The Great Fashion Designers Read Free Page A

Worth was a ‘man-milliner’ running a house that was, so the rumours ran, more of a bordello.
    Worth also set the tone for the couturier as dictator, rapidly acquiring much of the arrogance of the French court he served, with prices to match. ‘Those ladies are wisest who leave the choice to us,’ he told an interviewer. According to his son, Jean-Philippe, ‘in time he came to have no awe of anything … and to recognise only two higher in authority than himself—God and the Emperor.’ He also had an innate appreciation of the insecurities and competitiveness of the ladies of high society. Speaking to the journalist F. Adolphus, Worth once said: ‘Women dress, of course, for two reasons: for the pleasure of making themselves smart, and for the still greater joy of snuffing out the others.’
    He was born in 1825 in Bourne, Lincolnshire, one of five children. Disaster hit the family eleven years later when his father, William, a solicitor, went bankrupt and left his family to fend for themselves. His impoverished mother was left with little choice but to find an apprenticeship for her son, who worked at a printer’s shop. The young boy, however, hated the work and persuaded his mother to allow him to move to London to gain employment at Swan & Edgar, a haberdashers located in the recently constructed Regent Street. This was effectively Worth’s home through his teenage years; legend has it that he even slept beneath the counter. The opportunity to work with textiles gave Worth an outstandinggrounding for the future. Perhaps equally important were his frequent visits to the new National Gallery, within walking distance of both Swan & Edgar and Lewis & Allenby, the royal silk mercers, to which he moved in 1845. Society fashion drew heavily and freely on the costumes of past centuries, particularly for balls and masquerades. Thus, Worth’s encyclopaedic knowledge of costume history, garnered from observation of portraits in the National Gallery, stood him in good stead.
    At the age of just twenty, Worth arrived in Paris in 1845, determined to make his way in the capital of fashion. He lived on the breadline for more than a year, making money where he could and picking up French along the way. It took him two years to land a job at Gagelin in the rue de Richelieu selling fabrics and another eleven years before he was in position to set up his own business. Worth’s breakthrough innovation went unnoticed at the time: he persuaded his employers at Gagelin to allow him to open a dressmaking department. Never before had textiles and dressmaking been brought together under the same roof—and never before had a man been a dressmaker. Gagelin entered dresses to the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in 1851, the year Worth also married the Gagelin in-house model Marie. In 1855, Paris hosted its own international event, the Exposition Universelle, where Worth’s court train, unusually suspended from the shoulders rather than the waist, won a first-class medal. Three years later, Worth joined forces with Otto Bobergh, a young Swede with similar skills to Worth, to open Worth et Bobergh at 7 rue de la Paix.
    Paris had been in political and social upheaval during Worth’s early years in the French capital. But the creation of the Second Napoleonic Empire in 1852 under Napoleon III, son of Napoleon I’s brother Louis, unleashed a period of imperial extravagance that put Paris at the heart of the European social scene. Empress Eugénie required a new dress for every occasion, as did the guests at imperial balls, masquerades and country visits. A veritable gold mine awaited Worth, although breaking through the barriers of court convention to secure the first royal order required all Worth’s skills of salesmanship, acquired on the shop floor over the years in London and Paris. The story goes that Empress Eugénie did not like the first gown Worth made for her in