugny describes a countess who shone at court because of ‘the perfection of her features, the academic purity of her curves . . . and her brilliant choice of lovers’. This lady once arrived at a fancy-dress ball at 2 a.m. (after the imperial couple had left, so as not to eclipse the Empress) dressed as a Roman goddess. Her skimpy dress was slit down one side from top to bottom, revealing erotic expanses of outer thigh and what de Maugny calls ‘a foot of unreal perfection’ left half-naked by an open sandal. Yes, a woman was showing her toes in public. It is hard to imagine anything similar happening at one of Victoria’s sober gatherings.
When the young Bertie first ventured outside the imperial palace, he would have seen that well-off Parisians about town were also stylishly dressed. Daytime wear for chic men at that time was a long, buttoned-up jacket, a stiff high collar, a very tall top hat, accompanied by gloves worn thin and tight to prove that you didn’t need to use them for anything practical. The outward style was similar to that of rich young men in London, but in Paris this playboy set reigned as uncontested masters over whole sections of the city, strutting along every boulevard as if they were in the grounds of their châteaux. And as we have seen, many of these wealthy Parisians did possess châteaux – the hôtels particuliers – in the city.
As soon as Bertie had got the measure of these Parisian high standards, he took them back to London and adapted them to his life there, getting his tailor, Henry Poole of Savile Row, to add what the French now like to call ‘le British touch’ and creating his own personal style – which he then re-imported into Paris. The French loved it, and the adjective most frequently used about Bertie was ‘impeccable’. Here is Xavier Paoli, the French police commissaire who would later be his official bodyguard, catching sight of him for the first time in the 1870s:
Beneath the impeccable cut of a navy-blue tweed suit, his gait was fluid and remarkably relaxed. From the expertly tied knot of his tie to the fine silk handkerchief peeping from his breast pocket; from the gold-handled bamboo cane tucked under his arm to the perfumed Havana between his lips; from the light-grey felt hat that he wore tipped slightly to the left to the yellow suede gloves with black trimming, everything suggested sober elegance and subtle refinement.
The French policeman, a representative of the Republic, was instantly under the suave Prince’s spell.
Bertie is credited with several sartorial inventions. If we are to believe some sources, he was the first man in the world to have turn-ups on his trousers, after going for a walk in the country and shortening his trouser legs so they wouldn’t get wet. He is also said to have started the fashion for leaving one’s lowest waistcoat button undone when he began loosening his clothes to accommodate his burgeoning waistline. This plumpness then led to him leaving his jacket completely unbuttoned, a fashion that Parisian men of all girths adopted. And proving that he was always open to new ideas, Bertie also began a craze for uncreased trousers after a valet accidentally ironed along the seams instead of putting a sharp crease in the front and back of the leg.
His greatest invention, though, was the dinner jacket. Legend has it that it was Bertie who first requested a short jacket for evening wear from Henry Poole. This may not sound as ground-breaking as the discovery of penicillin or the invention of the steam engine, but it is surely no bad thing that a British royal once conceived an idea more universal than marrying six wives or invading France.
As the story goes, the long frock coat with tails was becoming less and less popular in London for informal wear in the 1850s and 1860s. The tails were first removed for horse-riding in Hyde Park, for practical reasons, and then for general town wear. In the evening, though, tails were a must for anyone who wanted to look chic. Men got into the habit of putting a straight-collared velvet jacket over their evening suit when they went off to smoke after dinner so that their clothes wouldn’t stink of stale cigars, and this smoking jacket1 gradually became shorter. Apparently it was Bertie who first asked Henry Poole to make a smoking jacket out of black wool, with a silk collar so that it could be worn all evening at more informal get-togethers with friends (like Napoléon and Eugénie, he had innumerable sub-divisions of formality in his various residences). Perhaps Bertie was just too lazy to change into and out of a smoking jacket, or – more probably – he wanted smoking to be a permanent fixture of the evening rather than limiting it to a post-prandial puff. Either way, the James Bond jacket was born, and has survived to this day.
Incidentally, Bertie also conspired to give the dinner jacket its other name, the tuxedo. In the summer of 1886, a rich American coffee merchant called James Brown Potter and his wife Cora came to London and were invited to a ball attended by Bertie. The beautiful Cora caught his eye and he invited the couple to dinner. When James asked what he should wear to such an occasion, Bertie told him to consult his tailor.
Perhaps Bertie had secretly designed a cuckolded husband’s costume equipped with earmuffs and a blindfold, but in the event Henry Poole fitted the American out in one of Bertie’s short dinner jackets. Mr Brown Potter took the jacket home and wore it to a function at his New York country club, Tuxedo Park, from where it spread right across America, branded with its new name. If only Bertie had thought to patent his invention, his gambling debts would have been a thing of the past.
Bertie was just as influential on women’s fashions in Paris, mainly thanks to his choice of lovers. As we have seen in a previous chapter, his mistresses would sometimes begin dressing like Princess Alexandra as a badge of honour. And because the smartest thing to be in Paris was an English prince’s lover, other women began to adopt the same fashion.
Alexandra’s sober style led to the abandonment of the crinoline, the parasol-like dress that had turned mid-nineteenth-century women into walking lampshades. This fashion for ultra-wide skirts held out by layers of stiff petticoats had begun in the 1830s, and by the 1850s had become so extreme that the most fashionable women could hardly walk beneath the weight of their underwear, inspiring an American to invent a hooped frame that gave the dress its shape without obliging the woman to wear so many petticoats. The crinoline reached the height (or breadth) of its popularity at Eugénie’s court, where the low-cut bodice left the top half of a lady’s torso enticingly exposed while the domed skirt kept men at arm’s length – at least until a lady stepped out of her evening gown and invited him closer.
After the collapse of Eugenie’s court and her inflated skirts, things changed. Princess Alexandra was amongst the leaders of a new fashion for a flatter-fronted dress which extended at the back in a sort of train, eventually evolving into a full bustle. Because Alexandra had a scar on her neck from a childhood operation, she would usually wear a choker necklace in public, which also became very fashionable. As her marriage wore on and she became even less sensual than she had been as a young bride, her cleavage disappeared behind higher collars, and, strangely, the eternally sensual Parisiennes adopted this fashion too. In the 1880s Alexandra even inspired Parisian cocottes to imitate her immobile face that one painter of the time, Paul Helleu, described as ‘a silver mirror’.
These extremes were part of a general French Anglomania largely created by Bertie. Forever turning up in amusing but chic new street fashions, he had shown France that the odd siege or massacre was no reason to abandon a life of fun, and he now became a kind of ideal man for many Parisians – despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the newspapers back in London were constantly complaining about his overspending, his political indiscretions and his fondness for other men’s wives.
It was for Bertie that the French imported the English style of hunting – that is, driving creatures towards shotguns and massacring them. In the autumn of 1874, Bertie’s friend the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia organized a pheasant hunt at Esclimont, his château in the forest just outside Paris. Journalists from the newspaper Le Figaro were invited along to witness the novel event, and reported that the Duc and the other French royalists were mostly rotten shots, but that Bertie was a fine marksman, personally bagging eighty birds. They were too diplomatic, or too ill informed, to reveal that the Duc had wisely ordered several hundred dead pheasants from a poulterer to make sure that the hunt flattered his guests.
On Bertie’s next visit to France in March 1875, he was invited to another chasse à l’anglaise at the Château de Serrant on the Loire, home of another French royalist friend, the Duc de La Trémoille. Here, Bertie reportedly bagged 300 pheasants in a single Monday morning. How many of them were dead before he shot them is impossible to know.
The guns naturally had to be accessorized with Bertie-style tweeds, and occasionally this new French taste for the English-landowner look caused confusion. There is an anecdote about a French aristocrat who took to dressing up as an English country gent at his château. One day, he showed some English visitors around his stables, and at the end of the tour, one of them gave him a tip. Because of the way he was dressed, they had all assumed he was a stable lad (for which the French have an English name, incidentally – un groom). The aristo thought this was so funny that he had the tip framed and hung it in his family gallery alongside his noble ancestors.
It also became fashionable in the chic parts of Paris to speak like Bertie and pepper one’s French with English words. The biographer Philippe Jullian tells a story about a snobbish Parisian being served a bad wine in a restaurant, and declaring that from now he was only going to eat at the Café Anglais where he would be sure of getting ‘un bon claret’ – claret being the exclusively English word for what the French would call a Bordeaux rouge.
Bertie’s personal appearances in Paris became highly important events in the city’s cultural life. The best evidence for this is an opera written by Jacques Offenbach and his librettist Albert Millaud in 1874, when they were still rebuilding their careers after the Commune. The opera was Madame l’Archiduc, a typically fluffy story about an archduke who falls in love with a servant, into which Millaud had (very fashionably) inserted a duet sung in Franglais. Two characters at an inn are pretending to be English, and sing a song with lines like ‘Oh yes! Come, come, boivez wine, so beautiful, divine’ and ‘Very well, I tank2 you, oh my dear’. Deliberately ungrammatical nonsense that a Parisian audience would have found hilarious.
When Bertie visited Paris in March 1875, he went to see Madame l’Archiduc, helping to make it a hit after a slow start at the box office. And he probably got a great kick out of the Franglais song. If he had any literary sensibility at all (which is arguable), he might have noticed one telling line in the duet: ‘Oh! Ce rosbeef very fine.’ In the context of the scene, this could be taken literally to mean that the roast beef served at the inn is excellent, but ‘rosbif’ (as it is usually spelt nowadays) is also a slang term for an Englishman. Everyone in the theatre that night would have known that le prince anglais was in attendance, and it’s easy to imagine the singer bowing towards Bertie as he sang the line. And it may not be going too far to surmise that Offenbach and Millaud inserted the Franglais scene with the precise intention of attracting Bertie along to hear it. If so, their strategy worked perfectly, because the first time Bertie visited Paris after the opera opened, he went along.
Naturally, during the performance Bertie was seen to spend most of his time gazing through his opera glasses at beautiful women in the audience, but then most of the audience would have gone there in the hope of being gazed at. And there would have been plenty of opera glasses trained on Bertie, too, to see what he was wearing that night. In the 1870s and 1880s, Paris was a republic, but in terms of style its ruler was a prince.
Bertie and Alexandra can’t claim all the merit for the English influence on Parisian fashion – at least where women’s clothing was concerned. A lot of the credit has to go to an Englishman called Charles Worth.
Worth first came to Paris in 1845 as an ambitious twenty-year-old fabric salesman to work for the Maison Gagelin, a popular shop selling both cloth and ready-made clothing. Worth began designing dresses, and was soon promoted to head his own department in the business. When the Maison Gagelin was invited to provide clothes for the wedding of Empress Eugénie in 1853, Worth contributed some of his dresses, which were noticed by Paris’s new First Lady. After winning a prize at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle (where he exhibited in the French section, of course, for Gagelin), the Englishman found himself a financier – a Swede called Otto Bobergh – and opened his own shop in the chic rue de la Paix, between Opéra and Concorde.
It was a canny move – this was exactly the right time to be starting a luxury business in Paris, because in Napoléon and Eugénie’s capital, impressing people with your dress sense was a key part of a woman’s social success. What was more, Worth’s shop soon had the city’s number-one customer on its books, the maîtresse of style, Eugénie herself. Once it became known that the Empress shopped chez Worth, any Parisian lady worth her sel was dying to get on to his client list – and being turned away if she wasn’t important enough. Interestingly, amongst the élite customers accepted by Worth were the famous cocottes, notably the two English stars of Paris’s sex-for-money scene, Cora Pearl and Catherine ‘Skittles’ Walters. And this in no way drove away the more respectable ladies – in the Second Empire, the high-class prostitutes formed a parallel aristocracy.
As well as a keen eye for business and a sense of style, Worth had come up through the ranks and therefore possessed a true working knowledge of new fabrics on the market and the way they behaved when cut. His success was no coincidence – his customers knew that their dress would fit perfectly, and we have seen how important that was when it came to the plunging necklines at Eugénie’s court. Any bit of bad tailoring would have caused an embarrassing fashion accident.
Worth was a true craftsman-artist. His skill, and his unbeatable client list, helped him impose his own dicta-torial rules. The most imposing Parisian aristocrat could no longer come and tell the tailor to carry out her instructions – she would wear what he told her. She had to buy dresses for the morning, afternoon and evening as well as more relaxed tea gowns and nightgowns to be worn at home. She would also buy new designs each season, because fashions would change, by order of Worth – although she could also be sure that her particular version of the design would be unique. Furthermore, the lady would accept Worth’s choice of accessories, made by his associates in the shoemaking, bagmaking and millinery trades. In short, he was creating what the French call le total look as well as inventing the business model followed by all the best haute couture houses today.
Understandably, Worth closed up shop during the Franco-Prussian war when most of his clients left the city, but he returned after the Commune – minus his Swedish business partner, but with new designs in mind. It was when he made this Parisian comeback that he put an end to the crinoline.
The reopening of his shop was taken as a key sign of regeneration in the city. In a diary entry for January 1872, the writer Edmond de Goncourt records seeing a traffic jam in the rue de la Paix, caused by carriages jostling to get into the courtyard of a building. He walks closer and: ‘Looking above the entrance to the courtyard, I read: Worth. Paris is just as it was during the Empire.’ What he meant was that the rich, fashionable women were back in town and the first thing they were doing was rush to get the latest English designs.
It would of course have been a miracle if everyone in Paris approved of this Anglo influence. Goncourt’s diary for 1875 contains a hilarious description of English tourists eating at the chic Café Voisin, one of Bertie’s haunts: He writes:
The joy with which the Anglais stuff themselves is a truly disgusting thing that you don’t see in any other civilized people. As they eat, their whole brain is concentrated on chewing and gulping. The men utter little grunts of animal satisfaction, while their pink-and-white-faced women glow with mindless intoxication. The sons and tomboy daughters grin lovingly at their meat. All of them – men, women and children – put on a show of bestial obsession, mute repletion and imbecilic ecstasy.
What Goncourt was witnessing, of course, was a family of English tourists who had come to a fashionable Paris café to enjoy the food, rather than look around to see who was with whom and gossip accordingly. In this respect, Bertie would never have ‘disgusted’ Goncourt – he was an Anglais in Paris who always behaved exactly like a Parisian.
1 Interestingly, the French word for a dinner jacket harks back to these origins – it is le smoking. The fact that it is an English term is probably not only a homage to Bertie. Even though the activity of smoking is still considered fairly chic by many French people, their word for smoking, fumer, and anything associated with it, sounds rather vulgar. Fumier, for example, means dung.
2 This misspelling reflects, of course, the French inability to pronounce the ‘th’ sound. Mispronouncing ‘thank you’ is a favourite French game, and variants include ‘Saint Cloud’ – the suburb of Paris, pronounced ‘san cloo’ – and ‘ton cul’ (‘ton coo’), which means ‘your arse’. In fact, in Madame l’Archiduc, the singer might well have pronounced the line ‘Very well, I ton cul, oh my dear’ to get an extra laugh.