The Fashion Businessthe female body. Fashion designers’ desire for a simple style that would sweep
away the multi-layered excess of the early years of the twentieth century
was epitomized in Chanel’s work. Her designs were at the cutting edge of
couture fashion, mocking bourgeois sensibilities that still clung to the more
obvious wealth of rich fabrics and complex designs. Utilitarian fabrics like
jersey were given high fashion status by virtue of the image and ideals
conveyed by their designer. Chanel worked within the rarefied atmosphere
of couture, but she attracted avant-garde and daring customers at the start
of her career. Potential wearers had to be willing to risk the misunderstanding
of onlookers, unversed in the coding of inverse status symbols. There is a
history of artists and intellectuals adopting simple, utilitarian clothing as a
symbol of their contempt for fashion’s constantly shifting whims and a sign
of their loftier concerns. However, the bourgeois fashion consumer needed
to be sure of the unassailable nature of her status to embrace such simplicity
of style. Chanel provided women with clothing that was appropriate to their
new, more active lifestyles, and which viewed femininity as confident and
streamlined, rather than as a decorative confection. She encouraged women
to dress as plainly as their maids, but this did not mean that they should
necessarily be mistaken for such lowly creatures. Chanel’s sleekly minimal
designs fused the tenets of dandyism: close attention to detail, high quality,
basic forms, with an irreverent attitude, simple black dresses and separates
were piled with the previously déclassé glitter of fake jewelry.
Another earlier form of pared-down design is exemplified in the work of
American designer Claire McCardell who rose to prominence in the 1940s.
In her work we see minimal fashion as an expression of laid-back functional-
ism rather than any adherence to introspection. Her clothing is about allowing
the body to move and work, to take part in an active and healthy life. The
simple shapes and utilitarian fabrics she favoured came to epitomize American
style, based as they were upon a belief in democratic ready-to-wear, not the
elitist couture of the Old World. As one commentator remarked, ‘She thought
the couture mode too structured, too formal and wanted to create accessible,
easy clothes for busy women in a fast world.’^9
McCardell dressed the proto-career woman of the 1940s and 1950s, freeing
her from the New Look and giving her instead an easy-to-care-for wardrobe
of sports-inspired separates. In a Louise Dahl Wolfe photograph of a
McCardell bathing costume of 1948, the soft grey tones enhance the feeling
of harmony between body and fabric. The model wears a clingy knitted jersey
costume which forms around her figure, its patterned weave echoed in the
gentle ripples of the sand she lies on.
- Yusuf, N., ‘Form and Function’,British Elle, June 1990.