A timely assessment of the resilience, glamor and ingenuity of World War II American fashion pioneers.

The French legend is surprisingly tenacious. It dates from Louis XIV and still exists today. Louis XIV had Jean-Baptiste Colbert, we have Bernard Arnault, they both promote the superiority of French taste, and we are stuck in this internal inferiority complex that says Paris is better and Paris is the standard to which everyone should compare themselves. , and as long as we believe that it will be true. Valerie Steele said Paris is like Tinker Bell. If everyone really believes that Paris is great, then Paris will continue to be great.

I would say Paris is no better. This is different. And you know, historically, especially when you look at a beautiful Vionnet or Lanvin dress in a museum, that’s high fashion. It’s not like today, when Parisian designers make very expensive clothes, but expensive clothes that anyone can buy. To buy a couture dress in those days, you had to be introduced to the fashion house, you had to be accepted as a client. If you were a client of a couturier, you most likely had a maid, a full-time servant who lived with you and whose sole purpose was to look after your clothes and do your hair. So it’s a very restrictive, exclusive system. American fashion is built on the idea of ​​ready-to-wear, the idea that everyone should have access to beautiful clothes, which New Yorker fashion critic Lois Long called “the American genius of mass production.” I think this is a very compelling origin story and should be given more attention. I mean, which system would you rather be a part of?

Do you see any parallels between what the empresses did in the 30s and 40s, redefining how women could dress with greater ease, and what American fashion is doing now?

That’s a different story. Now we have a lot of ease. Perhaps a better way to look at it is that they redefined what fashion could be. And I see that today we have more diverse points of view being recognized in fashion, like Rachel Scott, like Willie Chavarria. They both cite their heritage: her Jamaican heritage, his Hispanic heritage, and they have both won CFDA Awards. I think this shows that there is a need for this kind of fashion. It’s not much different from what happened during World War II, when, you know, for centuries Paris was considered the fashion capital of the world. There was no second city. New York was a manufacturing center. Remarkably, this idea was turned on its head in just four years. What the Empresses did was truly bold, and they did it by drawing on what made American fashion and American culture unique. When Virginia Pope of the New York Times wanted to bring a little spectacle to fashion presentations in New York, she didn’t try to make them look like a short fashion show, she relied on the idiom of a Broadway show, you know, something very American. Here’s how she did it. I think this lesson still applies.