“Elegance is refusal,” Coco Chanel reportedly said. Pierre Balmain reminded his customers, “Rigor, always rigor,” while Karl Lagerfeld, taking aim at the non-rigorous, specified, “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat.” For Sonia Rykiel’s part? “How can you live the high life if you do not wear the high heels?”
The authority of France’s great fashion designers has long resided not only in their glamorous creations but in their oft-cited diktats. And reflecting the axiomatic French equation of beauty with suffering, these statements posit discipline, even discomfort, as the necessary precondition of chic.
How fortunate for those of us with a weakness for sweats and flat shoes that the heroines of Nancy MacDonell’s engaging new book, “Empresses of Seventh Avenue: World War II, New York City, and the Birth of American Fashion,” came along and freed American women from the tyranny of haute Gallic style.
Before World War II, that tyranny was as absolute in New York, the center of the American garment trade, as it was in Paris, the birthplace and capital of French couture. The latter industry supplied (and still supplies) elaborately constructed, dizzyingly expensive and predominantly formal bespoke confections to an elite clientele of just a few hundred people worldwide. But it also provided the inspiration for the mass-produced couture copies that, after the end of World War I, came to dominate the women’s clothing market in America.
Little did it matter to garment executives stateside that, as MacDonell observes, “women who ordered their wardrobes from haute couture houses led completely different lives, with completely different needs, from women who shopped for ready-to-wear on a budget.” Nor did it concern them that a dress worn by a marquise to “the races at Auteuil” — a woman with an unlimited budget, servants and “freedom from quotidian concerns like work” — made little sense on “a typist in Brooklyn” en route to Coney Island. So it was that, until history intervened, the U.S. apparel industry force-fed female customers a steady diet of clothes they did not want or need, prompting the American ready-to-wear designer Elizabeth Hawes in 1938 to coin a catchy maxim of her own: “Fashion is spinach.”
How Hawes and several other forward-thinking American women weaned their compatriots off sartorial greens is the remarkable story that MacDonell, a fashion columnist for The Wall Street Journal, recounts in lively prose and rich historical detail. The precipitating event is the Third Reich’s invasion of Paris in June 1940 and the city’s subsequent four-year occupation by the Nazis. This period was a dark one for France’s couturiers, who were reduced to either closing their fashion houses or dressing Nazi officers’ wives.
It also led to an embargo on American exports from, and American reporters in, Paris: two sources on which the U.S. garment industry had previously relied to generate its knockoffs. In 1940, the fall of Paris seemed to betoken the end of “fashion” in America, until a group of bold visionaries in New York developed an irresistible, homegrown alternative: “easygoing, comfortable, more or less informal clothes that could be worn for a variety of functions,” distinguished by “uncontrived elegance.” These clothes formed the basis of a radically new, eminently American genre known as sportswear. Disseminated on a mass scale by Seventh Avenue’s powerhouse production capacity, they quickly revolutionized women’s dress.
The designers who spearheaded the revolution were Hawes and her fellow sportswear pioneer, Claire McCardell, but as MacDonell emphasizes, they received crucial support from similarly clearsighted figures in many related fields. The other characters in her colorful, all-female cast range from magazine editors like Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland, tireless champions of the “simpler, sleeker and less cluttered” new aesthetic, to fashion reporters like Virginia Pope and Lois Long, also both “staunch supporters of American fashion.” We meet innovative retailers like Betty Shaver of Lord & Taylor, the first woman in the United States to earn a six-figure salary, and trailblazing P.R. mavens like Eleanor Lambert, the inventor of the International Best-Dressed List and the Met Gala.
In the space of just a few years, these women created the American fashion industry as we still know it today. Short on formality and fussiness, it remains a bastion of easy, breezy, thoroughly modern flair, and though it has grown into a billion-dollar business, it still works on the principle that fashion can “be both beautiful and democratic.”
That the women behind this tremendous success story have been, until now, largely forgotten is a wrong that MacDonell rights with verve and, dare I say, elegance — refusing simply the démodé premise that the French are “the only possible arbiters of style.”
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