If a tourist arrives in Paris during the period of ready-to-wear runway shows in March or September, a taxi driver stuck in the inevitable traffic jam on the trip into the city from Charles de Gaulle Airport is likely to offer commentary on the world-famous fashion labels Christian Dior or Chanel in the same manner that a New York cabbie might kibitz about the Yankees. Fashion, after all, is one of France’s national treasures. Even those who do not consume it at its highest levels are interested in its well-being.
France’s reputation in the world of fashion is bound up with the industry’s early links to the monarchy, its importance to the developing republic, and the enduring tension between the two. From the days of Marie Antoinette, in the eighteenth century, French fashion, like fashion throughout Europe, was dictated by nobility. “The rules were established by the court in every country. Spanish fashion had nothing to do with French fashion. When French fashion was pale blue for men and women, Spain was black,” explains Didier Grumbach, the author of Histoires de la Mode, his book about the history of French fashion. “In every country in Europe, the king or queen was making fashion. Marie Antoinette had a couturier but only to give her advice. It was the queen deciding.”1
Any well-bred French woman, even those who were not part of the royal court, employed a dressmaker. As a result, there were some 350,000 couturiers working in France up until the end of the 1920s. In addition, all commoners who could not afford a dressmaker sewed, so that the production of basic clothing occurred at home. But there was no ready-to-wear, no off-the-rack, in the manner we think of today.
The monarchy ruled over clothing aesthetics—everyone simply copied or paid homage to what the nobles wore. There was no creativity in fashion—only in textiles. The fabric merchants were the artists in what could only barely be called a fashion industry. They dealt in jacquards, brocades, and silk taffetas, as well as notions: button making, lace weaving, and embroidery. They perfected crafts that continue on at such lauded firms as Maison Lesage embroidery and Maison Lemarié, where artisans work magic with feathers.
Breaking from this tradition of the royal court determining the styles and women collaborating with their own dressmakers was Charles Frederick Worth, who arrived in Paris in 1845. An Englishman with significant chutzpah, Worth established what we now consider couture: something that is born in the imagination of the designer and offered to the client.
As a young man, Worth worked as a salesman at Gagelin, a textile firm. While there, he began to make dresses for his wife, who was a saleswoman in the shop. He built a small business designing dresses, which won prizes at various fabric exhibitions and contributed to Gagelin’s success. With the rise of the French Second Republic in 1848, Worth encouraged his employer to expand even further into dressmaking. But Gagelin refused. Dressmaking was still perceived as lowly, inelegant, and beneath the status of a textile artist. So Worth found a partner and started his own business, calling it the House of Worth. He set about the process of developing new shapes and conjuring fresh ideas. He even had the audacity to present his creations on live models. His brazenness didn’t go unnoticed—or unrewarded. It created a scandal.
“It was unaccepted that someone was inventing new shapes,” Grumbach explains. “The rules were very clear about what women wear—before forty years old and after forty; when she is married, when she is widowed. Everything was imposed. There was no freedom in fashion.”2
For a time, Worth’s daring paid off. All was fine and lucrative, and destined to get even better. But then Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been elected the president of the Second Republic, led a coup d’état and, in 1852, began to rule as Napoleon III. With a new emperor and a new royal court, Worth had to rethink his business plan. Wily and savvy, he dispatched his wife, Marie Vernet, to visit the wife of the Austrian ambassador. Vernet arrived with a book of sketches. At first she was met with skepticism about this Englishman’s skills, but Worth’s creativity prevailed. The ambassador’s wife placed an order for two dresses, one for day and another for evening, for the grand sum of three hundred francs.3
Soon after the dresses were completed, the diplomatic corps was invited to a ball at the Louvre. When Napoleon’s wife, Empress Eugénie, got a look at the Worth gown—white tulle, embroidered with silver threads—she was smitten. The next day she summoned Worth to the Louvre, the emperor’s city home, to shop his wares. But instead of arriving prepared to acquiesce to the empress’s desires, with a sketchpad and sample fabrics, Worth arrived with a fully made brocade dress.
“The empress sees the dress and hates it because she thinks it looks like curtains. And she’s absolutely insulted because the dress hasn’t been negotiated. It’s all made. He’s proposing a creation where she didn’t interfere,” Grumbach explains. “She sends him back; she sends [the dress] back. But by chance, the emperor arrives. And Worth, who is not shy, quickly explains: ‘The brocade is from Lyon—a republican city—so I think it’s good politics if the empress wears it a few times.’”
Politics won the day, as it still so often does, and Empress Eugénie gave in. And Worth, a consummate rainmaker, made sure that anyone with money knew that he was the couturier for the empress. During the reign of Napoleon III, from 1852 to 1870, France saw robust growth both industrially and economically. Its influence and power spread around the world. Worth’s position as the exclusive dressmaker for the court was incomparable publicity. He was deemed the ne plus ultra creator of evening gowns and began to dress Russian and English nobility, as well as the wives of American millionaires.
Worth’s business model and his determined self-promotion set the foundation for what became haute couture at the dawn of the twentieth century. Worth would create a collection of designs, which he presented to potential clients. They would make their choices with Worth’s counsel. And he would tailor-make the garments to each client’s specifications through a series of fittings.
This would be the process by which generations of well-to-do women would dress. And while those women would still collaborate with the great couturiers, because of Worth, the balance of creative power increasingly tilted toward the designers.
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Today the term couture is used loosely in reference to clothes that are expensive or especially luxurious, but from Worth’s day well into the 1970s, it had a particular meaning—and in France it still does. Formally, haute couture refers to a manner of construction, one dedicated to handmade quality and personalized fit. The rules of haute couture are strictly dictated and overseen by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, which was established in 1868 and essentially codified Worth’s design process. In France, haute couture is a legally protected designation and the Ministry of Industry regularly reviews which design houses are allowed to use the nomenclature.
A couture show was and remains a singular event—intimate, dignified, and glamorous. The attire of the guests can be breathtaking, not for its opulence or its ostentation but for the sheer perfection of its construction: the purity of fit, the unspeakable chic. The audience is filled with clients as well as retailers, editors, and, today, stylists.
The guests arrive quietly and in due time. There are no hordes of people clogging doorways. No pushing. No snarling guards. There is no conjuring of faux frenzy. The anticipation is palpable but silent.
If haute couture shows today are calm and respectful, up until the late 1960s they were like religion, a cross between Easter Sunday and Holy Communion. The models were not especially beautiful, but they were elongated, birdlike creatures who floated gracefully through a room filled with clients perched on little gilded chairs. Each model held a number in her hand to identify her look. There was a hush over the room. At Balenciaga, there was utter silence.
Haute couture greedily consumes a woman’s time, as a garment requires multiple fittings—in practice and by legislation. It demands patience and a willingness to bother with details. A woman has to appreciate the perfect little hand stitches on the interior of a garment, the handmade lace and embroidery—or at least relish the admiring glances that an exquisitely constructed garment can attract.
Following each couture show, clients make an appointment with their vendeuse, or saleswoman, for the next day. The process has not significantly changed since the time of Worth. Clients select their style, request tweaks, and then proceed through a series of fittings. From a rudimentary muslin to the final product, the garment is handmade, embroidered, beaded, and feathered by a group of artisans who have learned their trade over the generations. This is not disposable fashion. Clients keep garments for years, often altering them slightly to freshen them up.
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Historically, clients maintained close relationships with their vendeuses, who were not just salespeople, but also social arbiters, gatekeepers, and meticulous businesswomen who kept track of who bought which garments and how those orders were progressing through the atelier. The vendeuse was a diplomat who knew which social circles overlapped and was abreast of the current hierarchies. She could discreetly dissuade a client from an ill-advised purchase. If so moved, she could offer a client the discounted sample garments worn by the model in the show. And if the vendeuse was the sort of woman who herself came from relatively rarefied circumstances, she could bring in influential, big-spending, important women who could raise a design house’s notoriety by association. The vendeuse was a celebrity wrangler long before the first Hollywood red carpet was unfurled and the swag suite was opened.
In its most serious form, couture is a way of life. And in its heyday, the 1930s to the 1960s, when there were some twenty thousand couture clients, wealthy women made multiple costume changes a day, going from a dressing gown to a luncheon suit to a dinner dress. The couturier often developed a personal relationship with his clients. For example, designer Hubert de Givenchy sometimes traveled with his American clients Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon (whose grandfather invented Listerine) and Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney (daughter-in-law of Franklin D. Roosevelt and later wife of John Hay Whitney, the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James).4 Indeed, Mellon once sent her private plane to fetch Givenchy from Paris so that he could create uniforms for her entire household staff—including the gardeners.5
You had to be someone, not just someone with very deep pockets, to wear couture. Couture was a world defined by relationships and lineage, in addition to money. A woman was introduced into this world by her mother, a socially prominent friend, or a representative of the house who’d taken note of the woman’s stature in the community and her healthy bank account. One did not simply turn up at an atelier, ring the bell, and expect to be welcomed. A fool’s errand! Haute couture was an exclusive club. And once admitted, a woman tended to remain loyal to one or two couturiers for a lifetime.
Paris’s fashion industry provided the wardrobe for the Western world’s great, striving, and influential beauties. And in the decades straddling World War II, beauty was as all-consuming and revered as any career. Beauty was a profit center for those who were genetically endowed or determinedly self-creating. It helped women attract the most suitable sort of husband. And thus, it could improve a woman’s social standing, fatten her bank account, and enhance her cultural clout. And of course, her beauty reflected well upon her spouse, lending him both virility and admiration.
In today’s judgment, relying on one’s appearance for advancement may be disdained, but throughout the 1940s and ’50s, a woman would be declared foolhardy and unambitious if she failed to exploit her valuable gift of beauty, just as a musical prodigy would be deemed a disappointment if he shunned the concert stage.
The French fashion capitol had a symbiotic relationship with these aspiring women. The Parisian designers used their great skill to help them dazzle men of means and impress (or intimidate) their fellow sojourners. In return, as their appearance won compliments and their prominence rose, these women reflected the spotlight back on their French créateurs whenever their portraits appeared in the pages of Vogue, which debuted in America in 1892, and when their names were included on the International Best-Dressed List, which began as a poll orchestrated by Paris couturiers.
Haute couture set the standard of beauty in all of fashion, and the women who wore it set the standard of style for the masses. The American women who patronized the couture ateliers of Paris came from all parts of the country, from the East Coast to the plains west of the Mississippi to the oil fields of Texas to the California coast. They availed themselves of couture because it was the most personal expression of creative design. They admired the couturiers’ techniques, understood couture’s history, respected its perfectionism, and relished its enduring iconography. But they were also drawn to couture because of social expediency, family tradition, and simply because it was expected of them.
Among the most memorable of these women were Mona (née Strader) Schlesinger Bush Williams von Bismarck, who was enshrined in the Hall of Fame of the Best-Dressed List. She was born in 1897 with little fanfare in Louisville, Kentucky, but she died a countess in Paris after she’d made an impressive and lucrative habit of marrying up. The designer Hubert de Givenchy, who says she was both “beautiful and elegant,” often dressed her.6
Barbara “Babe” Cushing Mortimer Paley, the wife of a Standard Oil heir and later of the founder of CBS, was another darling of the haute couture world. Born in 1915 in Brookline, Massachusetts, she made her first appearance in Vogue in 1934, where she was described as having a “special talent for wearing clothes.”7 By 1958, Babe was also welcomed into the Best-Dressed List Hall of Fame.
“There’s a story about her walking out of a famous New York restaurant and she had a scarf and didn’t know what to do with it so she tied it on her handbag. And scarves on handbags became a thing,” recalls fashion editor Marylou Luther.8
Hailing from Texas, the blond socialite and philanthropist Lynn Wyatt was the granddaughter of the founder of the Sakowitz department stores. She was divorced with two children when she married Oscar Wyatt, the smooth-talking wildcatter, in 1963. A friendly and exuberant woman with a birdlike physique, large, round eyes, and a rollicking Texas twang, Wyatt was introduced to couture—specifically, Hubert de Givenchy and Emanuel Ungaro—and the glamour of Paris by well-meaning friends who took her social well-being in hand. They invited her to all the right parties, and she would pack ten evening gowns in her suitcase for a ten-day trip to Paris. “It was never exhausting to me, ever. I don’t care how many times I see something. I am never blasé. I am never blasé about anything. Beauty is beauty is beauty,” Wyatt says of herself. “I get energized by things like that.9
A pure and unabashed clotheshorse, Nan Kempner, wife of New York investment banker Thomas Kempner, was a wry and self-deprecating character who maintained a “social X-ray” physique, which was akin to that of a very hungry-looking twelve-year-old boy. She grew up in San Francisco in the 1930s and ’40s with a mother who shopped couture. The daughter quickly picked up the habit.
And there was Muriel Newman, the legendary Chicago art collector, who used to say that she always chose the top pieces from a couture collection so that her dress would speak eloquently for her and help secure her rightful place in society regardless of her having come from the former cow town of Chicago.10
But the grandest presence among this genus of American women is the regal Catherine “Deeda” Blair. A great thoroughbred, she was born Catherine Gerlach and grew up in Chicago, with her social coming out occurring in 1949. She was a devotee of Cristobal Balenciaga, and it was his work she’d saved up for when she arrived in Paris in 1959 for her first couture show.
Deeda was recovering from a failed marriage when family friends Eunice and Sargent Shriver introduced her to a lawyer named William McCormick Blair Jr. Mr. Blair was the son of an investment banker and a member of the family who once owned the Chicago Tribune and gave Chicago’s McCormick Place its name. He was also an associate of Adlai Stevenson and part of the Kennedy circle.
In 1961, not long after Kennedy appointed Blair ambassador to Denmark, Blair and Deeda were married at Frederiksborg Castle, which dates back to the seventeenth century.11 Balenciaga designed Deeda Blair’s wedding dress. In keeping with an aesthetic considered the epitome of austerity and elegance, the gown was a restrained eggshell color with a subtle satin sheen, a modest off-the-shoulder neckline, and a gentle waistline. During one fitting, Balenciaga sent the bride-to-be around to a young designer he was mentoring to have him construct her veil. That designer was Hubert de Givenchy.
“I did not know it was Mr. Balenciaga who sent me Mrs. Blair, but I do remember that there [were] a lot of fittings,” Givenchy says. “I was delighted to dress [her]—a beautiful woman.”12
After living abroad for many years, the Blairs eventually moved to Washington, where Deeda began a career in pharmaceutical consulting and medical philanthropy. Decades later, they settled in New York. In her twilight years, Blair remains a tall, slender woman with the upright, calm bearing of a ballerina. She does not walk so much as glide. She is a regular swimmer, which no doubt serves as a preventative to the appearance of frailty despite her reedlike figure. Blair’s voice is a perfectly modulated and subdued alto that lacks any hint of her Saratoga cigarette habit. Her hair remains as it always has been, an immovable raven halo streaked with silver.
As a young woman in the 1960s, she bought from Christian Dior, Givenchy, and Balenciaga. Later, she grew to embrace Saint Laurent and Chanel. Today, her style of dress is classic, reserved, and expensive, from the drape of her silk trousers to the featherlight texture of a cashmere sweater. Even as the numbers of women around the world with the money and wherewithal to indulge in couture has shrunk to a few hundred, Blair has remained a couture client, although her attendance at the annual January and July shows has waned.
But of all the beautiful women who supported and were supported by the business of haute couture, the Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild was the socialite nonpareil. Born in 1931 in New York to a Dutch diplomat father and an Egyptian mother, she headed to Paris after graduating from Marymount College. She married twice, first to a French count and then to Baron Guy de Rothschild of the French banking family, who was a distant cousin. The couple had a thick web of connections to political power brokers, social heavyweights, artists, and various members of the gilded jet set.
With a tidal wave of strawberry blond hair, a sturdy nose, and strong jolie laide features, Rothschild had the most highly valued social cachet in France. She was a woman to whom few could say no. She was imperious, exhausting, imaginative, and vengeful. The stories about her would make Miss Manners alternately smile and recoil in horror. She was both mean girl and Good Samaritan. She could be so far beyond politically incorrect that she risked being a caricature. She gave her vendeuses at Christian Dior compacts from Van Cleef & Arpels as Christmas presents. In a fit of pique, she slapped a man in the middle of the Paris restaurant Fouquet. She suffered for years from a form of degenerative arthritis and sometimes received guests in her bathroom while soaking in her tub.13
As the baroness came into her own as a socialite, she received a good deal of attention for her party-throwing acumen—a skill she put on full display in 1971 when she hosted a costume ball to mark the one hundredth birthday of Proust. When she died at sixty-five, her various obituaries included commentary on her reputation as “one of Europe’s most imaginative hostesses.”14
These women and their peers considered their vendeuses and their preferred designers to be indispensable. The gowns worn by these admired ladies helped to solidify their social standing. At the same time, their social standing served to burnish the reputation of their chosen designers.
“I got on well with my vendeuse and was sold samples the models wore,” Blair recalls of her early days in the ateliers. “I went to Dior and they had this room upstairs where they kept all the old samples. This was the year of the famous Dior gowns with twenty or thirty layers of net with the four top layers all embroidered.
“There was a dress up there, strapless. It weighed about twenty-five pounds. It was boned. White. It fit perfectly. I got it for nothing,” Blair remembers. “During Marc Bohan’s time at Dior, I bought a white organza wedding dress. He added a pale green belt. They’d let you buy the dress for $700. They wanted you to wear them.”15
Specifically, designers wanted Mrs. William McCormick Blair Jr. to wear their clothes. And $700 would be the equivalent of about $5,300 today. The cost of haute couture has risen far faster than the rate of inflation, as the designs have become more lavish and ostentatious, and the skills required to produce them increasingly endangered. The prices of contemporary haute couture gowns—those Cinderella red carpet fantasies—can spiral up to $75,000 and beyond.
Wealthy clients weren’t the only ones bolstering the reputations of the haute couture designers; occasionally it was the vendeuses themselves who lent panache to the houses with which they worked. “I started with Givenchy at the beginning, when he was at [Elsa] Schiaparelli,” recalls Dreda Mele, a former vendeuse renowned for her taste and connections. Beginning in 1943, Mele developed a relationship with Givenchy that lasted ten years, until she moved on to the atelier of designer André Courrèges. Mele was a true rainmaker.16
Born in Bordeaux and educated at the Marymount School in New York City, she was quite beautiful in her youth and remains a striking woman in her eighties, a brunette with deep-set eyes. She was married twice and, as she merrily shares, could have acquired husbands on countless other occasions. She met her first husband in Capri. Her second husband adored yachts. She has most recently been in a decades-long relationship with Philippe Stern, a Frenchman who has a home in Switzerland, which is where she lives when she is not in her stately Paris apartment on Cours Albert Premier.
Mele was lucky enough to have been born into a family of means, and she could have enjoyed a lifetime of leisure. But circumstances demanded otherwise. Her father wanted her to occupy her time with something other than parties. So at age fourteen, she promised her father, on his deathbed, that she would work.
Her mother added another impetus for employment. Not particularly generous with the family funds, her mother had been a beautiful but cold apparition in her daughter’s life. “My mother was dressing at Balenciaga. She was very chic. I had the eye of my mother and my father. He was very, very good looking. I started to realize I could bring Hubert [de Givenchy] a lot of friends,” Mele says. “I brought him Jackie Kennedy.”
The influence of wealthy clients; the taste, social standing, and business savvy of the vendeuses who serviced them; and the skilled craftsmanship and creativity of the designers all came together to make haute couture a dominant and influential cultural presence from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s. But today, even as Mele recalls those years, she admits that the moss-colored tailored suede jacket she wears is from Ralph Lauren. An American! How times have changed.
To fully understand how a woman like Dreda Mele could come to wear Ralph Lauren, one must look at a single event in November of 1973 at the Palace of Versailles.