Glamour Girl
Whatever names we may throw around when talking about designers today – Chanel, Lagerfeld, Ungaro, Armani, Givenchy, Gaultier, Dior – our memories tend to go back only so far. Though the names of many venerable houses still exist, even if their founders do not, some tend to get lost in the fray. Even some that were the ne plus ultra of high fashion in their day.
Charles Frederick Worth was one.
An Englishman who learned his craft in London, he went to France in 1845 and soon made his fortune. Beloved of high society grandes dames and even royalty, he is credited as the Father of Haute Couture (mon dieu!, I know).
His gowns were incomparable.
He was the first designer to use live models to showcase his dresses, later adjusting them to custom-fit his clients, and the first to put labels into clothing. One of his employees went on to found the House of Lesage, the master embroiderers of Paris to this day.
So iconic were his creations, that his name routinely appeared in novels of the day. In Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, when Newland Archer asks his wife May why she doesn’t wear her wedding gown to big party (common practice in the day), she replies: “If only I had it here! But it’s gone to Paris to be made over for next winter, and Worth hasn’t sent it back.”
And in another passage from the book: “The extravagance in dress—” Miss Jackson began. “Sillerton took me to the first night of the Opera, and I can only tell you that Jane Merry’s dress was the only one I recognised from last year; and even that had had the front panel changed. Yet I know she got it out from Worth only two years ago, because my seamstress always goes in to make over her Paris dresses before she wears them.”
“Ah, Jane Merry is one of us,” said Mrs. Archer sighing” . . . “Yes, she’s one of the few. In my youth,” Miss Jackson rejoined, “it was considered vulgar to dress in the newest fashions; and Amy Sillerton has always told me that in Boston the rule was to put away one’s Paris dresses for two years.”
Vulgar to dress in the newest fashions? My, how times have changed.
From Frederic Prokosh’s The Asiatics: “I could see the lean bronzed women in their Worth gowns standing on the half-lit terrace, and the men in their white shell jackets . . . .”
And Henry James often mentioned the exorbitant cost of gowns and their beauty, attributing them to Piguet, Doucet, and Worth.
The House of Worth is getting its due these days in several places: a couple of exhibitions in New York, one of which, American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, I wrote about here, and the other, a companion exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum called American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection.
But as this article in the Telegraph of London reveals, Worth is also making an appearance in the Paris fashion shows for the Autumn/Winter 2010/2011 season: as inspiration for designer Giovanni Bedin.
Look for more-wearable versions of these wasp-waisted beauties to appear as evening gowns in the coming season (for which you will certainly need a corset, which Glamour Girl will be only too happy to write about in a future post).
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