Introduction

In the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, visitors had the opportunity to circumnavigate part of the exhibition on the trottoir roulant, a moving pavement consisting of two parallel platforms that ran along the perimeter of the exhibition grounds at four and nine kilometres per hour Fig. 1. These were the respective speeds of slow strolling and fast walking, speeds that evoked the pace of two urban types, the leisurely flâneur (a male pedestrian) and the hurrying passante, or female passer-by. Unlike the passante, however, the travellers on the moving platforms, either fast or slow, looked as if they were gliding across the cityscape, thus reproducing the visual effect of the famous gliding walk of the Paris mannequins. The moving pavement was one of several mechanical inventions in the period from 1870 to 1914 that included the escalator, the motion-picture camera and projector, Marey’s photographic gun, the phonograph, the roller-coaster, the Ford assembly line and the zip fastener, all of which, Hillel Schwartz argued, “made possible a significantly different sense of physical movement”.¹ Each smoothed the pattern of rhythm by creating a natural flow that eradicated the distinction between separate steps, movements, frames or images. Nurturing a new kinaesthetics that altered the ways in which people moved, exercised, acted, and operated in the world, this equivalence between kinetics, bodies and machines existed equally in the moving pavement of the 1900 Exhibition and in the mechanical movements that were the specialty of the ideal – and idealised – mannequins of the couture houses. This mannequin glide was not yet familiar to the public from the fashion show, which took place behind closed doors, but by 1900 mannequins could be seen strolling in the Bois de Boulogne and other fashionable venues where their employers sent them to test reactions to the new modes before the collections. On their return, sixty to eighty designs would be selected for the new season’s collection that would then be shown in private fashion shows to the overseas buyers.² One attempt to bring the fashion show to public attention was made in the Pavillon de la Mode at the 1900 Exhibition that displayed fashion in a series of elaborate tableaux on wax dummies. At first, the house of Worth chose to stage a tableau of a fashion show but the idea was vetoed by the other exhibitors as “bizarre, a masquerade, undignified, not to be considered”, mainly on the grounds that the wax mannequins were offensive.³ Nevertheless, wax mannequins were used in the Exhibition’s displays, including in a tableau of the fitting of a wedding dress at Worth. Such inanimate dress forms were used in the couture houses, too, but by 1900 they had been joined, in all but the most conservative Parisian houses, by a group of living mannequins employed to model the dresses Fig. 2 and Fig. 3.⁴

The rise of the Paris Fashion Show

Fashion modelling became well established in the nineteenth century but it was not until the early twentieth that the fashion show, a distinctly theatrical phenomenon, came into being. The shows were pioneered by the houses with the biggest export business, such as Paquin which, in the late 1890s, began to organise shows in its salons at fixed times.⁵ Other key designers in the development of the fashion show were Lucile, Poiret, and, after the war, Patou. All four astutely developed this modern form of sales, marketing and publicity and ensured that their innovations were widely publicised, so much so that their claims for their own innovations have entered both the mythology of the fashion business and several twentieth-century fashion histories, while little is known about the many other designers who also played a part in the development of the fashion show. Of these, Doucet and Worth are among the best known today, but of equal importance are Félix, Fred, Redfern, Walles, Laferrière, Francis, Martial et Armand, Beer and Jenny, all houses that had large American sales. Many of them demonstrated a degree of stagecraft from the start. At Redfern the mannequins modelled beguiling gowns to clients in vast salerooms with soft carpets, reported the new magazine Femina in 1901.⁶ Redfern, Paquin and Beer all had mirrored fitting rooms equipped with electricity for trying on stage costumes, a precedent set in the 1860s by Worth’s salon de lumière brilliantly lit by hissing gas-jets with movable shades, in which customers could try out their ballgowns surrounded by mirrored walls on all sides.⁷ Both Beer and Paquin had modelling stages, an innovation of Lucile’s that became a feature of many Parisian and a few American firms . At Paquin’s it was in “a good-sized room, half of which was occupied by a platform with footlights; and powerful electric lights were thrown on this platform from the sides and above, precisely as in a theatre”.⁸ Paquin is said to have concluded some of her shows with a ballet performance with the dancers all dressed in white.⁹

The employment of mannequins was deemed “a good trick, useful for sales” because even the most elephantine client imagined herself to be like the wasp-waisted mannequins.¹⁰ Although fashion shows were not open to the public, living mannequins were part of a burgeoning publicity industry and soon couturiers began to use them in their advertising Fig. 4.¹¹ By 1907 Paris shows and mannequins, particularly at Paquin, Raudnitz, Beer and Félix, were regularly mentioned in the American newspapers.¹² By 1910, the same newspapers routinely referred to American fashion buyers’ trips to Europe in their columns.¹³ A New York Times journalist calculated in 1912 that in the two weeks after the shows approximately fifteen thousand gowns were manufactured for export and that the majority were bought for “bait”, that is, for advertising, rather than for copying.¹⁴

A French advertising guide published in 1912 and reprinted in 1922 cited psychological research to prove that viewers paid more attention to moving than static objects in its advocacy of the homme-sandwich (sandwich man) as a walking poster.¹⁵ The fashion mannequin was an unwitting femme-sandwich but one who came wrapped in a fancy package, a set of styles and discourses that disguised her advertising role in a veneer of theatricality.¹⁶ In the 1910s she came to prominence as a new form of working woman, much in the public eye as a modern Parisian type Fig. 5.¹⁷

During the first decade of the century, playing on their worldwide renown and secure in the patronage of a rich and leisured clientele, Parisian couturiers developed the spectacular side of their businesses. By 1910 shows were taking place at fixed hours in all the big couture houses. They evolved a set of protocols that mimicked an elite social occasion, fostering a sense of exclusivity, even though they were in reality commercial events. Entry was by invitation only, usually handwritten, though gradually couturiers began to have engraved cards made, as if to a private party at home. Anyone seeking entry without an introduction was regarded with great suspicion. In the shows, several mannequins modelled either together or one after another, either to private clients or to a group of buyers seated in the salon. The saleswoman or couturier acted as a guide, talking the customer through the dresses that were presented in a set order, from day to evening wear. Audience numbers ranged from a few to a score of people, both women and men. After 1911, following the innovation of the English dressmaker Lucile who served tea at her Paris fashion shows, French dressmakers also began to provide refreshments, and tea and cakes became champagne and canapés.¹⁸

By then, fashion modelling was deemed essential to sales. In the Paris floods of 1910, overseas buyers coming to the Paris salons in February were disappointed to see the clothes by candlelight, simply thrown over the backs of chairs, because the mannequins who lived in the suburbs could not get in to work. Fantasio announced that the floods had been disastrous for the couturiers, quoting the melancholy reflection of a disenchanted buyer:

“Mannequins without dresses just about pass! … But dresses without mannequins!”¹⁹ Mannequins had the talent of seeming to bring clothes to life through movement. In 1911 one garment at Paquin “was admirably shown on a tall, slim girl who seemed to know how to make the fur ripple on her figure as though it were on the body of a lissom animal”.²⁰ For the autumn of 1913, the short wired overskirts of the Paris mannequins, influenced by Poiret’s lampshade tunics, were stiffened with ‘supple featherbones’, wrote the Chicago Daily Tribune, “so supple indeed that, instead of standing away in an unbroken line these undulate in graceful curves, quiver with every motion of the body, and are fascinating to look upon”.²¹ The feather boning at the edges of overskirts was covered with delicate trimmings such as lightweight ruching, velvet fringing or artificial flowers to add to the effect of bobbing and swaying when the wearer made the slightest move. In these ways, movement was incorporated into the designs of the dresses, highlighting the role mannequins could play in the design process as well as in publicity and sales.

From 1911 the role of modelling in the French industry was put on a more formal footing by the abolition of the nineteenth-century Chambre syndicale de la Couture, des Confectionneurs et des Tailleurs pour Dames and its replacement by the Chambre syndicale de la Couture parisienne on 14 December 1919.²² This in effect established haute couture as an autonomous trade and distinguished it from ready-to-wear (confection). Its status was defined by an arrêté ministériel which decreed that haute couture houses had to make clothing to measure, to employ a minimum of twenty staff in the ateliers, to present collections twice a year, spring and autumn, consisting of a minimum of seventy-five models shown on living mannequins and to offer these same collections at least forty-five times a year to individual clients. This fiat identified the buyers’ shows as the important biannual ones and put the slightly different procedure of private modelling to individual clients on a more formal footing by the requirement to repeat the collections to clients individually many times a year.

Throughout the nineteenth century, American buyers had gone to Paris biannually to acquire model dresses,²³ which they then displayed in ‘seasonal openings’ at home Fig. 6 but it was only in the twentieth century that fashion journalists began to refer openly to the international fashion calendar. In the couture houses, work started on the design of the new season’s collections in January and July; they were shown in February and August, first to buyers from the U.S.A. and then to those from Europe and South America.²⁴ The autumn openings, as the fashion shows were called, started on 15 August and, unlike today’s shows, were repeated daily over seven to ten days.²⁵ During the 1910s and 1920s the dates of the openings gradually moved forward a fortnight to 1 February and 1 August.²⁶

From the early 1910s onwards, quite a few buyers coming to the autumn openings would arrive in France as early as May in order to observe the fashions worn by the mannequins at the Paris races and on the boardwalks of the fashionable resort towns of Trouville, Deauville and Dieppe.²⁷ Those privileged few who routinely placed large orders were given advanced previews by houses such as Beer, Lanvin, Jenny and Mme Robert.²⁸ They were able to ship home some early models for advanced sales in August, claiming them as the first models from the new collections.²⁹ In reality, these tended to be produced expressly for the advanced openings and the buyers still had to wait until 15 August when the real collections for the autumn season were revealed for the first time to the full cohort of overseas buyers. American buyers would then exhibit their ‘imports’, both licensed and unlicensed copies, in American fashion shows in October and November.

Then in the new year the American buyers would depart again for Paris for the next round of biannual shows for the spring collections.³⁰ The pre-war years were profitable for French couture, even though America’s protectionist policies, in the form of punitive import tariffs on foreign luxury goods such as dress, often resulted in problems for the French industry.

New, and higher, import tariffs in 1909 put a temporary brake on imports but inevitably these did not last and American buyers remained integral to the Paris trade and vice versa.³¹ The American trade journal the Dry Goods Economist maintained a Paris office in the fashionable avenue d’Antin.³² It habitually bought a number of garments and accessories from the Paris shows in order to bring them to the attention of its readership and was at pains to point out that Paris fashions were relevant to the entire American garment industry, not only to the top end.³³ From the garments it purchased, the Economist produced full-page plates which it recommended retailers to exhibit in their shop windows. In this way, the Paris fashions that were modelled in the elite European houses were a vital part of the American industry at all levels, even if in reality they underwent such a change in the translation that the American copies bore almost no resemblance to the French originals. Buyers at the Paris shows were carefully monitored. Only foreign buyers were allowed in; French retailers were banned, to prevent them from selling popularised versions of couture designs too close to home.³⁴ Nor did the French department stores (grands magasins de nouveautés) stage their own mannequin parades until the 1920s.³⁵ By contrast, those American, English, German, and Austrian department stores that sent buyers to the French couture houses all staged domestic fashion shows of their Paris purchases. Despite the fact that Paris retailers did not hold fashion shows, one French source from 1902 suggests that the French ready-to-wear wholesalers did show clothes on live mannequins and that the modelling styles differed between wholesale houses and the elite rue de la Paix export establishments.³⁶

Bibliography