In Vanity Fair: A Tale of Frocks and Femininity

by Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd

She is most assuredly "gentille." So is the "femme chic" as Drian pictures her,—Drian the youthful, who might stand at the head of our conscientiously monotonous portrayers of pretty women, were he working in New York instead of Paris. Many of those same American exponents of feminine types draw badly enough to shock the clever young Frenchman, but they would marvel at his pride in his fashion work,—for he is proud. He recognizes the importance of his metier.

It is this popular attitude toward things sartorial that has made Paris the centre of the dressmaking world. The great dressmaker may be born anywhere, but even a sartorial genius, born to dressmaking as the sparks fly upward, will not come into his artistic heritage outside of Paris. Your artistic temperament must have its sympathetic environment, and only in Paris is the artist dressmaker ranked with the immortals, only in Paris is dressmaking classed among the fine arts. Worth, the great, blushed unseen in the dark unfathomed caves of Birmingham; Beer wasted his sweetness on the desert air of Berlin; the Callot Sisters are from Provence and owe to the land of Tartarin their bold originality of invention; the Maison Drecol, famous in Paris and the foundation of Viennese fashion, was established by a Madame Wagner from Amsterdam. Once rooted in Parisian soil, these insignificant ones waxed great and famous, and their history is the history of fully two thirds of the well-known Paris dressmakers.

They are the truly great men of France, those famous dressmakers. Politicians, statesmen, generals, writers, musicians, strut across the public stage and play their rôles; but Paris could do without them. Given a grand cataclysm, and a possibility of saving some one famous man for the Republic, Paris would unhesitatingly rescue Paquin.

There has been a revolution in the type of the illustrious ones, during the last decade. Dressmaking has its Champs de Mars; but, in its case, the new men have almost driven the old salon to the wall.

Paris to-day has two distinct schools of great dressmakers, the new and the old, but the survivors of the old original type are few and far between. In the old days the phrase "creative genius" was not amiss when applied to the heads of the big French dressmaking establishments. To-day these great men are business men, but the men of the old school were artists, had creative talent—in a fashion sense—and cultivated that talent.

Walles, an Englishman by birth, was an extreme example of this attitude on the part of the dressmaker toward his art, though his name is not so well known to the general public as many others. He was an artist enragé, a genius in colour combination and line. He was an avid student of colour, line, values, in the art galleries; he spent day after day in the woods noting the colour combinations of the autumn leaves; he drew upon flower and bird and insect and cloud for inspiration, and he achieved great results; but he had the ill-balanced temperament of genius and his career was brief.

Madame Roderigues, a Portuguese—and an exception to the rule that no great dressmaking talent has come from Spain, Portugal, or Italy—was a phenomenal artist of this same type, but ill health interfered with her spectacular success.

Other dressmakers, not such extremists as these two, ranked with the artist group, but Worth was practically the last of the old masters of dress.

The new men are of a different class. The work turned out from their ateliers is as good as that of their predecessors, but it is produced by different methods. The head of the establishment to-day is, first of all, a business man of extraordinary ability. He is also a man of phenomenally good taste—but he is not a creative genius. He does not lie awake wrestling with embryonic ideas concerning sleeve or flounce or collar, he does not roam woods and fields in search of inspiration. Not he. He buys the brains of lesser folk and launches the product of those brains for the edification of womankind and his own glory. Some little ouvrière in the workroom has a moment of inspiration. She goes to her employer with her idea. If he likes it, he buys it,—and she goes back to her work. Or perhaps some obscure dressmaker with more originality than reputation goes to one of the famous men and shows him models she has designed. If she has anything to offer which, in his judgment, has possibilities, he buys it—and at a generous figure. These men are always willing to pay liberally for ideas; but, once bought, the thing is theirs. The originator must not repeat it nor claim credit for it, though it may make the man who buys it famous, and set the fashionable world agog. Unfair? Not at all. The little dressmaker has not the ability to launch her idea. She makes more out of it by selling it to a well-known house than she could make in any other way. In course of time she may become the head of such an establishment, for the seats of the mighty are filled chiefly from her class; but, in the meantime, she is glad to find a market for her ideas.