Dear listeners,
Since the arrival of COVID-19, Europeans have been making do with the “new normal” - baguettes by bike messenger, Oktoberfest is cancelled, and now, to kick off the return of Milan Fashion Week, designers are replacing their living models with marionettes!
Yes, as part of an effort to abide by Italy’s strict coronavirus lockdown rules, Jeremy Scott teamed up with the crew behind The Muppets to produce a socially distanced runway show for the Moschino Spring 2021 collection - complete with miniature Anna Wintour.
Yet this isn’t the first time a desperate designer has turned to dolls for help - French fashion houses pulled the same stunt following World War II. Let’s dim the lights and raise the curtain on a very peculiar postwar exhibition: the Théâtre de la Mode of 1946.
The fabric of the nation
The Third Reich wanted Berlin to be the cultural headquarters of the world, the undisputed arbiters of all tastes - food, art, literature, and fashion. They had a long way to go. As much as the Germans may have crowed about their military dominance over their ancient foes, the rest of the world still wasn’t lining up for German-made dresses. Every woman wanted to look like a parisienne, nobody wanted to look like a hausfrau. The Germans tried everything to incentivize French fashion houses to export their trade secrets, but to no avail. As I covered in my episode about Coco Chanel, “The Collaborator”, French fashion houses went to great lengths to stay open - and stay put - during the war. While Coco may have closed her House and fired all her workers in a fit of pique, other designers did everything they could to keep the lights on and their workers employed.
Like every other French industry, couture workers had their own trade union: the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne (CSCP), led by a couturier named Lucien Lelong. Lelong’s job was to advocate for the tens of thousands of French people - mostly women - working in the fashion industry. He stressed to the Germans over and over that a simple transplantation was impossible: French haute couture was a community, deeply embedded, criss-crossed with generational relationships and centuries old trade secrets. Simply moving a few key designers to Berlin would never get results. When the Nazis raided Lelong’s office, stealing information about France’s greatest fashion houses, their clients, and their sales figures, Lelong flew to Berlin and told them to give it up, already. Haute couture could only ever survive in Paris! A couturier, like Chanel or Elsa Schiaparelli or Lucien Lelong himself, was only an architect. Any dream they created needed to be executed by hundreds of les petites mains, the (almost exclusively) women trained in the arts of tailoring, weaving, embroidery, and more. Les petites mains worked in ateliers, or workshops, dedicated to a particular craft, which would contract their work to various designers. If you needed someone to crochet fine lace, embroider a sleeve, transform fox fur into a collar, stitch corsetry into a ballgown, set jewels into a necklace, sew feathers into a hat, or tailor a dress into a second skin, you needed dozens of les petites mains. Together, the couturiers and the ateliers formed a delicate ecosystem, out of which the stuff of dreams emerged.
After the war, however, French fashion houses faced a new struggle: how to rebuild? Nobody had any money, nobody had any occasions to wear nice things, and most important of all, nobody had any fabric. Fabric rationing during and after the war left most people struggling to line their winter coats, let alone construct a ballgown for display purposes only. Eventually, one designer hit upon an idea: what if we produced new collections….on dolls? We’d be able to show off our creativity and our craftsmanship and reaffirm our identity as the fashion capital of the world - but we could do it with literal scraps.
Right away, the greatest couturiers and ateliers in France began digging through their scrap drawers. A stray yard of silk, a handful of buttons and beads, a beautiful lace collar, a fox fur collar in need of new life - all of these materials went into the most deluxe, delicately crafted doll dresses you’ve ever seen in your life.
Pink satin gown by Mendel, with real ermine cape and matching kid gloves by Hermès.
Yellow dress by Jeanne Lafaurie with matching accessories.
Itsy bitsy shoes!
Working on 27 inch tall mannequins, fashion houses like Balenciaga, Lanvin, Balmain and Hermès sketched exquisite fashions in miniature. The petites mains were suddenly more petites than anyone ever thought possible, crafting teensy tiny hats with teensy tiny feathers, soldering itsy bitsy necklaces and stitching extra-small purses. Even the French beauty industry saw an opportunity to assert its own leadership, sculpting tiny little hairstyles for each mannequin.
Robert Ricci, inventor of the Théâtre de la Mode, and his mother, the couturier Nina Ricci, posing next to one of their mannequins in the making.
Couturiers du Rêve
As the 60 fashion houses finished their dolls, they worried about the world’s reception. While Paris stifled under the Occupation, American and British designers stepped in to fill the power vacuum (truly nobody wanted German fashions, lol) and filled their runways with practical, workaday fashions for no-nonsense war wives. Brown wool, work dresses, overalls for factory work and Victory gardening - it was all so very reasonable. The French were horrified. Fashion wasn’t about practicality! It was about dreaming! It was about transforming clothing into something bigger. A Monet was more than oil paint on stretched canvas, and a Schiaparelli gown was more than fabric on the body. After so many years of war, did the world still know how to dream? Did it even want to dream anymore? Holding their breath, on March 28, 1945, the designers debuted 237 miniature ensembles in the Grand Gallerie of the Louvre and waited for a response.
The public views the Théâtre de la Mode on tour in Paris, March 1945.
The show was a blockbuster. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to dream again. After years of practical, reasonable clothing, women missed glamour and excitement, flirtation, romance, and the sheer joy of ornamentation. In Paris alone, more than 100,000 viewers passed through the Louvre exhibit, raising over one million francs for war relief along the way.
Visitors weren’t just entranced by the clothing - the entire exhibit was a work of art. Just as today’s designers create elaborate spectacles, with stages, music, and meticulous lighting, the tiny dolls had set pieces of their own, designed by artists like Christian Berard. In one set, Ma femme est un Sorcière, mannequins in frothy silk and satin stare through the wreckage of a bombed out ceiling.
But it wasn’t enough to prove that French women still respected French fashion - the couturiers and ateliers wanted to remind the rest of the world that they were still running the show. The Théâtre de la Mode went on tour, passing through London, Leeds, Barcelona, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Vienna, New York City, eventually traveling all the way here to San Francisco. Reaching the end of the road, the teensy tiny jewels were sent back to Paris, and the mannequins with their miniature couture disappeared into the basement of the City of Paris department store (now the Neiman Marcus on Union Square). In 1952, someone discovered the mannequins and eventually they returned to Paris for a little restoration. In 1990, the entire show entered the permanent collection of the Maryhill Museum of Art, just outside Portland. Someday, when we can go outside again, I’d love to see them with my own eyes.
Nestled in amongst the other 235 mannequins were a few contributions from the house of Lucien Lelong himself. One is particularly striking: a shorter dancing dress, with uncovered shoulders, a wasp waist, and blossoming tulip skirt, ornamented with tiny flowers. The dress is a complete rejection of wartime fashion: no dull fabric here, no boxy shoulders or silhouettes. Everything is luxurious and feminine. If you know anything about what’s coming around the corner for French fashion, you’ve probably guessed the surprise..
Yes, this mannequin was almost certainly designed by none other than Lucien Lelong’s master sewer: Christian Dior. On this tiny mannequin, we see the seeds of a vision which Dior would grow over the next two seasons. Dior rejected “mending and making do” as well as the masculine shapes and fashions pioneered in the 1920s and 1930s by designers like Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. Dior asked us: Are you ready for the pendulum to swing back? Do you miss romance? Do you miss fitted waistlines and voluminous, twirling skirts? Are you ready for the end of rationing? In 1947, Christian Dior released the most spectacularly successful debut collection in fashion history: The New Look.
“We were just emerging from a poverty-stricken, parsimonious era, obsessed with ration books and clothes coupons. It was only natural that my creations should take the form of a reaction against this dearth of imagination.” - Christian Dior
The Théâtre de la Mode signified a rebirth: of fashion, of France, of the act of dreaming. Once again, couturiers face a shutdown, and ask the world, “What will we wear, in the after?” First to pay tribute to the show was the House of Dior itself. Now led by Maria Grazia Chiuri, who spent most of this year in lockdown in Rome, the autumn/winter 2020 collection referenced the Théâtre explicitly.
With Jeremy Scott’s new mannequins gliding down a miniature catwalk, fashion houses around the world are drawing new inspiration from the Théâtre de la Mode. A puppet show that saved French couture! But also, a puppet show which helped Europe move on, leaving wartime mentalities behind. Adapt, the story tells us, make do, and above all: keep dreaming.
Left: Pink ballgown by Marcelle Dormoy, Théâtre de la Mode collection 1945. Right: Pink dress by Moschino, spring/summer collection 2020.
Learn more:
See a fascinating, newly-discovered treasure trove of photos depicting everyday French fashion during the German Occupation
This 2006 NYT profile of modern day petites mains is a must-read: “The Hands That Sew The Sequins”
Go behind the scenes of Dior to meet their modern day petites mains:
Bisous,
Diana