The Hilfiger Factor and the Flexible Commercial World of Coutureof the dressmakers – clothes set to the new life style of the post war period’.^12
The industry as it continued consistently to do thereafter also responded
with far-sighted business acumen to shifts in its post-1920 consumer base.
The fashion salons profited more and more from selling to less well-off
consumers through widening their department store and official copyhouse
sales. Commercial retailing methods grew more competitive. Lucien Lelong,
who ran his salon with the aid of a young design team and was not a major
designer himself, launched into elite ready-to-wear production,^13 whilst at
the same time encouraging private couture sales by staging his evening
collections as if in a theatre, ‘blocking out the real daylight with heavy
curtains’.^14 Patou, the supreme modernist, just like Chanel, sold franchised
perfume products and successful lines of chic leisure, travel and sportswear
clothes and accessories, as well as the most elegant of avant-garde haute
couture. The war crisis had been dealt with, but only as another financial
agony reared its head in the shape of the Wall Street crash.
The Crisis of the Early 1930sAfter the 1929 Wall Street crash, panic ensued in 1930 following the US
imposition of a 90 per cent import tax on Paris haute couture garments under
the new Hawley-Smooth bill. Paris lost its entire fleet of US buyers over the
1930–2 period and costs simply had to be cut. Thus in 1931, Chanel designed
the first range of couture evening dress in cotton to bring costs down as her
company was hit badly when both commercial and private US consumers
stayed away. What on earth was to be done? It was at this exact point, in
1932, that Chanel turned briefly to Hollywood as a source of income and
vitally needed international publicity. She accepted a lucrative invitation to
work for Samuel Goldwyn, a project that met with signal failure. However,
by 1935, as her couture business picked up again, she was employing 4,000
workers, making 28,000 model garments a year and no longer had any need
for Hollywood approval or publicity.^15
The designer Paul Iribe proposed his own solution to the 1932 crisis in
sales. He published a furious and passionate polemic, Défense de Luxe, to
persuade wealthy clients, in the name of French patriotism, to keep up their
levels of luxury spending on elite French consumer products. ‘Defend, as we
- Ibid. p. 159–60.
- Nystrom, P., The Economics of Fashion, New York: Ronald Press, 1928, pp. 167–8.
- Wilson, R., Fashion on Parade, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1925, p. 74.
- Grumbach, D., Histoires de la Mode, Paris: Seuil, 1993, pp. 35–6.