Charles James’s Drafting Table: Charles James at the Chelsea
Sarah is an older lady, scatterbrained, though endearingly so, with a wild mane of curly gray hair. A jewelry designer, she’s lived here in the Chelsea since the sixties, when she outfitted the Warhol superstars.
Sarah’s large apartment/workshop is filled floor to ceiling with a lifetime’s accumulation of dusty junk: tools, boxes of bolts and clasps and beads and sequins, broken-down sewing machines, teetering piles of old magazines, you name it. I’ve offered several times to help her clean out her apartment, which has become so cluttered that there’s not much living space left, but she’s collected all this stuff for a reason and, who knows, never can tell when it might come in handy.
But one afternoon she called me and said she did have a few things to throw out, so I came down to her place to help her move them out. Mostly, it just looked like her usual trash, but she had a box or two of papers for me to carry out, and there was a metal cabinet, the drawers filled with ticket stubs and receipts and other scraps of paper that she thought she could live without.
When I had carried all that stuff out to the trash can, Sarah said, “I’ve been thinking of getting rid of this.”
From somewhere in the bowels of her rooms she had dragged out an old drafting table. Of dark wood, the table was worn and beaten but still sturdy and functional, with an ancient, heavy iron mechanism to control its slant.
“Wow!” I said. It was a really good-looking piece of furniture, must have been seventy or eighty years old. But then I caught myself and said. “Yeah, get rid of it. And how about some of these old magazines too.”
“Those have my designs in them,” Sarah said.
We turned our attention back to the drafting table. “I don’t use it anymore,” Sarah said. “Never have. But it belonged to Charles James, so I’ve kept it all these years.”
The son of an American mother and an English father, the fashion designer Charles James was born in Sandhurst, England, in 1906. He was expelled for a sexual scandal at his public school, so his parents sent him to Chicago in 1926 to work in an architectural firm, but he didn’t much care for that. Instead he opened a hat shop and then moved to New York in 1928, where he quickly won fame in the world of fashion. Known primarily for his evening wear, James looked upon his one-of-a-kind creations as works of art, “sculptures in fabric” that reshaped and remolded the body, often using forms, such as the tulip, inspired by nature. James helped create the “femme fatale” look of the film noirs, and his gowns can be seen in countless movies of the forties and fifties. Many of the Barbie doll’s early gowns are based on his designs, including one of her most popular, called “Solo in the Spotlight.”
James moved to the Chelsea in 1964 after he went bankrupt and his marriage subsequently dissolved. The forties and fifties were the decades of his greatest success, and James came to be seen as old-fashioned in the sixties, with its minimalist aesthetic and the decidedly antifashion pose of the hippies. James refused to change with the times, and hence toward the end of his life he was more respected in the art world than in the fashion world. He died in 1978 at the Chelsea, and in 2001 he was honored by a plaque on the Fashion Walk of Fame on Sixth Avenue in the garment district.
“Oh, did James give it to you?” I asked Sarah. “Did you know him?”
“I did know him, but no, he didn’t give it to me. I think Viva gave it to me,” she said, referring to the Warhol superstar who lived here into the nineties, “but I can’t really remember, it was so long ago.”
I made to seize the old table.
“I just don’t know,” Sarah said, vacillating. “It seems a shame to throw it away. Maybe I should just keep it.”
“Sarah, you have to get rid of something,” I scolded.
The upshot of this was that, in order to make Sarah feel less guilty, and since the piles of junk were threatening to fall over on her and bury her like the Collyer brothers, I agreed to take the table.
(I must admit, too, that I harbored a secret desire to own the table—because of its origins, because it looked cool, and also because, like Sarah, I’m a pack rat at heart and can’t bear to throw anything out.)
I thought for sure I was in for trouble. My girlfriend, Susan, and I had had arguments before about my habit of dragging home junk. Susan had a stressful job, which she had to take just so we could have the money to live in New York, and it stressed her out even more to come home and be surrounded by clutter. But maybe, after all, I was kind of hoping she would bitch me out, so that would give me an excuse to get rid of the table.
Instead, she had even more enthusiasm than me for the table, especially because of the Charles James connection. “Oh my God! That’s really beautiful!” she exclaimed. “But what can we do with it?”
“Well, maybe I can use it for a desk,” I said, thinking of replacing the one I had but knowing all the while that that wouldn’t work at all. The table was too high and wasn’t really meant to lay flat. It was for an artist rather than a writer.
Folded up as far as was possible, the table sat in the middle of our room for a year. Everybody who came to visit thought it was really nice, but nobody actually wanted to own it. Finally, it just got be too much of a hassle to move it whenever we wanted to get into our closet.
Late one night, when I knew Sarah would be in bed, I set the table out by the elevator with a note on it that said: Charles James’s Drafting Table: Free To A Good Home, and it was gone within the hour. I was sad to see it go, but glad in a way also because I felt it had gone to someone who needed it—surely it’s still in the Chelsea—and maybe, with any luck, someone who could tap into the energy of the old designer in a way I wasn’t quite able to.
