Paris to New York by Véronique Pouillard

Author:Véronique Pouillard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Couture and the Nation

The postwar period was characterized by the development of a large program of nationalization of companies by the French state. Haute couture firms remained in private hands, but in order to give subventions to haute couture houses, the French Ministry of Economy and Finance mandated the commission Couture Création to investigate whether the Paris haute couture houses that operated to the letter of the 1947 Paris-Province agreements would be eligible. Jacques Heim, whose house had opened in 1930, claimed that ready-to-wear was not a legitimate output for the Chambre’s members. Yet, in his own firm, Heim was an early promoter of haute couture spin-off lines. He had debuted his Jeunes Filles (junior misses) collection of couture, adapted for youthful customers, in 1936 and hired as an in-house designer Hélène Lyolène, who had extensive experience in New York. Heim failed in his first attempt to license a branded line in the US market, in 1946. In the 1950s, he divided the Heim firm into two companies: Heim SA and Heim Actualités, which produced ready-to-wear collections. But Heim liquidated this second firm in 1954 and placed all of its operations under the firm Heim SA, which oversaw the haute couture and two ready-to-wear lines, Heim Jeunes Filles and Heim Actualités. At the end of that year, Heim claimed that his house had reverted to its focus on haute couture and abandoned all previous ready-to-wear and wholesale lines. In February 1955, the leadership of the Couture Création, in charge of attributing support to the Paris couture houses, paid an impromptu visit to the Heim workshops and asked to see the full collection that was hanging on the rails. The government-appointed visitors checked the finishing of all the garments to make sure they met the standards of perfection expected in haute couture. The assessment was positive. Heim fulfilled the criteria and received a subvention; the application form for this is shown in Figure 6.3.28

In his position as president of the Chambre Syndicale, Heim was particularly exposed to the contradictions faced by Paris couture. Even at Dior, the most successful haute couture house of the postwar period, after four private fittings on a client the couturier was working at a loss; in some cases, the client needed up to eight fittings before her garment was ready. Haute couture was on its way to becoming a rarefied craft, with little or no profitability. Yet instead of letting the industry undergo creative destruction, the French government decided to support it financially. The challenge was to set up criteria of eligibility. To receive financial support, haute couture firms had to respect restrictive conditions of craftsmanship that prevented them from entirely modernizing their production techniques. The situation was easier for the couturiers who had established a separate firm to produce and sell their perfumes, as the existence of a separate company or a distinct perfume division did not prevent the couture branch from receiving the government subvention.29

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