When I first walked into the Metropolitan Museum’s Jacqueline de Ribes: The Art of Style exhibition a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by the dark atmosphere, punctuated throughout with sharp spotlights, and the huge fi lm being played in black and white directly across from the entryway. The two-room exhibition, designed as a loop around a centre space with short videos playing, gives off the air of a high-class cocktail party with music streaming and mannequins touting sumptuous dresses in brilliant colors, poised as if preparing for the flash of a camera and a subsequent feature in a socialites tabloid. Another large film screen greets you as you enter the second room to the right of the lengthy entrance, which is in itself part of a strategy aimed at isolating the whole exhibition from the rest of the museum’s more sunlit rooms with its long flight of descending block-like stairs. Passing the massive profi les of De Ribes’s strikingly angular face, which was often shielded by some sort of half-veil or piece of tool and highlighted by chignon bun, as well as videos of her at work streaming quietly and continuously and blending in with the murmur of people walking past, I wondered what could make someone who designed such clothing so much more interesting to people today than her actual designs.
As an aristocrat born in 1920s France and later married at a young age to a Vicomte, Jacqueline’s struggle to become a designer was less economic and more personal, since her new family did not support her career. Even still, she began designing for ballets, theatre productions and her own society events, which were perhaps the best place for her to advertise her creations. Coco Chanel, despite having been raised in an orphanage, which was also where she learned to sew, likewise got her start designing for high-society women for whom she made custom hats in early 20th century Paris. She was only later able to expand her product base into other garments and perfumes. Karl Lagerfeld, who started a bit later and remains an active and present fi gure on red carpets today, was born into a wealthy though not aristocratic family who allowed him to move at a young age to Paris to pursue design. There he entered design competitions and soon began to work under more established designers like Balmain. He now works with several brands including his own and Chanel.
Designers of the early 20th century are known so well today because they supported their businesses through their own unique personas as much as they did through their actual designs. When clothes were very often still handmade in the average household, the lives and identities of the designers of such upscale clothing were inextricably linked to the image of their own company.
The wearing of mass-produced (or ready-towear) clothing items is still a relatively recent phenomenon, fuelled by the growth of the textile industry in the later nineteenth century as well as the adoption of assembly-line practices from the auto industry. Although some ready-to wear items were developed in the early- to mid-1800s, such options didn’t become popular until factory-made fabric became more readily available.
I even recall photos of my own parents in garments handmade by both of my grandmothers up until the late 1960s (all of which tended to look something like the curtainsturned-play clothes from The Sound of Music to the chagrin of my parents’ 12-year-old selves).
In the fashion world today there are still success stories to be found of fashion designers making miraculous entries into the world of design from more humble beginnings, perhaps most visibly those of designers who have entered televised competitions such as Project Runway.
Yet large corporations still supply a huge portion of the clothing that we wear. While some of these corporations claim to have sustainable and humanitarian business practices, others continue to be successful whilst running their businesses through slave-labour and underpaid workers. People often cite the cheaper cost of mass-produced goods as the main reason why they continue to buy from such companies, and of course, those people shouldn’t be blamed for taking the most economical route available to them.
Still, if some people have begun in recent years to swap out mass-produced foods for organic and sustainably-sourced products, wouldn’t it also be worth a try to do the same with our clothing? Where nudism, which I suppose would be the vegetarianism of clothing, is not yet widely socially acceptable or even practical in the colder months, we need a solution that goes beyond boycotting certain companies.
While for the immediate future it may seem more economically practical for a person to buy clothes from the cheapest seller, if more and more people began to buy their clothes from local seamstresses and designers, the demand for these items would grow and the descriptors ‘bespoke’ or ‘handmade’ would no longer have the social cachet that it has today. While for now ‘bespoke’ has begun to connote something nearly on par with designer labels, it could soon come to connote something more personal and responsibly sourced for all of us.
Though I could never pretend to be a specialist in the economics of the fashion industry, it is an interesting idea to consider that we could all be dressing a lot more uniquely, a lot more personally and a lot more conscientiously if we took a page out of our past.
Along with the advent of greater amounts of leisure time for the middle classes came the desire for more, and more varied, kinds of clothing that could be made in less time and for less money. This desire drove onward the consumption of mass-produced goods to the point where we now have lost touch with where our clothing comes from and the people that design and put it together.
Unlike in the era of De Ribes, the most successful design companies today are those at which the designers seem the most disconnected from what we see in the stores, with many of the largest fashion houses having been taken over by figures other than their founders and practically all labour taken from abroad. The upstart designers of the past can now be mythologized simply because we cannot relate any longer to the personal relationships that they had with the clothes they made and the people who wore them.
Still, the fashion industry is not without hope in this regard, and online shopping centres such as Etsy and Handmade at Amazon encourage people to buy one-of-a-kind items from individual sellers in a format that is convenient, thoroughly modern and, more importantly, cheap. I, for one, will try to make the switch
