Suffer for Fashion

Remember the post on the amazing work of Charles James, arguably the first American couturier? Well, since the Met Ball, held this coming Monday, is dedicated to his designs, Vogue gave us some insider insight into those aspects of his design that escape the naked eye.

First off we learn that the man was a bitch:

Universally praised for his talent, Charles James was also famously high-strung. “Fashion’s last angry man,” is how one reporter described the highly articulate designer, who could be wickedly funny (he called Woolworth’s “Barbara Hutton’s boutique”), or just plain vicious. If James lived in the digital age, one can imagine that he’d be an avid commenter, and an active ignorer of the “like” button.
 
James’s biggest beef was with the system. Seventh Avenue was largely an anathema to James, a couturier, who believed in the trickle-down theory of fashion, a notion that the sixties Youthquake and the emergence of designer ready-to-wear lines (like Yves Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche), put to rest. While James’s elitist view of fashion now seems out of step, his belief in the value of a designer’s name, and his campaign for the need for support and recognition of and for American designers was prescient.
 
When not tangling with Seventh Avenue or the IRS (James was anything but a successful businessman), the designer sometimes gave vent to more personal grievances.  Diana Vreeland, the legendary Vogue editrix once said: "Charlie’s got every talent. The only talent he lacks is getting along with people. He thinks it’s rather cute.”

And secondly, his designs demanded COMMITMENT:

Avoir du chien is a French expression used to describe an exceptionally chic woman. It’s also a fairly accurate description of what, by our creative accounting, it would feel like to sport Charles James’s eighteen-pound “Butterfly” gown—approximately the combined weight of five baby French bulldogs. Ever the contrarian, James often gave his dresses ethereal names from nature—“Rose,” “Petal,” “Four-Leaf Clover”—despite the fact that they were weighty, meticulously constructed, and designed to “correct” the wearer’s form, i.e. one-up Mother Nature.

They weren’t called wearable sculptures for nothing: Some of James’s gala gowns tipped the scales at ten to 20 pounds. (To be fair, they were engineered to distribute the weight to provide ease of movement; for example, most of the heft of the Four-Leaf Clover dress in anchored at the hips.) Still, a James dress was as demanding as its designer. Wonder what it might feel like to wear one? Let us do the math for you.

The “Butterfly” dress = five baby French bulldogs

Weighing almost 20 pounds, this gala gown, made of 25 yards of fluttery tulle, hardly floats—but it sure is fly (if not exactly a dress to walk the dog in).

Pictured: Charles James Butterfly Gown, 1954

The “Four-Leaf Clover” dress = 21 pairs of Nikes

Made from 30 pattern pieces, the lucky lady for whom this dress was designed was Austine Hearst, the fashion columnist and best-dressed lister who described James as “a complex genius.”

Pictured: Charles James Clover Leaf Gown, ca. 1953

The “Tree” dress = an average watermelon

This dress takes its name from the socially and politically active Marietta Tree, mother to a lovely sapling, a moon-eyed model named Penelope, who Voguedubbed “The Tree.”

Pictured: Charles James Tree Gown, 1955