The French legend is remarkably enduring. It dates back to Louis XIV and still exists today. Louis XIV had Jean-Baptiste Colbert, we have Bernard Arnault, they both promote the supremacy of French taste, and we are stuck with this internalized inferiority complex. The hat says that Paris is better and Paris is the standard that everyone should compare themselves to, and as long as we believe it will be true. It was Valerie Steele who said Paris looks like Tinker Bell. If everyone believes very strongly that Paris is great, then Paris will remain great.
I would say Paris is no better. It’s different. And you know, historically, especially if you look at a beautiful Vionnet or Lanvin dress in a museum, it’s haute couture. It’s not like today, where Parisian designers make very expensive clothes, but expensive clothes that anyone could buy. To buy a haute couture dress in those days, you had to meet the couture house, you had to be accepted as one of the customers. If you were a couture client, you most likely had a maid, a full-time servant who lived with you and whose sole purpose was to take care of your clothes and do your hair. So it is a very restrictive, exclusive system. American fashion was built on the idea of ready-to-wear, the idea that everyone should have access to beautiful clothes, what New Yorker fashion critic Lois Long called the “American genius for mass production.” I think this is an origin story that is very compelling and should be given more attention. I mean, which system would you rather be a part of?
Do you see parallels between what the Empresses did in the 1930s and 1940s, redefining the way women could more easily dress, and what American fashion is doing now?
It’s a different story. Now we have a lot of convenience. Perhaps a better way to look at it is that they were redefining what fashion could be. And I see that today in the way that we have more diverse points of view that are recognized in fashion, like Rachel Scott, like Willy Chavarria. They both reference their heritage: her Jamaican heritage, his Latino background, and they have both received CFDA Awards. I think this shows that there is an appetite for this kind of fashion. It’s not so different from what happened during World War II, when Paris was considered the world capital of fashion for centuries. There was no second city. New York was a manufacturing center. That this idea was turned on its head in just four years is remarkable. What the Empresses did was truly daring, and they did it by drawing on what made American fashion and American culture unique. When Virginia Pope of the New York Times wanted to introduce some showmanship into the New York Fashion presentations, she wasn’t trying to make it a short fashion show; she leaned on the idiom of the Broadway show, you know, something very American. That’s how she did it. I think that lesson still applies.