A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Author:Alison Hawthorne Deming [Deming, Alison Hawthorne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, anthropology, Cultural & Social, Business & Economics, Industries, Fashion & Textile Industry, design, Textile & Costume
ISBN: 9781640094833
Google: ZMIXEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-08-24T23:37:03.140520+00:00

“DE ST. ISLE? I FIND NO ONE BY THAT NAME,” SAID THE WOMAN who keeps the records. Was Louisa a “first hand” or one of the “petit mains” in a couture house? Did she work for Worth or in competition, one of the holdouts against the turning of the tide in fashion toward male couturiers? Was she an entrepreneuse who had more work than she could do by herself and hired less-skilled seamstresses and skirt hands and embroiderers to work for her? How did she pass from modest origin into the empyrean of dressmaking in Paris and then in New York? Imagine the silks that passed through her hands, the crepe de chine, the chiffon, the fine lace saved from the finest dresses to be employed on a new creation.

After giving up on another day of archival dead-ends, I decided to take the train to Compiègne to seek some atmospherics of the place where Napoleon had courted Eugénie and that became their autumn palace during his reign. For the Royal Hunt, a forest had been built in a series of octagons. Horses trotted out from the palace under a grand canopy laced over with vines and sculpted plane trees. The hunt is immortalized in nine massive eighteenth-century tapestries woven at Gobelins, designed by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, known for his paintings of dogs, that hang on palace walls. The grand chase in the forest. Over a dozen dogs. Men on horseback. Women sidesaddle. A forest of trees and stags and foxes and rabbits. A melee of wildness and genteel ritualized killing. A tiny figure in the lower right-hand corner of one tapestry shows the artist, leaning over his sketch pad, sentinel to the act of witness.

On such a hunt, Napoleon sought to bed the vivacious Spanish beauty Eugénie de Montijo. He’d given her a horse on a previous visit to Fontainebleau. At Compiègne he rode with her into the forest, passion doubly roused, but she denied him. I like to imagine a coterie of seamstresses hanging out in some dark recess of the palace grounds, making bawdy hay of the erotic escapade.

The emperor has split his pants again.

Yes, he was so hard he split his pants, and still she would not let him have her.

He blamed the tear on a feint executed by his mount at the sight of a rabbit, but we had all seen the bulge in his pantaloons grow more desperate as the week bore on.

That pansy ass.

And when she came to our salon to be dressed for the ball, she told us what she’d told him. Make me empress and I’ll make you a man.

Then she acted all the virgin at the ball, that spirited huntress who knew her prey.

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