Empress of Fashion (18 page)

The first all-American
Harper's Bazaar
appeared on September 1, 1940, followed by another on September 15. “This is the first issue of
Harper's Bazaar
that has ever appeared without fashions from Paris,” said the editorial on September 1. “We publish this record of the New York autumn openings with pride in the achievements of our American designers and with full acknowledgment of our debt to the French. We have learned from the greatest masters of fashion in the world: learned, and then added something of our own. Such clothes have never been made in America before.” Diana worked flat out on both issues. “You managed the impossible—not only completing September 1st, entirely a fashion issue—but doing practically all of the September 15th pages,” wrote Snow. Diana's spreads in September 1940 were aristocratic in tone, featuring designs from upmarket made-to-order houses, including Germaine Monteil, Nettie Rosenstein, and Hattie Carnegie. The captions were not short on Vreelandesque bicontinental flourishes either: “Skirt lengths are an atom shorter than last year's. . . . By night they just touch the Aubusson or just miss the sidewalk.”

Once America entered the war in December 1941, however, Diana's tone changed. The didactic cadences of “Why Don't You?” disappeared (and so, more or less, did the column), to be replaced by a more empathetic tone. Upper-class American women went out to work in greater numbers than ever before. Their servants disappeared. They needed serviceable, adaptable clothes that were easy to care for. Everyone, including the editorial staff of
Bazaar
, was in the same boat. Snow and Diana were united in the view that their task was to keep up morale by helping
Bazaar
's readers look as attractive as possible in such difficult circumstances, and they turned to American sportswear designers for help, a move unthinkable before the war. In 1940 “sportswear” meant clothes for sports like tennis and golf, so-called resort wear, and included swimwear, beach clothes, light summer separates and dresses, yachting clothes, traveling clothes, and informal clothes for town and country.

The rise of American sportswear has conventionally been seen in stark terms, as a democratic, egalitarian form of dress emerging in opposition to aristocratic French couture. In many ways this is a false distinction, since Chanel created clothes for dynamic women and both she and Patou designed for the more active parts of their clients' day. Sportswear also had a close cousin in English country tweeds. However, it was undeniably American garment manufacturers who developed sportswear in response to a demand for cheaper clothes, made to simpler designs from fabrics that were easy to look after and suitable for cutting by heavy machinery. The fashion scholar Rebecca Arnold and others have suggested that the sportswear look was a homogenizing force—an important dimension in American fashion—suitable for anyone wishing to sign up for a certain kind of elite American identity; and she also detects in its rise undertones of New England puritan simplicity and thrift. Sportswear certainly met a demand for clothing for an active life. It flattered the uncorseted female body, and because it was so adaptable it was capable of holding together many conflicting ideas about womanhood, quite often in the same woman. In 1942 the American government introduced Limitation Order L-85, restricting the amount of fabric that could be used in civilian clothes. This actually played to the simple, minimalist look of American sportswear; and both
Vogue
and
Bazaar
supported L-85 as a stimulus to sportswear design.

The particular focus of Diana's attention was a brilliant young designer called Claire McCardell. Diana met McCardell while she was working for Hattie Carnegie in 1938. Diana took in some French jersey and asked for it to be made up into a “little two piece Chanel kind of uniform,” but got a one-piece McCardell instead. She liked it so much she asked to meet the designer and became one of her most powerful supporters. Claire McCardell, who would later be considered one of America's greatest designers ever, was only two years younger than Diana, but arrived in fashion by a very different route. She studied fashion design at the Parsons School for Design in the 1920s. As a student she went to Paris where she was greatly influenced by Chanel and Vionnet, pooling resources with student friends to buy secondhand couture clothes to see how they were made. Back in New York, McCardell was taken on as a designer by Townley Frocks in the early 1930s, and for most of the decade she copied Paris designs in its back rooms, though even there her creativity and inventiveness broke through. Her first real hit (still as an unnamed designer) was the “Monastic” dress, a waistless shift cut on the bias, which appeared in the fall of 1938. Widely copied, it had the unfortunate effect of forcing Townley to close because the firm lost so much money fighting copyright suits until it was restarted in 1940 by Adolph Klein. Klein was a very different character from every other manufacturer on Seventh Avenue. He greatly admired McCardell's creativity and gave her her head, allowing her to work as a named designer. This gamble resulted in huge success for Townley, thanks in no small part to Diana.

Diana's sudden metamorphosis from 1930s woman of style to wartime fashion editor reflected rapidly changing social and economic circumstances in the United States even before Pearl Harbor. This sudden, radical change in American daily life opened Diana's eyes in the most powerful way to the symbiotic relationship between fashion and changing everyday reality. It was an insight that would stay with her for the rest of her life, and in 1942 she took action. “Please don't be modest,” wrote McCardell's biographer Sally Kirkland to Diana later. “I know that without designing for her you nevertheless inspired her to do lots of things like the popover.” The “Popover” was the garment that made McCardell's name, but it was conceived by Diana. Diana thought of it as a dress made in accordance with L-85 that could be worn for housework, though it evolved into an outfit in which one could step out to the shops, or fling over work clothes at a moment's notice to look respectable. Diana and Snow approached Claire McCardell with this idea in 1942 as part of an attempt to show how L-85 could stimulate American creativity. The first Popover appeared in
Bazaar
in September 1942. Manufactured in workmanlike fabrics like denim, McCardell's version allied the ideas of Madame Vionnet with the simplicity and informality of sportswear design. This was the first time a magazine dedicated to contemporary high fashion proposed a solution to its readers in the form of a sportswear garment, and the impact was instantaneous. The Popover was mass-produced at $6.95, well below the usual price of Claire McCardell's designs. A runaway success, it was a career-defining piece for McCardell and a bestseller for Townley. It also showed what could be achieved when a businessman with vision joined forces with an outstanding designer.

Diana's next attempt to ally the aesthetic values of
Bazaar
with clothes for the wartime woman was less successful in commercial terms but was even more daring and reflected her longstanding fondness for ballet clothes. In late 1942 the designer Mildred Orrick came to see her with ideas for a “leotard”—not a ballet leotard, but a tabard dress worn over a striped sweater with leggings. Realizing that it might be too avant-garde for
Bazaar
's readers, Diana floated the idea with a drawing in the January 1943 issue, describing it as “an old idea based on every ballet dancer's rehearsal costume.” The idea appeared again in the July 1943 issue, considerably developed. By this time Diana had involved Claire McCardell, believing that Mildred Orrick did not have the expertise or the profile to launch such an idea on her own. The leotard then appeared on the cover of
Life
magazine on September 13, 1943, earning itself a send-up in
The
New Yorker
along the way. In the end the notion failed because it proved too expensive for college girls, the only people slim enough to wear the leotard to advantage. Meanwhile Diana's ideas spread in other ways. She circumvented leather shortages by putting models in fabric espadrilles; and fashion editor Babs Simpson credits her with putting women in ballet slippers in wartime, though others maintain this idea came from McCardell and the dance shoe manufacturer Capezio, and was then enthusiastically adopted by Diana in the pages of
Bazaar
.

Such questions of attribution do not seem to have been of great importance in wartime. What is striking, however, is the extent to which war turned the New York clothing industry into an all-female world. Women had played an important role before the war, though they were disproportionately clustered in its lower ranks in both manufacturing and retail. But even in 1936, when Diana first started at
Bazaar
, the New York fashion world was providing a wide range of occupations for educated, middle-class young women, particularly those looking to earn a living before they married—and increasingly before and after they had children. These women worked not only as designers but as copywriters, buyers, entrepreneurs like Cora Scovil, who made window mannequins, retailers like Dorothy Shaver, and photographers like Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Toni Frissell. “Probably about the best paid of all women's jobs are fashion jobs,” said
Bazaar
in August 1939; and in 1937 the Tobé-Coburn School for Fashion Careers aimed itself squarely at educated young women with the express aim of finding them the right sort of professional work in the field of fashion.

With so many men away at war, New York fashion became dominated by a small and powerful female group. There was little thaw in relations between Edna Woolman Chase and Snow; but designers like Joset Walker, Clare Potter, and Carolyn Schnurer pooled their ideas to such an extent that even experts have trouble telling their wartime work apart. Diana proved to be a good team player in this wartime all-female world too. Besides her relationship with Snow, she worked closely with one highly progressive fashion buyer, Marjorie Griswold of Lord & Taylor, who was fast gaining a reputation as having an instinct for the best American designers, and was given great leeway by Dorothy Shaver as a result. Griswold's view of the American woman had an influence on Diana's thinking. “I rang her 7 times a day,” she said, and later wrote to Griswold that “you were the person I always worked the closest with and I was the most devoted to and respectful of.” Diana was the indirect beneficiary of lectures arranged throughout the war for senior staff like Griswold by Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor on the relationship between fashion and changing socioeconomic conditions; and she often had lunch with Dorothy Shaver to discuss such matters face-to-face.

Diana's greatest creative partnership of the war years, however, was with the first woman in the canon of twentieth-century photographers, Louise Dahl-Wolfe. A former art student, Dahl-Wolfe trained and worked as an interior decorator before she took up photography; and she ended up at
Bazaar
only when she discovered that Dr. Agha of
Vogue
had described her in an internal Condé Nast memo as “making a great effort to learn photography . . . but on account of her advanced age—about forty-eight—perhaps a little too late.” In developing her craft, Dahl-Wolfe absorbed lessons from the leading male photographers around her: Munkácsi's images of strong, dynamic women; Huene's love of form; the glamour and imagination of Beaton's portrait photographs; and the surrealism of Huene's successor at
Vogue
, his lover and protégé Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann, known simply as Horst. “We had the best time—we were all such friends,” she recalled. Dahl-Wolfe's own contribution to the development of photography was her use of color. She experimented endlessly with the new color film launched by Kodachrome in 1935, achieving the first successful fashion photographs in color in interior natural light, and taking her palette outdoors to create some of the most memorable fashion shoots of the early 1940s.

“Dahl-Wolfe freed color from convention and timidity, wedding the American ideal of natural wholeness to a European standard of elegance,” writes the American photographic critic and photographer Vicki Goldberg. Dahl-Wolfe achieved this in part because, unlike Huene, she was able to work with others. As Diana said: “One was never selfish with Louise. There was an extraordinary, immediate communication of her seriousness.” For her part Dahl-Wolfe greatly admired Diana. “She was the tops,” Dahl-Wolfe said. “No one knew color or could pull a sitting together like Diana.” The color photographs in each issue were expensive, and were allocated to clothes by advertisers and designers whom Snow and Diana agreed were important. Snow and Brodovitch, meanwhile, deliberated on how the images should be placed in the issue. Once Diana had selected the pieces, and Snow approved, Diana and Dahl-Wolfe agreed between them what the mood of the image should be. Diana, with her theatrical streak, often had a hand in dramatizing the scene, suggesting roughly the pose of the model and the wording for the caption that was later polished by a copywriter. Dahl-Wolfe then developed the idea in her own way, actual garment or swatches on hand, designing and building the set or finding locations. She would often take a day over just one photograph, and at this point in her career Diana was on hand to style the model. They frequently worked in sweltering temperatures with no air-conditioning. “There'd be big rows between Dee-Ann and Louise on some point to do with the pictures. They'd end up, both of them, sending flowers to each other,” said Babs Simpson. But the rage came from passionate commitment to the task at hand, and the relationship was one of great mutual respect.

One bane of both their lives was the garments that had to be photographed for
Bazaar
because the manufacturers were regular advertisers. Diana was heard to exclaim, “That's perfectly ghastly!” before asking the manufacturer to change a piece slightly and make it more appetizing. Particularly hopeless cases were grouped together in a feature called “Pearls of Little Price” at the back of the magazine. “Sometimes you'd get [these clothes], and just not know what to do,” said Louise Dahl-Wolfe. But in these circumstances Diana proved unexpectedly calm and resourceful. “Diane always managed to make it work,” she said. At the other end of the scale, some of the most outstanding work from the Dahl-Wolfe and Vreeland team took place out in the open. As the war progressed, deploying the beauty of the American landscape became a powerful way of reinforcing the identity of the clothes and the all-American talent of designers like Claire McCardell, Carolyn Schnurer, Tina Leser, Bonnie Cashin, and others. Munkácsi had already used New York architecture as a backdrop to American design before the war, but Dahl-Wolfe took this further, using some of America's most dramatic open spaces and developing her color technique as she did so.