The Great Fashion Designers (25 page)

The teenage market, invented in the 1950s, proved the most easily manipulable in advertising's history, and so the culture refocused on youth. Young people were drafted to fill jobs and professional positions they would once have laboured half a lifetime to attain. They invented new jobs, particularly in the burgeoning media, which they reshaped to meet their own agendas. And, sheltered and pampered as they were, they began to develop an altruistic approach to the world, embracing various strands of utopian politics and a romantic view of a perfectible world, one in which all the benefits of science could be bent to the advantages of the masses, where disease, ignorance and hunger could be vanquished and space conquered.

Women, in particular, wanted to distance themselves from the lives lived by their mothers, who had worn some variation on the New Look, which their daughters took, in its corseted hour-glass silhouette, to represent traditional womanhood and its traditional (at least in the middle classes) roles of motherhood and dependent wife. They needed a new way of looking that put fertility on the back burner while constructing a post-Pill please-my-self sexuality that expressed independence, self-determination and a new sense of empowerment.

André Courrèges was not a member of this generation, but he largely understood it and identified with it. He told Brenda Polan in an interview for
The Guardian
in 1979, ‘My revolution of 1965 was not a calculated volte-face; it was an instinctive thing, a reaction to a period which was both progressive and aggressive. A designer must be a sociologist; he must look at the lives people lead, the way their houses are built, what their needs and preoccupations are.'

On that occasion, just a decade and a half after the collection that set all Paris on its ears, Polan described Courrèges's salon in some detail:

Today [it] still reflects his identification with the shiny, hard-surfaced clinical world of pushbutton machines and silicon chips. Like the offices and workrooms beyond it, it is all a startling high-gloss white … Here vast, untinted mirrors reflect shiny white walls, a gleaming white-tiled
floor, white leather and chrome furniture and rails of distinctively cut clothes in vibrant-coloured cottons, satins, silks, fine wools and fantasies of feathers and chiffon.

At that time it was easy to make the connection between the decor and the philosophy. The man who had delighted in an invitation to sit in at NASA Mission Control in Cape Canaveral was still locked into the sci-fi vision of a future where man (and woman) walked on the moon and lived in a then only vaguely imagined uncluttered and dust-free domestic world of technological miracles. But there was more to it than that. There was the Balenciaga connection.

André Courrèges was born in Pau, in southern France almost in the shadow of the Pyrenees, in 1923. His father was employed as the major domo in a private chateau and sent his son to a school that specialised in civil engineering—where he gained an understanding of three-dimensional structure that was to become the basis of his innovative garment construction. Growing up during the Second World War in Vichy France, young André trained in Aix-en-Provence as a pilot in the French Air Force but was certain that his interests lay in fashion. The great Cristobal Balenciaga had been born only miles away in the Basque country on the other side of the border with Spain and he, Courrèges decided, was the master from whom he would learn. So as soon as the war ended in 1945, André set out for Paris, aged twenty-two. He studied fashion design at the Chambre Syndicale school and attempted to get a job with his idol. Initially he could not obtain an appointment to plead his case, so he took a job at the Jeanne Lafaurie fashion design house. Eventually in 1950 he found a way. ‘I went to a team of smugglers in Hendaye who carried Balenciaga's patterns and designs between Paris and his offices in Spain,' he told Valerie Guillaume. ‘I had a letter passed on to him and I met him. I suggested I should work for him as a junior apprentice. He took me on in the tailoring atelier.'

Courrèges compared his entry into the House of Balenciaga to that of a novice monk preparing for holy orders. He told Georgina Howell in 1989, ‘The atelier was pure white, unornamented, and intensely silent. People whispered and walked on tiptoe, and even the clients talked in hushed voices. Once or twice a day the door of Balenciaga's office would open, and you would hear him leave the building to go and pray in the church on the avenue Marceau.'

After five years, Balenciaga sent Courrèges to work in his Eisa couture house in Spain in order to give him ‘more freedom and responsibility'. On his return, Courrèges told Valerie Guillaume that he had gone to Balenciaga and told him, ‘Nothing grows under a tall tree. I am a little acorn and you are a great oak. I have to leave you to survive.' Balenciaga pretended not to hear. Three years passed and every time Courrèges brought up the subject, Balenciaga would feign deafness. Then came the day when he wandered into Courrèges's atelier and asked, ‘Are you leaving? Do you need money? I'll give you some. Do you need help with administration? I'll send you my manager. Do you need clients? I'll send you clients.'

So in 1961, with some financial assistance from the great man, Courrèges set up his own house in partnership with Coqueline Barriere, with whom he had worked at Balenciaga and who was to become his wife in 1966. At first both were still very much under the influence of the master. ‘In his atelier I had to think like him. That was no problem for me. Balenciaga taught me about the seventeenth century. The aesthetic simplicity of his clothes and mine was inspired by that period.'

Gradually, however, the couple began to develop their own style—from the feet up. Courrèges had always preferred flat shoes, and they were right for the times, for the mood of women—but they dictated an entirely new set of proportions. Coqueline Courrèges told Guillaume, ‘Women needed to be able to walk and run again. And I was a dancer myself.' Flat heels, she said, forced the designer to recalculate the proportions of the female body. This created a delicate balance and a hat became essential ‘to fill out the silhouette'. The garment had to fall from the shoulders and was accompanied by a mid-calf sock or boot. Courrèges continued, ‘The clothes float. You don't feel them. I don't emphasise the waistline because the body is a whole. It is ridiculous to treat the top and bottom parts of the body separately.'

The Courrèges mini, first shown in January 1965, was the result of this thinking. Shown on unusually limber, active, athletic models, these designs included angular mini dresses cut four inches above the knee and trouser suits in heavyweight fabrics like gabardine. Many of the outfits had cut-out midriffs and bare backs and were worn without a bra. These were accessorised with flat white boots, goggles and helmets inspired by the equipment worn by astronauts. The stark shapes and white and silver colour scheme were immediately labelled ‘Space Age'. Initially they met with a stunned silence. Backstage in the
cabine
with the models and dressers, the Courrègeses heard no applause. A shocked silence prevailed. As he tells it, tears welled in Courrèges's eyes. ‘I received a note. “André,” had written the editor of the magazine
L'Officiel de la Couture
, “you were crazy, your collection is too short, with boots in the summer. It won't work. What were you thinking?”

‘I was thinking that I wanted to make women liberated, full of life, modern,' recalled Courrèges. ‘I think I achieved all that.' Indeed, just three hours after the show, the fashion photographer Peter Knapp telephoned him to say, ‘André, I hear your collection was fantastic; it was genius. The girls from
Vogue
are super-enthusiastic. They're saying you've revolutionised everything.'

In his interview with Polan in 1979, Courrèges said, ‘I wanted to put women into a total-freedom suit, a ribbed-knit body stocking. In order to introduce an element of fluidity and because few women have perfect bottoms, I topped it with a gabardine hipster mini-skirt and a spaceman visor.' This was to become one of fashion's most enduring images and probably the most copied look in the history of fashion. Dismayed by how ruthlessly and universally his designs were plagiarised, Courrèges did not show to the press again until 1967, although he continued to produce collections shown only to clients. Through the next few seasons, he continued to develop this look, adding bright colours and fresh abstract motifs to the clothes.

In 1966 the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris hosted one of the first exhibitions of early-century art movements that were to bring about a reassessment of their value. Les Années 25: Art Deco/Bauhaus/Stijl/Art Nouveau marked a turning point, the beginning of a romantic revival which informed Barbara Hulanicki's Biba, the work of Ossie Clark and Zandra Rhodes and shaped much of the retro fashion of the 1970s. It certainly signalled the end of modernism's influence on fashion as perceived by Courrèges. ‘An avalanche of folklore, hippie dressing, in short, everything you can get from a rag seller,' he lamented, surveying the Rich Peasant, Russian Steppes, Bedouin, Mongol, Mexican, Indian and general Gypsy looks that crowded each other for tent space on fashion's voyages of the imagination. In 1970 he renamed his couture collection Prototype, his ready-to-wear Hyperbole.

At the end of the decade of disguise, Courrèges's prescience did not desert him. Fashion was once more beginning to march in step with his vision. For some time he had been designing and selling worldwide some of the most desirable clothes for sport—skiwear, tennis, dance/exercise—and he understood that the coming jogging and aerobics trend among women would have a huge influence on the clothes they chose to wear for ordinary life. ‘Now,' he told Polan in 1979, ‘we have reached another turning point and I am starting again to develop the movement I started in 1965. Other designers want to give women the refined style of the 1940s. This does not correspond to their way of living.

‘So the clothes made for sport must be ennobled and made into part of the rest of life. We must introduce a more relaxed, at-ease style to everyday clothes, even eveningwear. The ennoblement of sporting clothes is achieved not simply by making a tracksuit in silk or wool but by studying the tracksuit and incorporating the elements that make it so comfortably wearable in clothes which are stylish and flattering.' He was correct in this, predicting the upgrading of tracksuit, shell suit, sweatshirt fabric and hi-tech synthetics to daily wear and the importance of Lycra in everything from leotards to business suits. But his contempt for the fashion system was misplaced.

He declared, ‘In 15 years women have freed themselves. The retro look is putting them back in prison. Women are no longer decorative coquettes or sheltered wives; they may be coquettes and they may
be wives, but they are also workers with full and independent lives. What sort of service is it to them to change the style every year, one year dictating a frilly, layered peasant look, the next big, square shoulders and small waists? There is a decadent spirit of creativity.'

And yet, women still revel in fashion's wayward changeability. In 1983, the French daily
Libération
wrote, ‘Courrèges evokes a modernism so dated one is almost amazed he still exists.' But he did. In 1990 he was still designing and marketing a boutique fashion collection (down to fourteen boutiques from fifty in 1979) worldwide and headed a licensing empire that reportedly grossed an annual $285 million with men's wear, fragrance, home products, champagne and gourmet foods. In the mid-1990s, after several adventures with investors, takeovers and buyouts, André and Coqueline Courrèges regained control of most of their enterprises, and in 1997 André stepped down to concentrate on painting and sculpture.

Further reading:
Valerie Guillaume's
Courrèges
(1998), part of the
Fashion Memoir
series, is the most comprehensive account.

Although at the beginning of the twenty-first century Italy is a major producer of fashion, a dominant force in the luxury goods industry and second only to Paris in fashion creativity, it is a very new preeminence. Italy does not have a long fashion pedigree. Paris and couture have been indivisible for a century and a half, as have New York and industry, modernity and the thrill of the ever new. London has a long tradition of fashion, leading in menswear and tailoring, humbly following Paris's lead in womenswear until the 1960s and the explosion of youthful talent unleashed by the new art schools. But until the 1950s ‘Italy' and ‘fashion' rarely rubbed up against each other in a sentence. And it started in Rome.

Italy's history is as a handful of separate—and often warring—city-states, each with its own distinct identity; its own aristocracy, landed gentry, professional and merchant class; its university and developed culture; and its own fashionable elite. This was not, until Risorgimento in the nineteenth century, a single nation with a capital that could claim to be pre-eminent in politics, commerce, the arts and culture. Arguably, although it is certainly now a single nation, it still does not have that capital, but rather a series of beautiful, cultured, vital cities, each with a very different character. But after the Second World War Rome had the chance to become a city not just of priests, poets, painters and politicians but a real capital, symbolic of a resurgent nation, determined to put its world back together. The surviving members of the pre-war Roman establishment, the politicians, aristocrats and fledgling industrialists, were quickly joined by a new cast of characters. The Italian film industry and its studios at Ciné Citta began to attract an international cast of actresses, and, hard on their Ferragamo heels, came all the players in la dolce vita and the louche, nouveau riche jet set. To cater to them, the old-fashioned dressmaking establishments that had survived the war were augmented by a new generation of modern-minded designers with a flair for easy, youthful clothes of impeccable quality; together they formed Roman haute couture.