The Fashionable Mind by Kennedy Fraser

Author:Kennedy Fraser [Fraser, Kennedy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5201-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-01-07T23:00:00+00:00

One can’t help admiring the transformation of an ancient craft industry that, unaided, would almost certainly have died. By subjecting the couture to rational business methods and developing its potential in an abstract management-consultant fashion, its backers have pulled off a triumph of what the modern-minded French like to call “le marketing.” But it is a characteristic of the most skillful kind of modern marketing—whether of an industry, a product, a policy, or a politician—to enlist “the media” as its more or less conscious publicity arm. The world’s fashion press, whenever it prates on about the divine new tendencies in a couture collection, is simply serving up propaganda for a group of successful international corporations.

The French fashion press, at least, has a direct sentiment of commercial chauvinism to justify its attentions to the haute couture; still, the alliance produces some curious and paradoxical effects. All journalists in France, even those concerned with fashion, tend to think of themselves as political creatures, allied with the left wing, the right wing, or—more commonly—some fraction, subdivision, or splinter of a wing. In France, both Socialism and Communism are part of established society in such a significant way that it would be unthinkable for them not to be present at the collections of the haute couture—another important part of established society. Two boutiques in the old working-class quarter of Paris around the now demolished Les Halles—a neighborhood that, like SoHo, houses a community of earnestly tasteful young people, with the same international libraries of picture books on Garbo, the American Indian, and the Pre-Raphaelites—furnish what, together with clothes from the flea market, has become the uniform of Parisians who are both fashion-conscious and committedly left-wing. The shop called La Maison Bleue was founded by an intense young man with a Ph.D. in sociology who thought that his shapeless flannel flour-sack designs would be just the thing for “The People.” (Except that the clothes proved quite expensive, and “The People” turn out to have a stubborn loyalty to such unreformed fashions as miniskirts and double-knit pants suits.) Globe, a neighboring shop, is an even more unremittingly ideological spot with a few bleak gray metal filing cabinets in an aircraft hangar décor, and a few dismal piles of secondhand army surplus clothes—British desert shorts, Foreign Legion jodhpurs, Balaclava helmets, and Vietcong pajamas—that are carried off by the most attractive young fashion journalists and model girls in Paris. And in the magnificent rococo or Second Empire salons where the collections of the haute couture are unveiled one sees an incongruous parade of the more cerebral French fashion journalists, clothed by Globe or La Maison Bleue, with Moscow street-cleaner kerchiefs over orphanage-style pudding-basin haircuts, wending their way to a spindly bamboo-turned gilt chair and an honored place in the couturier’s front row. Here they may come across a photographer from the Communist daily press, making sure of a good shot of the latest examples of haute couture evening gowns, one of which still costs—as it did in 1900—about the equivalent of a year’s salary for the seamstress who made it.

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