Paris Envy: Christian Dior

It must be remembered that department store owners across the country were not working alone in keeping the myth of Paris alive for female American consumers.  The French continued to preach their superiority in all things aesthetic, but were especially vocal in advocating fashion.  It appears that many truly believed their rhetoric.  Designer Alexandre Arsène made no apologies for the expense of the clothing nor the grandiosity of the dream.  He declared, "Enfin, si Paris commençais à habiller moins bein la femme, il y aurait un peu moins de soliel d'amour sur la rest de la terre...nous avons fait dés catherdrals. Nous faisons es robes.  Que les autres en fassent autant.  Ils savent bien qu'ils ne le peuvant pas."   "Lastly, if Paris started to equip women less well, there would be a little less of the light of love on the rest of the earth...we create cathedrals.  We make dresses.  Others may try, but none do it quite so well..."
 
Arsène may have been responding to criticism he and others were receiving from some of their fellow countrymen who were not enthusiastic about the exporting of French sensibility to American shores.  In France, author Emile Zola penned his satiric novel, Au Bonheur Des Dames, a biting commentary against the women he perceived as empty-headed, flocking to department stores.   Other authors, like Georges Duhamel "held up American materialism as a beacon of mediocrity that threatened to eclipse French civilization, imposing worthless "besoins et appetites" (needs and appetites) on humanity at large.   The backlash against Americans taking over French culture became "something of a national hobby in France," according to Peter Stearns. These dissenters argued that "real Frenchness was hostile to mass consumerism on the grounds of inherent French taste and quality".  It is a familiar complaint:  nothing can be special if everyone has it.
 
The negative voices did not win out.  Cosmetics, perfumes, food, and especially fashion strengthened its hold on American imaginations and pocketbooks.  Newspapers, along with their paid advertisements, also helped keep the enthusiasm alive for Parisian fashion trends by featuring complete articles on the latest styles.  Front page stories often heralded the arrival of new lines from the fashion mecca.  Anne Price, a fashion editor writing in the early 1940s recalls the anticipation and dedication to reporting the latest fashion news:  "Those were the days when newspaper editors held the front page for the telephoned word from Paris on the height of the hemline and the status of the waists.  Elegantly clad fashion editors, hats askew, handbags flying, would race each other for the phone box with as much ruthless determination as their colleagues from the sports desk..."

"Of course," she continues, "fashion editors are competitive now, but...in those days we were reporting on one look, the look."  Women all over the world waited to be told whether they should chop two inches off their hemlines and that story on the front page actually sold
newspapers.  Mania like this led may have led existential novelist Albert Camus to claim in his work, Le Rebelle that "rien n'était aucun plus long bon ou mauvais, mais seulement prématuré ou démodé".  (nothing is good or bad any longer, but only remature or out-of-date).

The department stores, where all of these items were sold, were also responsible for launching a new type of celebrity into the American lexicon, the French designer.  Perhaps more than anyone, it was Christian Dior who propelled the designer to a god-like status.  He implicitly understood the dual purpose of fashion: to be functional, yes, but more importantly, to cloak the psyche in a beautiful dream.  For Dior, style came "venez d'un rêve et le rêve est une évasion de réalité". (from a dream and a dream is an escape from reality).  He coined his particular interpretation of the dream the "Nouveau Regard," the "New Look." Daniel Hill argues that Dior's "New Look" launched in 1947, "swept the fashion industry like nothing before - everything was important from head to toe:  hats and jewelry accentuated the face, long skirts framed the ankles, gloves and bracelets defined the hands.  Accessories and fabric manufacturers were ecstatic".  Dior's goal in creating the new look was to create an object of beauty, one that would stop people in their tracks, a vision that would cause the observer to exclaim, "Comme joli vous êtes aujourd'hui! Souvent voulant dire, comment votre chapeau vous convient!". (How pretty you are today!  Often wanting to say, how your hat suits you!).  "American fashions throughout the 1950s," argues Daniel Hill, "continued to be dominated by Paris couturiers and their enthusiasm for the New Look".

Dior was as much a businessman as he was a designer.  His marketing strategy virtually closed any opportunity for theft of his designs and ensured his dominance in the department stores.  Elizabeth Wilson finds that "Christian Dior...devised a system whereby his designs became almost a species of the franchise.  Overseas buyers could do one of three things.  They could buy a paper pattern of a model; they could buy a canvas copy, which when made with minor alterations might be labeled an "original Christian Dior copy" or they could buy the original, properly made up and sell copies of it with the label "Christian Dior".  Dior wanted to protect the integrity of his designs, for while he realized that "(l)a couture est avant tout un marriage entre la forme et le tissue" and acknowledged that it could be "beaucoup d'exquis" in the wrong hands, the union "mais on en cite de malherurex". (Fashion is a marriage between form and fabric; an exquisite union; but unfortunately sometimes unhappy).   Dior worked hard to see that none of his line met with any tristesse. (unhappiness)
 
The clothing itself may have been created in a state of blissful happiness, but that does not mean that all women were equally as pleased with Dior and his dominance of the fashion market.  Although most accounts recollecting the advent of the New Look offer only positive reflections of those years, Susan Faludi reveals that not everyone was worshipping at Dior's exquisitely shod feet.   There were thousands of women who very much enjoyed the more relaxed styles made popular by Coco Chanel, a look which gained an huge following among working women especially during the second World War.  These women were happy with their comfortable clothing and they were loathe to return to the restrictive styles that Dior mandated.  A group was formed to seriously protest the foisting of the New Look on American women.  Faludi reports that "more than three hundred thousand women joined the "Little Below the Knee Club" and when "Neiman-Marcus gave its annual fashion award to Dior, women stood outside waving placards" that read "DOWN WITH THE NEW LOOK".  Dior would not give in, and even taunted the protestors, predicting that, "Les femmes qui sont la volonté la plus forte bientôt portent les plus longues robes".  (The women who are loudest will soon be wearing the longest dresses).

Maybe not all women crumbled under the pressure of Dior but sufficient numbers of them did, and the New Look achieved market dominance.  Proof of the lasting impact of this style can be found in the fact fifteen years after it debuted, the New Look was still going strong, largely due to the influence of America's always-fashionable First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy.  Jackie Kennedy continued to "sell" the New Look and even breathed new life into the style by frequently sporting her favorite pillbox hats, an essential component of the Dior ensemble.  Thousands of women wanted to emulate the stylish First Lady in every way and orders for Dior's designs continued to be strong.

Beginning in the early 1950s, some of Dior's dominance was beginning to be challenged.  Chanel came back into the picture in a big way.  She introduced a suit that helped redefine elegance.  In a 1953 Vogue interview, Chanel discussed why her new suit had enjoyed such terrific sales.  She told the reporter:  "Elegance in clothes means being able to move freely, to do anything with ease. Those heavy dresses that won't pack into aeroplane luggage, ridiculous.  All those boned and corseted bodices? Out with them...Now women go for simpler lives".  Other designers, like Hubert de Givenchy, followed Chanel's lead, easing American women "away from Dior's formality with mix and match cotton separates".  In 1960, Jean Patou scored an enormous hit with the marketing of tennis outfits for everyday wear, a look that included "pleated skirts, straight cardigans and vests or short sleeved blouses"  (Wilson 162).  French designer André Courregès issued a challenge to Dior's dominance when he  pioneered the first formal trouser suit for women in the 1960s (165).  Elizabeth Wilson argues that it was Courregès's design that made wearing pants in the workplace acceptable for women, thus opening the door to pants ultimately being deemed appropriate for almost any occasion in which a woman might want to wear them.
 
It seems that by the 1980s French dominance began to suffer somewhat in the American market.  Designer Christian LaCroix surmised that the problem was exactly what early decriers of the dissemination of French aesthetics had feared:  the "specialness" of French fashion no longer seemed very special.  LaCroix wanted to return French fashion to its sense of royalty.  His strategy, argues Susan Faludi, was to address "only the elite".  Working in conjunction with high-priced department stores like Neiman-Marcus, LaCroix convinced buyers to return to purchasing limited, select items that would only be available, and affordable, by very few women.  He convinced these high-end retailers to return to the elegance department stores had offered at the turn of the century, and many took his advice. The stores "sponsored black tie balls and provided afternoon tea service and high-priced facials to the idle few". 

The return to indulgences such as balls, teas, and facials enjoyed a good bit of success, but the same cannot be said for LaCroix's attempt at return fashion to the look of earlier, Victorian times.  Sales were terrible.  "All that embellishment, the ruffles, laces and frills," said a Sak's Fifth Avenue buyer of European designer imports, "women don't seem to want that much.  They want quiet, more realistic things.  They want clothes they can be taken seriously in.  I guess they don't like to look superfluous".

As they have repeatedly shown in for over a hundred years, the French understand how to adapt and stay relevant in a market that is not completely their own.  LaCroix gave up his over-the-top, outrageously priced designs.  Pierre Cardin and Yves St. Laurent created more realistic, more affordable, but still somewhat exclusive, designs. Brands like Esprit Jeans kept French designs in the minds, and on the bodies, of younger women in mid-range retail outlets.  In addition to fashion, Christian Dior and Givenchy "kept the French language spoken at retail counters throughout the 1970s and 1980s".  But when they saw that "American women were less enamored of unpronounceable foreign words" they "launched scents with names in English:  Dune by Dior, Envy by Givenchy, (and) Allure by Chanel". It is a strategy that continues to work, proven by the fact that most of us have at least one, if not many more, French labels in our closets and dresser drawers, rouge or perfume bearing the names "Lancôme" or "L'Oréal," at our dressing tables, Evian water in our refrigerators and Baker's chocolate in our pantries.  If we are especially fortunate, a Cartier diamond may grace our ring finger.

Photos courtesy of www.designmuseum.org

 With a strategy of innovation, adaptability, and the continual selling of a dream, there is no reason to think French products will not continue to be a part of the lives of American women for some time to come.

Photo Credit © Jorge Espel | Dreamstime.com