The Great Fashion Designers (14 page)

He was only twenty-four when he followed the fledgling movie business to Hollywood and took out an enormous $35,000 bank loan to open his Hollywood Boot Shop on the corner of Hollywood and Las Palmas Boulevards. Next to the shop was his workshop, and he developed a small manufacturing operation as well as employing ever increasing numbers of outworkers. Gradually he developed links with factories across the country, sold wholesale to stores throughout America and his own shop became focused on retail. He was commissioned by Cecil B. de Mille to put shoes on the feet of the actors and hordes of extras in
The Ten Commandments
and
The King of Kings
and also shod D. W. Griffith's
Way Down East
and
The White Rose
as well as James Cruze's
The Covered Wagon
.

He would research archaic costumes in the library, but there was little recorded so, once more, he ‘remembered' it—very successfully. He also studied anatomy at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles. Although his creativity and inventiveness in terms of style and materials were boundless, his real quest was comfort, the secret of which he discovered through his study of anatomy. The weight of the body is borne by the arch of the foot, he learned; that is what needs supporting while the ball of the foot and the heel (the areas most shoemakers prefer to support) should float free so that the bones and muscles can move as nature intended. As a consequence, any dancer who had worn a pair of Ferragamo's shoes refused to wear any other. All Hollywood's leading ladies wore Ferragamo, from Mary Pickford to Ava Gardner, from Jean Harlow to Marilyn Monroe, from Katharine Hepburn to Audrey Hepburn.

When the machine production did not measure up to his high standards, Ferragamo decided to move back to Italy where he believed he could employ enough skilled artisans to make his shoes by hand. His return to his native land in 1927 was initially a disaster and, owing to greedy backers in America, deceitful debtors and perfidious creditors plus recalcitrant Italian shoemakers, ended in bankruptcy. Ferragamo paid all his debts, real and fictional, over the next few years, rebuilt his business and acquired the Palazzo Feroni-Spini in Florence and the Villa II Palagio at Fiesole, on the hillside overlooking the city.

Then the larger world handed him another reversal of fortune. In 1935, Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, and in 1936, the League
of Nations imposed sanctions on Italy, killing Ferragamo's export trade and cutting off his sources of raw materials. Ferragamo was forced to new heights of resourcefulness. Fiddling with the wrapper from a chocolate while seeking a substitute for the fine kid skins that could be painted silver or gold for evening shoes, he came up with a fine rolled transparent cellophane tube enclosing a gold or silver thread. It was strong and it was glamorous. The second invention forced upon him by necessity at this time was the ‘wedgie'. He could obtain only low-grade steel at this time, and the shanks on his shoes were continuously snapping. After much thought he tried filling in the space between the heel and the ball of the foot, sculpting Sardinian cork. He then persuaded the most fashionable duchess in Florence to wear the wedge to church—and the queues formed on Monday morning.

By 1939, Ferragamo was shoemaker to most of the royalty of Europe as well as that of Hollywood. At one point, he recalled, four queens were being fitted simultaneously in his Rome salon—the queens of Yugoslavia, Greece, Spain and the Belgians. Queen Elena of Italy was a devoted customer, and he also made boots and shoes for Mussolini—thereby curing his corns and calluses—and for the dictator's wife and mistress as well as Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun. ‘How was it possible,' he demanded in his autobiography, ‘for a bankrupt in 1933 to own within five and a half years a great palace and a beautiful villa and, above all, to number among his clients the greatest names in the world?'

His answer was that his unique fitting system permitted ‘Nature' to effect a cure of the ‘crippled feet' of his clients. His theory was that many ills, from bad temper and obesity to insanity, could be traced to ill-fitting shoes. Throughout his career the style of the shoes, although an endless source of joy to him, was never as important as the structure and fit. He wrote:

Normally I do not institute new fashions. There are a number of dress and shoe designers who struggle to be different for the sake of being different, meaning that they want to impose a startling new fashion line upon the woman but if designers must wait for their customers to become conscious of new styles who, then, determines fashion? The answer is: new fashion begins in the mind of the designer. He must not stifle all his ideas merely because the world is not yet ready for them. I have no season.

The war that broke out in 1939 meant the collapse of business as his workers were called up into the army and trade ceased. The 41-year-old Ferragamo took advantage of a period of relative inactivity to find a wife. Wanda Miletti, the daughter of the doctor and mayor of Bonito, was twenty-three years younger than he was, but it was love at first sight for both. Their six children were all to work in the family business. In 1947, on a trip to the United States to accept a Neiman-Marcus plaque for ‘distinguished services to fashion' he shared the voyage with Christian Dior (of whom he had never heard). The two designers were astonished to discover that Ferragamo's shoes complemented Dior's clothes perfectly—both had instinctively been working in the same materials, colours and mood. ‘I had for many years,' he reflected, ‘believed that the fashion trend is not the exclusive prerogative of one designer but is “in the air”—a sort of manifestation of the world will, if I may put it like that—with the result that two men, working 400 miles apart, unknown to each other and with widely different means of inspiration (I draw my creations from my memory, while Dior prefers to find his inspiration from practical items like paintings and drawings) can arrive at similar conclusions at the same period in time.'

Further reading:
Salvatore Ferragamo's autobiography (1957),
Shoemaker of Dreams
, is still an essential read. For a good historical perspective, see Stefania Ricci's
Salvatore Ferragamo: Evolving Legend 1928–2008
(2008) and for an understanding of the whole field, see Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil's
Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers
(2006).

Revivals of classical dress have tended to be countercultural, a critique of a corrupt, oppressive or over-luxurious regime and an expression of a desire to return to the pure ideals of Hellenic Greece or the Rome of the Republic. Significantly, the style only became mainstream in the late eighteenth century, the time of revolutions and the setting up of new political orders, of the British regency and the French Directoire. The original clothes of antiquity were not really cut and stitched but made up of simple rectangles of fabric hung and draped around the body and secured with pins, brooches and belts. The Greek chiton or tunic was partially sewn together, but the
peplos
was folded, pinned and girdled. The
himation
was a loose wrap worn like a cloak or a poncho. Roman men dressed in a tunic and toga (the wrap-like garment), and Roman women wore a long tunic or
stola
with an overwrap called a
palla
. These were essentially simple clothes without much bulk, depending for richness on expensive dyes, embroidery and decoration. However, when the sculptors, the great (and very importantly, enduring) memorialisers of both cultures, got hold of them, they became something else. To generalise, in Greece they became ethereal, often erotic elements of the artist's composition, balancing, obscuring, revealing, emphasising human beauty; in Rome they became grandiose, plastic and imposing, insisting on their space—in short, what we have learned to call monumental (because in many eras no monument was complete without a togaed grave-faced statue).

Greece and Rome declined and died but the statues, idealised and elaborated, remained, an inspiration to artists, philosophers, politicians and dressmakers alike. Along with Paul Poiret, Mariano Fortuny and Madeleine Vionnet, Alix Grès, who had longed to train as a sculptor, loved the simplicity and purity of draped fabric softly clinging and floating around the body, unconstrained by the artificiality of corsets and padding. In 1981, Barbara Burman Baines wrote of her style, ‘… best summed up in a famous photograph taken in 1937 by Man Ray for
Harper's Bazaar:
a model in a long, white halter-neck dress, seemingly made of nothing but multifarious pleats, leans dreamily by an antique statue of winged victory attired in a long tunic of fluid folds.'

The year before, in 1936, the same magazine had written, ‘Alix stands for the body Rampant, for the rounded, feminine sculptural form beneath the dress.' In Valerie Steele's judgement Grès was, along with Chanel, the most important post-war couturière. Their approaches were very different: Chanel was focused on dressing women for modern life, on ‘sexual politics and social signals' as Anne Hollander put it; Grès simply wanted to create beauty using ‘fabric as a fundamental artistic substance'. Grès's clothes, added Hollander, ‘were solutions to abstract problems … beauty the overriding standard'. Like a sculptor, she worked directly with her material, leaving no sketches or pattern pieces to posterity. Patricia Mears wrote in her monograph on the couturière, ‘Grès draped and manipulated fabric with great speed, dexterity and alacrity.' Sometime these dresses draped directly onto a mannequin used more than 20 metres of fabric. ‘In her neoclassicism,' wrote Harold Koda, ‘Grès conformed to the antique notion of uninterrupted lengths of cloth, stitched but not cut into shape. From her earliest work, Grès introduced windows on to the body with cut-outs that bared the back and midriff.'

Alix Grès was born Germaine Emilie Krebs in Paris in 1903. The secretive couturière hated her name and used two professional aliases during her career. The first, Alix Barton, was probably taken from an early employer, Julie or Juliette Barton, but Grès was content to let journalists assume it was her maiden name. However she did reveal that her family was bourgeois, her father an ‘industrialist', and that one of her grandmothers was Italian and one of her grandfathers was German. She first wanted to be a dancer and then a sculptor, both of which ambitions were discouraged by her family.

Dressmaking was her default choice in that it would allow her to be creative while earning her independence. She entered her profession on the eve of an economic depression that adversely affected the business of all Paris's couturiers. The Wall Street Stock Market crash came in 1929 and Grès joined the couture house of Premet in 1930 for a three-month apprenticeship in sketching and cutting. As with much of Grès's life, the next stage is unclear. Mears quotes several conflicting versions, which include making toiles freelance, working for Julie Barton and opening a shop, adding that what seems clear is that she set up her own maison de couture, named Alix, in 1934. (One version told by Grès to Cathy Horyn of the
New York Times
was that Julie Barton renamed her own business after her more talented assistant.)

Alix Barton received much admiring press attention in the 1930s, her work featuring in magazines as often as that of Chanel, Schiaparelli, Mainbocher and Vionnet. One profile in
Harper's Bazaar
in 1938 commented, ‘She is not yet 30 and she looks far more like a nun than a dressmaker.' It is noteworthy, perhaps, that Grès had already started to lie about her age. She was also a commercial success, especially in America, and attracted the attention of Paris's Bohemian elite. In 1935, Jean Cocteau and Jean Giraudoux commissioned her to design the costumes for their play,
La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu
(The Trojan War Will Not Take Place). The costumes, ‘whiffs of navy blue chiffon', received good press.

During the 1930s Grès did not restrict herself to Attic draperies. She also experimented with ethnic styles such as the sari or Chinese tunic, what Mears described as ‘loose interpretations of “exotic” prototypes. Garments such as the “Serpent of the Nile” and the Dutch-inspired “Lowlands” ensembles were as fanciful as their names.' In the 1950s, however, she was more successful with her development of garment construction derived from traditional shapes such as the kaftan, poncho, serape and kimono.

In 1937, Alix married a Russian painter, Serge Anatolievitch Czerefkow, converting to the Russian Orthodox faith to do so. Czerefkow signed his paintings with a partial anagram of his first name, Grès, and his new wife appropriated it, becoming Alix Grès. Although their daughter, Anne, was born in 1939, Czerefkow chose to live a separate life, returning to his home in Tahiti and a string of affairs with Polynesian concubines. Alix brought up her daughter with the help of ‘Muni', Anne's godmother, a former model and actress who shared Alix Grès's life for more than forty years and who has been the cause of much speculation about the couturière's true sexual orientation.