Category: fashion

09/24/19
Photo: TheSultanette

When French Fashion Went To War: Vive La Fashionista!

Photo: TheSultanette
Felt emblem on WWI nurse’s bag from Bard Exhibit.

Is fashion liberating? Some say it encourages following the herd. But you won’t find a fashion victim on The Best Dressed List. That’s reserved for women who bend trends to fit their individual power, not the fashion police.

The history of feminism has been a story of good girls breaking rules and burning bras. We’ve always dressed, and undressed, for the revolution. So when The Sultanette learned of the exhibit, “French Fashion, Women & The First World War” at the Bard Graduate Center on New York’s Upper Westside, I put on my stilettos and sprinted across town for a look.

I had gotten a sneak preview at The National Arts Club in Gramercy Park, where co-curator, Maude Bass-Krueger, gave a lecture on the exhibit to the club’s dedicated followers of fashion. Illustrated with enticing images of the show’s vintage clothing, her presentation traced women’s emergence from suffocating layers of lacy feminine pretense to the satiny-sleek deconstructed look of the flapper.

Photo: TheSultanette
Offline at Central Park, New York City.

The next Sunday, on one of those rare autumn weekends when New Yorker’s set aside their cell phones to commune with nature, I engaged in some Central Park reconnaissance on my way to the Bard Gallery for a walk through wartime France.

Colette was there to greet me. “War?” the exhibit quoted her as saying in August, 1914. “Until the end of last month it was just a word, impossibly grandiose.” Added to the shock, the opening salvo of World War One fell in the middle of the Paris fashion shows. War is hell.

Poiret at war. Photo from the Bard exhibit.

Over three floors, the exhibit demonstrates how the French fashion industry fought to maintain its premiere position throughout the war. Movie theatres were closed but fashion houses remained open. Couturiers like Paul Poiret were mobilized but he continued to take care of business from the front.

The prewar “lampshade” look was replaced with a less restricting crinolline de guerre. And because a woman of means was no longer expected to change five times a day to accommodate wardrobe-prescribed activities, the tailored suit was born.

As the war slogged on, the slaughter climbed to horrific numbers, morale hit bottom, and the economy took a dive, the fashion and textile industry prevailed, employing one-third of the working population. When the Germans tried to appropriate France’s fashion sovereignty with counterfeit magazines featuring looks stolen from Parisian fashion designers, the attempt was met with caricature and derision.

Mademoiselle Coco in wool jersey, the beach at Etretat, ca. 1913. Bard exhibit.

The war also launched the couture career of a little-known hat designer whose millinery store on the rue Cambon had begun to attract attention. When her loyal clientele encouraged her to design clothing for them, Coco Chanel’s smart, practical wool jersey creations made a splash in her first boutiques at Deauville and Biarritz.

But the real impact of the war on French women began when the war ended. “In one week Paris was a changed city,” the exhibit quotes British socialite Lady Duff Cooper. “The streets were full of women dressed in black.”

The war had left 600,000 French women widowed but it had also claimed 1.3 million soldiers. While the traditional mourning period had lasted up to two years – the widow shrouded in black until a three-month “half-mourning” period allowed for some white clothing and jewelry – it was time to repopulate.

Poster, National Day for Mothers of Large Families. Bard exhibit.

No longer needed in munitions factories, it was now a woman’s patriotic duty to be a baby factory. “France needs children,” reads a poster in the exhibit for National Day for Mothers of Large Families. Get back on the market asap was the message, but not too enthusiastically. If a woman appeared too available she was known as a “bad widow” or worse, a “merry widow.”

But not all French women were ready to report to the baby production line after a whiff of freedom. And this might be when women and fashion became most complicit. The Roaring Twenties, known in France as the Années Folles (Crazy Years) was as much female statement as fashion statement.

WWI bullet casing with fashion motif etching. Bard exhibit.

“Fashion now favored androgyny,” the exhibit notes, “and encouraged women to deemphasize their hips and breasts. The image of the ‘garconne’ became the template for the modern woman, who was to be both sexually and economically independent.” Suffrage was yet to come but women were voting for their freedom – from acres of lace and multiple daily costumes changes to a look that fit new life choices.

It took a war to change women’s fashions and attitudes. And now we can change our morals, our partners, and our sexuality. It doesn’t take the latest Chanel for that. It takes courage to be who you are. To ignore the voices that still inveigle and coddle us to comply. So what are you wearing to the rest of your life? C’est la guerre. Are you dressed for it?

“French Fashion, Women & The First World War” runs from September 5, 2019 to January 5, 2020 at The Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 18 West 86th Street, New York City.

09/9/18

Is Passion Out of Fashion? The Bad Boy Charms of McQueen & McEnroe.

CoiledCorset 2004, ShaunLeaneforMcQueen.

“I want you to be repulsed or exhilarated,” Alexander McQueen offers viewers of his collection in the documentary, McQueen. “If you leave without emotion, then I’m not doing my job properly. I don’t want you to walk out feeling like you’ve just had Sunday brunch.”

You could say that Alexander McQueen and John McEnroe – born a decade and an ocean apart, pursuing distinct talents, and playing them out in completely different arenas – shared a similar passion. A zeal to be real.

With the simultaneous release of documentaries on both enfants terribles, I decided to chase down the theory one steamy summer weekend in Manhattan. (Bad boys are always persons of interest to The Male Harem.)

I worried that McQueen would be a sycophantic fashionista homage but directors Ian Bonhote and Peter Ettedgui have produced a stirring elegy to McQueen’s troubled genius. The film deftly weaves the details of McQueen’s life – distant father, fiercely supportive mother, Savile Row apprenticeship, gigs at Givenchy and Gucci – with rapturous footage of his collections.

The couture wunderkind didn’t need the anointing of established fashion houses to claim his glory. His innate urgency to express himself projected him forward. From his earliest collections, cobbled together on a dime, to the theatrical extravaganzas of his later years McQueen’s vision was utterly personal.

RobotArt. CreativeCommons, Ivanna9867.

His pure, raw, and eventually destructive passion produced collections like The Hunger, Highland Rape and It’s a Jungle Out There. He pushed beyond the limit without ever looking contrived. When he is asked in the film who might take on the brand if he stepped away, he is sincerely flummoxed. There is no ego in his reply. Only McQueen can be McQueen.

As he polishes his public persona – shedding the scruffy working-class kid for the svelte fashion magnate – one senses his denouement. McQueen isn’t wired to fit a mold – fashion or otherwise. He doesn’t care what other people think about him, he says in the film, or even what he thinks about himself. What freedom. The freedom of a true artist. And also the loneliness.

With the death of his close friend and advocate, the relentlessly eccentric Isabella Blow, the oxygen begins to seep out of his life. The death of his mother marks the final emptiness. The darkness he’s held at bay can no longer be tolerated. On the eve of his mother’s funeral, he commits suicide by hanging. There is no air left to breathe.

Yet the film captures more of McQueen’s light than his darkness. When he is in play creating and producing his collections, his joy leaps off the screen. It draws those around him to his flame. Makes them complicit in his lurid vision. His models don’t just swagger haughtily down the runway. They push against mirrored barriers, wring out emotions, breasts exposed and vulnerable.

McEnroe in Play, ‘09 USOpen, CreativeCommons,EdwinMartinez.

Where McQueen battled with darkness, McEnroe seemed to thrive on it. The French documentary, In The Realm of Perfection suggests that he needed to create a hostile environment in order to conquer it. If only the film could have left him alone to prove it.

LA Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote that this “idiosyncratic, metaphysical meditation on tennis, cinema, human behavior … at times risks being too pleased with itself for its own good.” You think?

In the opening scene, a meticulous demonstration of a hand gripping a tennis racket is repeated. And repeated. We are then marched through an archive of vintage tennis instruction films, stick-figure renditions of McEnroe’s moves, and a tutorial with frames actually titled “A” and “B”.

McEnroeBallet, ‘79Rotterdam, CreativeCommons,Anefo/Croes,RC.

The Sultanette’s Francophilia might be near-fatal but I’m not completely blinded by the glow the French have bestowed on civilization since the Sun King. I even allow that some concepts can be explored without employing the words “paradoxical” and “ambiguity” and the phenomenon of John McEnroe is one of them.

When the drumbeat of analyzing lands on the keen observation that he “plays on the edge of his senses” we are at last treated to un-narrated footage of McEnroe in play. Whatever you feel about the prince of impudence, it’s his individual ferocity that dominates the screen – his inscrutable game strategy, balletic form, obsession to win every stroke.

Alexander McQueen and John McEnroe remind us that daring to be yourself isn’t for the faint of heart. Whether you play it out on the court, the runway, or life’s runway, it takes grace and grit, incalculable risk, and Olympian resilience. If that’s too much for you, there’s always Sunday brunch.