What lies beneath: A glimpse into the lives of four of the 20th century’s most iconic designers
The life of the artist is often as interesting – sometimes more so – as the work they make. Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, Picasso, Dali, Virginia Woolf, the Beats, David Bowie – all are as fascinating as the art they produced.
But what of fashion designers – does the same principal apply? Absolutely, according to recent films about Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen.
Modern fashion is peopled with creators known for their eccentricities, from Karl Lagerfeld’s cat having its own maid, to Donatella Versace’s appearance (“Natural is for salads”).
Yet it used to be that dressmaking was either done by unknown tailors and seamstresses, or conservative names like Norman Hartnell.
When did the fashion designer become as much a part of the story as the looks they created? Was Coco Chanel the turning point? For some fly-on-the-cultural-wall insight into the evolution of the designer, London’s V&A has just republished the autobiographies of four of the 20th century’s most iconic creators, with gorgeous ultra-collectable new cover art by Spanish print maker Beatriz Lostale.
ELSA SCHIAPARELLI (1890-1973)
You could trace a line from Elsa Schiaparelli to Isabella Blow and Lady Gaga, via Miuccia Prada and Commes des Garcons. Schiap, as she was known to her friends – she had loads, including Amelia Earhart, Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Manray, Dali, Giacometti, Picasso – was intensely original and avant garde, a wearer of turbans and chunky jewellery, the silhouettes of her designs architecturally exaggerated, her look severely elegant.
“Dress designing is to me not a profession but an art,” she wrote.
“A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn.”
Having invented shocking pink, she published her story, Shocking Life, in 1954, which outlined her trajectory from aristocratic birth via poverty and single parenthood to international acclaim through her astonishing connections, determination and fearlessness.
All she sought, she wrote, was “privacy and freedom”. Her single mindedness and vision meant that the gender repression of the era grated on her: “If ever I wished to be a man it was then,” she wrote of her time in Paris in her twenties, her marriage finished, her young daughter in boarding school.
“To wander aimlessly through the night, to sit in cafes and do nothing.”
Born in Rome to an upper class conservative family, she horrified her parents aged 14 by writing a book of erotic poetry; they sent her to a Swiss convent. She secured her release by going on hunger strike.
Escaping to London, she married a count, moved to New York, broke up with the count, and moved to Paris alone with her child. In 1927, she launched her first collection of knitwear with the help of some Armenian artisans. It sold out.
The Schiap Shop opened in Paris, where Schiaparelli created the divided skirt for lady tennis players, a hat like an upside shoe and a lobster dress, both collaborations with Dali, and a fragrance called Shocking packaged in hot, bright pink.
She wrote 12 commandments for women, which included the advice that women “should dare to be different.”
CHRISTIAN DIOR (1905 – 1957)
In Dior by Dior, published the year the creator of the New Look died, Dior identifies the moment when designers became famous. He credits this change to Coco Chanel, who “dominated all the rest… In her personality as well as her taste, she had style, elegance and authority,” he wrote.
“Today, after a long period of practical anonymous workmanship, haute couture has become the expression of the single personality; that of the head of the house.”
Dior was born in sleepy Granville on the Normandy coast, where his family home is now a Dior museum. He visited a fortune teller in 1919, aged 14, who told him he would suffer poverty, but would achieve success through women.
“You will make a great deal of money out of them, and… travel widely.”
Dior spent ten years working for another designer in Paris, in happy anonymity, but everything changed when the second world war ended, and he was given an opportunity to create his own fashion house. He was initially reluctant. (“I wondered whether I was really devoid of personal ambition.”)
But the war’s influence on how people dressed spurred him on. All around him were “hideous fashions” – too large hats, too short skirts, too long jackets, too heavy shoes.
“All around us, life was beginning anew: it was time for a new trend in fashion.” Another fortune teller known as The Grandmother predicted of Maison Christian Dior that “This house is going to revolutionise fashion!”
She wasn’t wrong. 1947 saw Dior’s New Look take the world by storm, its ultra-feminine frothiness supplanting Schiaparelli’s angular creations of a decade earlier. Dior, naturally shy and devoted to his garments (he regarded his creations as his children, whom he sent out into the world to be cared for by their new wearers), realised the value of publicity some time before the Mad Men of Madison Avenue formalised advertising.
He recognised that bad publicity was better than no publicity - in this respect, he was entirely modern.
“Gossip, malicious rumours even, are worth more than the most expensive publicity campaign in the world,” he wrote. As was the public image of the designer: “I had to take my new personality on tour.”
MARY QUANT (b.1930)
Mary Quant is as synonymous with the Sixties as Carnaby Street, Twiggy, and the Beatles. Her autobiography, Quant by Quant, published in 1966, is considerably breezier than Dior’s.
“Life was a whizz!” she wrote.
“It was such fun and unexpectedly wonderful despite, or perhaps because of, its intensity. We were so fortunate… we partied too – there were no real boundaries.”
Quant created fashion for young women like herself, inventing the mini skirt (named after her favourite car), and that iconic look involving big eyelashes, tights (not stockings), ponytails and Vidal Sassoon bobs, sleeveless shift dresses and giant daisies.
Barely out of her teens, she became a Swinging Sixties sensation, along with her husband and business partner Alexander Plunket Green (“Life as I know it now began when I first saw Plunket”).
They met at art school. Quant designed and made her creations on a sewing machine in her Chelsea flat, before opening a shop and an espresso bar.
By her mid twenties, her customers included Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn. Mary Quant the person was as intrinsic to Mary Quant brand as the clothes she designed; her lifetstyle as an original Chelsea Girl epitomised Sixties freedom and cool.
“The feeling of verve and zest was everywhere,” she wrote. “It drove the ideas, the excitement, the compulsion to do more, reach out and touch all of those whose lives embraced the new liberation.”
BARBARA HULANICKI (b.1936)
The creator of one of the most famous clothes shops published her memoir, From A to Biba, in 1983, ten years after the shop itself – five storeys of fabulousness – opened on London’s Kensington High Street.
With her Irish husband Stephen FitzSimon (“Fitz”), Hulanicki democratised fashion even more than Mary Quant, allowing anyone with a Saturday job to buy her ready to wear designs. Born in Palestine of Polish heritage, and brought up in Brighton by an eccentric aunt, Hulanicki ran away to London and became a defining part of the era.
Biba began life in 1964 as a mail order business, selling Hulanicki’s own designs by mail order to undercut the prices of high street shops. In 1973, the Biba brand – named after Hulanicki’s little sister – became the famous Art Deco inspired shop with its own roof garden, restaurant and dancehall, the Rainbow Rooms. A hangout for the beautiful people of the era – Bowie, the Stones, Marianne Faithfull – it was a place to be seen in, as well as a place to buy clothes.
“Business life then was spontaneous, lived from day to day, untouched by corporate rules,” wrote Hulanicki. “Biba was the first feminist company. Only Fitz could keep up with the disciplined energy generated by women working together.”
When Biba closed in 1976 after boardroom tussles, Hulanicki’s creativity continued as she designed for Cacharel and Fiorucci, before moving for a time to South America. When she returned to the UK, designing under her own name, it was at a time when fashionable youth had traded groovy elegance for baggy rave gear.
She hated it. She moved with Fitz to Miami Beach where she made a new career as an interior designer.
“After all these years, it’s wonderful to see how many people have held onto their Biba dresses,” she wrote.
Among Biba fans were Barbra Striesand, Yoko Ono, and Mia Farrow, but Hulanicki is most proud of putting the mini skirt and other Sixties fashions onto the high street and available to ordinary women.
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