The Fashion Businesswould the flag, these supreme industries,’ he declared, listing specifically
French architecture, decorative arts, silk and other luxury textile production,
fabric and the manufacture of French carpets, fashion, jewellery and perfume,
‘which are our glory and our wealth.’ He warned that ‘les industries Françaises
du luxe sont en peril de mort’. Seeing le luxe as sacredly embedded in the
definition of the word ‘France’, he wrote: ‘we must defend le Luxe with
pride’. He saw it as a bulwark against standardization and mechanization
within the design and manufacture of fashion, the decorative arts and
perfume. Iribe, who had been well trained by Paul Poiret in such matters in
the 1910s, saw these luxury levels of manufacture as ‘the symbol of the
creative genius of France, her prestige, her strength, her capital and her
guarantee’.^16
In fact, the economic crisis of the early 1930s forced the great fashion
houses into an even closer financial relationship with the ready-to-wear trade,
which thereafter became the basis of their business success right through to
the 1960s, through the direct selling of toiles to ready-wear manufacturers.
Little detail is given on this type of business in the eulogistic accounts of the
work of the great Paris couture salons. By the end of the 1930s the reoriented
couture trade was once again flourishing. Schiaparelli for example was selling
her gloves, jewellery, perfume and scarves from her new boutique and all
the major fashion houses had their own perfume lines. In 1938, the Paris
couture industry had a financial turnover of at least 25 billion francs. So
prestigious was the reputation of France in the international fashion world
that spin-off ready-to-wear and accessory manufactured flourished mightily.
The Geneva Tribune estimated the total number of pre-war workers in
fashion-related areas in France to be as high as 300,000.^17 The business
situation for Paris couture was therefore promising by 1939 as Paris still
dominated international style and exports were strong.
The Development of Franchised, Branded
‘Designer’ Products in the 1950sThe behaviour of much of the Paris couture industry during the Nazi
occupation of the city unravelled all this commercial success. The industry
was left in a truly dire moral and economic position in the 1944–7 period,
only overcome with the help of foreign buyers, the international fashion press
and the vitality of the designs of the couturiers themselves with the success
- Iribe, P., Défense de Luxe, Montrouge: Draeger Freres, 1932 (no page numbers).
17 .‘Bulletin des Soies et de Soieries’, no. 3362, Lyons, 1942, p. 3 and pp. 127–44.