The Fashion BusinessTokyo and production of garments was high. The London couturier Lucile,
showed a collection before leaving for the USA on a marketing trip in 1910
for example. A thousand guests packed her Hanover Square showroom in
London. ‘When the parade was ended the saleswomen found that they had
booked orders for over 1000 gowns.’^6
These clothes represented the social and economic power of the circles in
which they were worn. Stuart Ewen recognizes that ‘the relationship of style
and social power is not a creation of twentieth-century consumer culture. This
alliance has a long history.’ Specifically the dress of the nobility provided
‘excessive images [which] connoted a power over others: the employment of
enormous forces of detailed labour for the purpose of body decoration; the
enjoyment of waste and leisure in a context where most lives were spent in
arduous squalor’.^7
The wealthy had no sense of guilt in wearing their luxurious clothes. They
saw this as their natural due and as the right of their social class. They firmly
believed that it was also their social duty to look superbly and expensively
dressed in order to uphold the visual public image of their rank. They were
convinced that it was their duty, too, to provide employment for the workers
who made the clothes in the luxury trades. When the vogue for heavyweight
brocaded silks went out of fashion in the 1860s the specialist silk weavers in
Lyons went hungry. Worth begged the French Empress, Eugenie, to wear
evening gowns of heavy silk brocade, woven with complex jacquard patterns,
a fabric which had been the mainstay of the town’s industry. She much
preferred the new fashion fabrics of plain, lightweight silk but agreed
reluctantly. She hated the resulting dresses, calling them her ‘robes politiques’,
but they did indeed get the looms working again.^8
Overall the couture industry flourished in the 1880–1914 period. The
consumer base widened. Paul Nystrom noted that Jeanne Lanvin was finding
clients in Argentina through a successful branch outlet in Buenos Aires, whilst
the house of Paquin was already selling ‘to masses of wealthy women formerly
not participating in the main currents... [through] developing sales outlets
in a big way to department stores and to wholesalers for resale to dealers’.
Illegal copying by private dressmaking salons was already a problem. Callot
Soeurs took pirate companies to court, (they were usually private fashion
houses till 1915) and then permitted buyers the right to reproduce, for a
- Gordon, Lady Duff, Discretions and Indescretions, London: Jarrolds, 1932, p.70.
- S. Ewen, ‘Marketing Dreams – the Political Elements of Style’, in Tomlinson, A.,
Consumption, Identity and Style, London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 43–8. - Latour, A., Kings of Fashion, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958, p. 85.