The Great Fashion Designers Read Free Page B

1860, rejecting the heavy brocade from Lyon as looking like ‘curtain material’. Napoleon entered the room at that precise moment, whereupon Worth explained that support for the silkmakers of Lyon, a city with a republican tradition, might be very advantageous to the emperor. Remarkably, this Machiavellian switch of sales patter paid off—Worth was on his way.
    Empress Eugénie’s patronage opened the floodgates for Worth. If the empress wore Worth, then so did most of her ladies-in-waiting and guests. For one ball alone, Worth might be called on to make up to 1,000 dresses. The house’s ability to respond to such a volume of orders was boosted by recent advances in technology, specifically the development of the Singer sewing machine for long seams. Worth also industrialised the process, creating standard patterns that could be used as the basis for apparently new designs. Countless variations were developed around similar dresses, often refreshed through trimmings alone. In colour terms, Worth was more restricted: white was the required colour for court dress, with silver playing the decorative role. For masquerades, the parties where the court collectively let its hair down, Worth was freer, often drawing inspiration from the eighteenth century and creating fantastical costumes that delighted his clients.
    Worth’s approach to design was to find simple solutions to the challenges thrown up by nineteenth-century propriety and society values. He was not afraid to innovate, using his wife Marie to test the market with some of his more daring designs. She was outstanding at presenting a dress to best effect, making her a forerunner of the modern fashion model. Princess von Metternich was another important ally for much of his career, not least because of her social connections. For Empress Eugénie’s walk by the seaside, he created ankle-length skirts, a breakthrough after thirty years of ground-length hemlines. Likewise, he made the unwieldy crinoline more practical by pushing the volume round to the back rather than to the sides, enabling the wearer to walk through a doorway without having to turn sideways. Another innovation was the gored skirt with panels that are wide at the hemline and narrow at the top, a smoother option to gathering. Worth achievedsuch dominance as an arbiter of style that he could achieve remarkable changes in fashion in short order, such as replacing the bonnet with the hat as the favoured form of headwear or removing the crinoline altogether, a step he took finally in 1868.
    By this date, Worth himself was a considerably wealthy man with a country house outside Paris at Suresnes, which he expanded and transformed into a chateau over the years. In Paris, he had more than 1,000 seamstresses working for his house. He created dresses for royal courts throughout Europe besides that of Napoleon III in Paris and also designed for the theatre and the opera. His clients would be expected to make an appointment at rue de la Paix and stride backward and forward in his creations while he observed from a sofa. Over the years, Worth came to consider himself as much more than a dressmaker—he was an artist and began to dress as such, wearing a velvet beret and a silk scarf round his throat and consorting and collaborating with artists such as Winterhalter. The adoption of aesthetic dress by Pre-Raphaelite artists in England struck a chord with him. Aesthetic style with its looser dresses and rejection of corsets was a reaction against the swift-changing whims of fashion in favour of more natural lines and less restrictive clothing. The glories of the 1860s ended abruptly for Worth in 1870 when Napoleon III was overthrown by the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan. By January of the following year the Prussians were in Paris, Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie were in exile in England, and even Princess von Metternich left shortly afterwards. Worth vowed to carry on the business,