Fashion Climbing Read online

  Within a few hours after the showing, the buyers and some of the press people with photographic minds could draw in detail the whole collection of two hundred designs, which they then started selling to copycats. (Many people were caught carrying hidden miniature cameras, in canes, umbrellas, etc. Cloak-and-dagger stuff. One season a newspaper that was refused entrance hired a room across from the couture house and set up a special telescope, from which they saw the whole collection.) The Italian Mafia are like children compared to the boldness of what happens in Paris.

  After these two weeks, I would go back to my army life of touring around Europe with forty soldiers. Oh my, I’m almost ashamed to tell people that!

  I was filled with desire and ambition for the day when I would reopen my own business. The inspiration that Paris designers give the fashion world is total. Paris is the laboratory of fashion, where new ideas are discovered. The French take the time to mix and experiment. (It’s a costly laboratory; that’s why manufacturers were charged about $1,500 per garment, with the right to copy.) American designers were 98 percent under the influence of Paris, even though few would have admitted that their ideas were confiscated from the French collections, then disguised in New York workrooms and called their own. Of course, it’s not the fault of the American designers, as our big-business system didn’t give them time to be really creative. The time is coming when the big giants of American fashion will have to set up their own laboratories. The tottering dowager of Paris couture can no longer afford to indulge in its old-age customs.

  The army days were full of fun and excitement. In the spring, the fabulous Beaux-Arts ball of Paris was thrilling, as everyone poured their ingenuity into extraordinary costumes. I recall riding through the streets of Paris with the top half of my body coming out of a taxi roof, because I was done up like a huge lobster, with a giant head and claws that wouldn’t fit inside the cab. I was staying at the Hôtel de Vendôme, where Nona and Sophie had been guests. Their rooms were still in the style of the empress Eugenie. Sophie charmed the owners of the hotel into giving me the attic room overlooking the city, for two dollars a night. The august clientele were quite upset as I paraded down the hotel stairway, dressed as this nightmare-size lobster. But the French are quick to relish fantasy, and the whole city seemed to enjoy the art students’ ball. I remember we were free to run through the city streets and caused havoc as we danced a conga line through the sidewalk cafés of the Champs-Élysées. Some of us were almost nude.

  The Luxury of Freedom

  After the army years, I was desperate to get back to New York and sew up a storm of new hats. I had been released in June 1954 and spent the summer at the Long Island home of an army buddy, Jack Burkard. His mother let me set up a small millinery workroom in the basement of their home, from which I made a small collection.

  By December I had found a tiny brownstone on West Fifty-Fourth Street. This was to be the home of William J. for the next eight years. It was a narrow slice of a house sandwiched between the Dorset Hotel and the athletic club. I rented the parlor floor for 140 bucks a month—a real bargain for that location, and my head was just bursting with ideas to remodel it. The owner, Mr. Kay, was a renowned restorer of Asian art who worked exclusively for Mrs. Doris Duke. Doris often sat in my shop discussing the garden of her New Jersey estate, as Mr. Kay was a superb creator of Japanese gardens.

  The brownstone was an ugly boardinghouse that needed lots of imagination to bring back its high-ceilinged charm. The parlor floor consisted of a small front reception room and a large rear salon, separated by a hall with a stairway going to the upstairs apartments. It was a typical brownstone, with all that dark mahogany wood so fashionable at the turn of the century. I couldn’t stand it, and immediately painted it off-white. The owners nearly had a stroke when they saw their lovely wood masked like the face of a geisha. To hide the effect, they allowed me to put up a partition in the hall connecting my two rooms, thus giving me a full sweep of the narrow house. There was some crazy New York law that stated the hall couldn’t be cut off from the rest of the house, so I left a six-foot-wide opening as a doorway and closed it with a venetian blind. Everyone I knew was shocked at the idea of using a venetian blind as a door in New York City. I trusted everyone, and in all those years had only one robbery, and that was by one of my own customers, who stole a Russian sable scarf by putting it under her full-skirted dress. The owners of the house couldn’t have been nicer; they let me canopy the front entrance and decorate with topiary trees that I made into the shape of women’s heads. I must say they caused a lot of attention and stayed out in all the rain and snow, with long plastic drop earrings, which I had taken off a phony chandelier.

  At Christmas and Easter the front of the shop was my pride and joy, and I indulged in elaborate decoration. On Easter, the eight steps were laden with tulips and lilies, while the topiary trees got a new spray of green paint and flowers shooting out of their heads. At Christmas I usually got carried away. One year hundreds of white branches were arranged like a forest along the steps and sprouting out of the display windows. These were six to eight feet tall, and from them I hung thousands of tiny mirrors. In the cold winter wind they seemed to set the house dancing with their reflections.

  In the middle of all this, at the top of the stairs, replacing the topiary trees, were two bigger-than-life red sequin peacocks. The effect was sensational, drawing almost as many tourists as the Rockefeller Center tree. I must in all truthfulness say that these arty displays never brought in customers. People are afraid of shops that are too chichi; they’re scared to come in. But no matter, it was a wonderful relief for my flights of fancy—and besides, not many people bought hats around Christmastime.

  On the second floor of the house lived a renowned fashion model. She was a raving beauty who used to model my hats, often bringing her famous boyfriends as guests—such as Aly Khan and too many movie stars to begin mentioning. On the back of the second floor was a French dress designer who was like a bottle of champagne just opened. She was full of life, and often after she had finished a new design, which she would completely make herself, out she’d trot, dressed to the nines, giving the new fashion a breath of El Morocco air. Madame’s salon was dark and mysterious, like a French boudoir. Incense was always smoldering its exotic perfume, often filling the apartment above, which belonged to our landlady, a Prussian frau who was of the dowdy, practical German school. The French dressmaker was a constant revelation to Frau Landlady. In the coldest days of winter, the dressmaker would be bitching up a storm over the lack of heat when the landlady would come tramping down the stairs lit by a fifteen-watt bulb, her body covered with heavy wooly underwear and layers of sweaters, bearing a huge thermometer in her fist to prove to the French madame that there was ample heat. When the landlady would tap at the door, she always got the shock of her life to find the French madame running around on ten-degree-cold days with just a bra and panties. She couldn’t design fully clothed; she found inspiration only flowed to her fingers when she was almost naked. Of course, the landlady would hit the ceiling, wildly screaming, scaring my customers out of their wits.

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  I BELIEVED IN STARTING each week doing the thing you love most. Luckily, my love was flowers. At five thirty each Monday, I’d go down to the New York flower market, where all the colors of nature brightened the early morning. I would buy armfuls of fresh flowers to perfume my salon for the week. This is a practicing luxury I still indulge in, and one that makes all my weeks happy.

  Monday shouldn’t be drudgery. More people should start off doing what they enjoy most.

  Flowers aside, I never believed in fixing a place up and then opening; I wanted business right away. Once I had found the brownstone, I immediately moved all my creations and millinery supplies out of the Burkards’ on Long Island, and within ten minutes I had washed the front window and had hats on display. I had very little money to begin with, and I wouldn’t accept any financial help
after the Harkness episode. From the second I crossed the threshold of the new shop, it was a case of sewing like hell and finding customers. I was too filled with false pride to ever ask my Boston family for help. I never borrowed a dime from them since the day I came to New York in ’48.

  I remember Bergdorf’s custom millinery department ordered a couple of models from me at twenty dollars a hat, with a promise to reorder. I didn’t have a cent to buy the necessary straw, and so I went to my uncle’s office and asked for twenty dollars to fill the order. This took a lot of nerve; my uncle hadn’t been speaking to me. He was a kind man, but the idea of a nephew in fashion was a total disgrace to him. After putting me through the third degree, I ended up in a flood of tears, feeling that the Bergdorf order meant the life or death of my shop. Finally, he gave me the twenty dollars against his better judgment, as he felt by giving me the money for millinery he was encouraging the thing he hated most. If I had wanted money for anything outside of fashion, the sky would have been the limit. When I finally got the dough in my hot little hand and ran down Fifth Avenue to the supply house, Bergdorf’s buyers had been there that morning and bought every inch of the straw. I later learned from a customer that they were making my design and selling it themselves for sixty-five bucks. It was hard to take, but this was to be the typical transaction with retailers. I found with few exceptions that stores and manufacturers had minimal ethics in business, even when it meant developing a new talent so they could reap the benefit in later years. The practice was to wait and watch a designer struggle to a position of influence and success, and then the buyers would descend on the designer like a pack of vultures, stripping the tree bare of fruit and leaving the raped tree to survive on its own.

  Altogether, though, my new shop with a humble beginning was happiness immediately. I used the small front room as a salon, and for decorations I went to the liquidation sale of a top fashion house. For just a few dollars I bought tables, chairs, and all kinds of millinery supplies. When I was leaving, I saw a huge trash can filled with hundreds of yards of nylon curtain. I salvaged it, and washed the yardage in my bathtub. It came out beautifully, and with it I draped every inch of my new salon, including the ceiling. The effect was of a seductive harem, which pleased me since the walls and ceilings were in terrible condition.

  Nona and Sophie of Chez Ninon sent all their customers over to my West Side shop. For many it was a new experience, for these swanky ladies hardly ever crossed Fifth Avenue to the West Side except on the way to the opera on Monday nights. I remember Mrs. William Woodward Jr. pulling up in her sleek town car and climbing the stoop. She explained that had she realized it was on the West Side, she wouldn’t have come, and immediately pulled a Paris hat out of a bag and asked me to copy it. I told her we created hats on the West Side, advising her to go back to the East Side where she could get a good copy. Mrs. Nielsen, who could hear everything as she sewed in the workroom, nearly killed me for tossing out such an influential lady, especially when we needed all the money we could get. But I felt we’d make ends meet by selling our own designs.

  Another lady who found the West Side scary was Mrs. Mellon Bruce, one of the world’s richest women. Chez Ninon sent her, and I’ll never forget the frightened look on her face as she stepped out of her limousine and into my harem tent. She was so unsettled by the decor that she bought two hats just to get out of the place, never to return.

  When movie stars came into the shop, at first I was excited to see them, but after the first few, I never wanted to meet another one offscreen, as they are totally different people, and too often it’s a depressing letdown. When Leslie Caron came, I couldn’t believe my eyes, having just seen her film Lili where her adorable, charming personality caught everyone’s imagination. When she arrived in my shop in the flesh, she had an extraordinary shyness and no visible personality. A great disappointment. It’s best not to meet these famous people, as their mythical bubble of illusion bursts.

  One time early in my career I was a super at the Met Opera, where you carry a spear in Aida and get paid two bucks. I got paid four dollars, as I let them paint me black, and I helped carry the throne of Aida onstage. A customer, opera singer Mildred Miller, got me the job, but after a few performances I had to quit, as all the magical enjoyment I had had while in the audience was stripped away while I was backstage, where the queen of the Nile could be seen reading a mystery, and on her musical cue, would turn herself into the century-old seductress. It really spoiled all my illusions, and it’s definitely wrong to let the public see the inside of any industry, for immediately all the make-believe is gone. This is what’s happened in fashion since the war. Customers have been fed a steady diet of behind-the-scenes goings-on. Now they know almost as much as the pros, and once having seen behind the gold-and-white salons, they lose interest. In the future, I think fashion is going underground, to regain its breath of mystery.

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  THE FIRST FORMAL collection in the new shop was spring 1954. A dozen of the press attended, and lots of friends. There wasn’t enough room in the tiny salon for more than twelve chairs, so we opened the workroom, where all my friends sat applauding like they were relatives. My family never came to one of the shows until many years later. It took them so long to get over being ashamed of my work, and they never really did accept it. The first collection showed seventy-five hats, and although I thought each hat was a spectacular original, the truth of the matter was that outside influence, and Paris, could be traced through most of the designs. It’s funny, though; the press almost always chose the designs that showed my own personality. The most difficult thing in designing is the long, hard years it takes designers to free themselves of others’ influences. Of course, the general public most often can’t see the influence, but each designer in his own heart knows when he’s taken someone else’s idea, no matter how cleverly it’s disguised. And whenever the coat, suit, or hat is shown, he is reminded that it is not really his own. Luckily for the business world, buyers couldn’t give a damn, encouraging designers to take what they want from other people’s work, so long as the finished product is salable. And this is the very reason there are so many unhappy designers. Their lives are continual frustration, as inwardly they know they haven’t freed themselves from copying, and their own personal signature is never born. This is why at any given time you have so few real creators. Most designers are stylists or good editors.

  It wasn’t until the fall collection of 1955 that I was able to free my inner self from outside influence. It happened to me in a rather embarrassing way, but one I shall always be grateful for. The New York Times took a picture of a sawtooth-brimmed cloche and placed it in a prominent spot on its fashion page, along with the work of Adolfo, one of the true creators. The sawtooth brim was an idea I had taken from one of his hats of the previous season. At any rate, when I saw the picture of the hat with my name under it, I felt so ashamed and disgraced that I vowed never to be influenced again, no matter how unsuccessful my own ideas might be. In the future they were going to be only what I felt and thought, deep inside me. From that moment on, I was freed, and ever since that day I have enjoyed a happiness in my designing that no hell on earth could destroy. I created the best hats, often setting trends years in advance of Paris. It’s only when designers make this escape that they can express fully from inside things that they themselves aren’t aware of until they’ve been put into design.

  Preparing the new collection each spring and fall was the real reward for me. For two months before the showing, I would not make a date or see anyone, except a few customers during the day. But as soon as Mrs. Nielsen put down her needle and went home, I would close the door, turn off the telephone, and be alone with my thoughts to create throughout the night. It was the most wonderful time, to take the felts, draping and pulling them, as my imagination spilled through my hands. Some nights when the feeling was strong in my fingers, I could drape thirty hats, one after the other. Other nights, try as
I might, nothing would come to my hands. At times like these, I would lace up my ice skates and race around the rink at Radio City, my body swerving and dashing through the cold wind. There was something inside me that needed to be released, and after an hour or two I could go back to the shop and start new hats all over.

  Another time I stopped designing on a snowy night around midnight and went for a walk with my dog. The snow had blown itself into deep, beautiful drifts. At the Plaza I saw a horse-drawn sleigh, which I hired and rode through Central Park, filling myself with inspiration.

  I didn’t have many friends during these times, as the hats took up day and night. Besides, the designing was so rewarding I didn’t feel the need for people, but the few friends that I had were always mad as hell when these two months came around. They couldn’t understand why I had to shut myself off from everyone, but I felt that people might influence me, and I wasn’t going to take the chance. I never told anyone about my new collection, or let them see it, before the showing. My reason for all this secrecy wasn’t temperament or fear of copyists, it was simply that I found people too eager to give their advice, and especially in my case, where the designs weren’t like everyone else’s. I was widely criticized, and criticism is deadly harm for a designer and could prove discouraging in the crucial time when the designing is taking place. The day I stopped creating, and the collection was shown, I felt the press, buyers, and friends could say whatever they wanted; it didn’t bother me a bit. I had made a sincere statement with each new collection that I knew was my own, and anything they had to say had little meaning.