The way we look now

National Review, Oct 13, 1997 by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

FASHION HAS CLAWS. Its artful adornments should not be mistaken for mere fripperies. They display the primal instincts of the predator. Ever since the days of the French Revolution, when decadent aristocrats challenged their doom by tying crimson ribbons around powdered necks, fashion has taunted with its provocative play of power.

Earlier in this century, this power lay mainly in the hands of a few women. High personal style dominated the fashionable sphere. The dictators of a sybaritic and capricious way of life, a select group of the wealthy and aristocratic exerted influence by making modish what they chose to wear.

In the decades before and after the Second World War, fashion stood stiffly as the footman at the door. Its strength lay in social exclusivity. Couture cultivated a clientele a cut above the rest. The relationship was as ritualized as courtship, an elaborate balance of control and capitulation. The house of Charles Frederick Worth arbiter of taste for almost a century was dressmaker to the courts of Austria and France. Cristobal Balenciaga, a Basque who fled to Paris at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, became couturier to Europes aristocrats, dressing the Duchess of Windsor, Countess Bismarck, and Pauline de Rothschild. Stitching along the seam between elegance and innovation, the gowns of great designers made the women wearing them seem as inaccessible as works of art.

The outbreak of war, of course clipped the wings of couture. Rationing began in Britain in 1941, with accompanying regulations to limit yardage and styles. But fashion contorted itself to take control of the circumstances. "Il faut skimp pour - tre chic, declared British Vogue. Practicality was promoted as patriotic. In France there was no such incentive to stint. Anything saved went to help the Nazi war machine. Fashion became a weapon against the occupying forces, comforting the French while discomfiting the Germans.

Diors "New Look swept the scene in 1947, cocking a snook at compromise. It re-established social hierarchies. Although its nipped waists and wide, wide skirts might have gratified a general postwar longing for luxurious femininity, they were far beyond the financial reach of the average woman. One outfit would have exceeded an entire clothing ration. "The longer skirt is the ridiculous whim of idle people . . . who . . . might do something more useful with their time, fumed Betty Braddock, the testy Labour Party politician. But Princess Elizabeth was invited to a private showing by Dior, and her sister, Princess Margaret, was soon flaunting the New Look out in society.

Fashions elitism tyrannized the expanding middle classes in the 1950s. Respectability was ardently valued by those who had recently risen in the social hierarchy. Arbiters of taste discriminated between types of cocktail dress suitable for early evenings and for theater showings at 8 P.M., with full evening wear to be paraded only after ten. Manuals such as Genevive-Antoine Dariauxs Elegance informed women how to be "well and properly dressed on all occasions. As directrice of Nina Riccis couture house she spoke with a ring of authority when she prescribed that alligator shoes however expensive should always be retired after 5 P.M.

Top fashion mannequins of the 1950s were glamorous creatures, such as Suzy Parker, Dorian Leigh, and Dovima "the supersophisticated model in a sophisticated time, definitely not the girl next door, declared Jerry Ford. The aristocratic appearance of the models served them well. Fiona Campbell-Warner married Baron Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemiza, Anne Cumming became the Duchess of Rutland, and Bronwen Pugh, top model for Balmain, married Lord Astor.

But already the seamier side of fashion was becoming more flagrant. New art has always balked at the limitations of what went before. It is only by pressing back boundaries that the radical is reached, and up-and-coming designers began to push at the establishments stiff structures.

By the late 1950s sexuality was creeping ever more flagrantly into fashion. Anne Fogarty in her 1959 manual Wife Dressing may have advocated "a girdle with everything, blithely equating its restrictions with the Chinese custom of foot-binding, but Simone de Beauvoir made explicit the idea of elegance as bondage. She bared the brutal, subversive power of couture. With the publishing of The Story of O by Paula Reage, an overt connection was made between feminine fashion and sadomasochism. Indeed, before her first sexual encounter, O who, incidentally, was a fashion photographer dressed in "a whalebone bodice which severely constricted the waist.

The cruel carnality of haute couture was unleashed by the revolution of the Sixties. This was a period of complete upheaval as much in sartorial as in political and social terms. "People are talking about . . . Vietnam and the Negro revolution . . . and Youthquake . . . the eruption of the young in every field, pronounced American Vogue in 1965. Suddenly style swept in from the streets. High society lost its stranglehold on taste. Like many of the most powerful artists the new designers did not so much develop and perfect the ideas and techniques of their predecessors as shatter them. "Lets kill couture, declared Emmanuel Ungaro, "kill it in the sense of the way it is now. His mentor, the great Balenciaga, was pronounced dead. The whole fashion industry underwent profound and permanent alterations.