How Did the Modern Fashion Model Begin?

Models and modelling is something that everyone knows about and to which many young women aspire. But what were the beginnings of the fashion model, and how did she enter into public consciousness? The answer lies in the early twentieth-century at the hands of women designers such as Chanel and Vionnet as much as men such as Poiret and Patou.

Chanel

Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel is given credit for the modern revolution in fashion. That is, over Paul Poiret, who dispensed with the corset before her and lifted the anxiety caused by women wearing pants by introducing an Orientalist twist. Also over Madeleine Vionnet and Jean Patou. The answer lay in her charisma and her talent for personal celebrity. Chanel had a gift for adding narratives of personality and lifestyle to her design image.  

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, 1920. Wikipedia (Public Domain). https://bit.ly/3pfxFpC

Chanel’s clothing and its subsequent imitations allowed women to dress quickly, without assistance, and to dispense with the corset. As her biographer Rhonda Garelick also advises, Chanel’s clothing did not admit for one, unsympathetic jersey fabric that would have made a corset visible, and slender lines of the designs would have drawn attention to the folds of skin corsets caused.[i]

To a greater degree, Chanel designed for herself and in the shadow of her own silhouette, which was svelte and narrow-hipped. In turn, to show off the clothes in the best possible light, models had to comply with the same shape.

Details such as these reveal that when feminist criticism deplores the wearing of manly, austere and suit-oriented clothes by women in the workplace, or the pressure on models to be thin and near androgynous, it was indeed a woman, Chanel, who stands accused.

Lucile

An important forerunner of the modern notion of the fashion model is the English couturier Lucile, who rose from humble origins to find success in not only London but Paris and New York. Lucile was the couturier name for Lucy Christina, Lady Duff-Gordon, wife of a high-profile diplomat. She mixed in the best circles, and her gowns were worn by the royal family and other social eminences as Lady Duff Gordon. Her designs were also with various other high-profile actresses and glamorous of the less high orders who wanted to step up into them (also called demimondaines, women of the ‘middle world’).

At the end of the nineteenth-century, when clothing was not displayed on wood or wax figures, they were modelled by women wearing a maillot, a black sheath and long boots, the all-body covering that gave her a strikingly doll-like effect,[ii] ensuring that the garment would remain unsoiled and that the model’s modesty untarnished.

Lucile did away with these measures of austerity and dispensed with the sheath to reveal the natural skin. (A similar case was Vionnet, who presented uncorseted, unsheathed and barefoot mannequins while working for Jacques Doucet 1907-1914.)

Her models were drawn from the lower classes but subjected to a rigorous reeducation in deportment. It was a refashioning that places Henry Higgins' reeducation of Eliza Doolittle in Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion into sharper relief.

Each of these models was given an exotic name, and as a cohort, they were announced as 'Lucile's mysterious beauties’.[iii] (Caroline Evans equates such renaming with the way prostitutes were given new aliases upon entry into a brothel.[iv])

Like all opportunistic marketers, Lucile likes to lay claim to having instigated the fashion parade. She at least contributed to the status of the fashion show as a popular spectacle entertainment for the wealthy and fashionable. Presaging Gaultier and McQueen's theatrical pageants, in 1909, Lucile designed a fashion parade as a seven-act drama entitled The Seven Stages of Woman.

It had snippets from Shakespeare, and the gowns were named after certain female archetypes they were designed to typify or denote, such as 'The Schoolgirl' or 'The Fiancée' or 'The Dowager'.

In 1916 her fashion show in New York was a series of tableaux vivants under the banner Fleurette’s Dream at Peronne, which led to Florenz Ziegfield inviting Lucile to design for his Follies, which itself was the beginning of the modern showgirl.[v] A tableau vivant, or 'living picture', consisted of usually a number of people in costumes and poses that evoked or quoted from a painting. It was intentionally styled and staged for pictorially aesthetic effect.

With a few of Lucile's models attaining celebrity status in the United States (such as Dolores, who went on to be a beauty of the Ziegfeld Follies), there was much journalistic talk and street gossip generated around the mannequin of the turn of the century. The mannequin of this time became another breed of the femme fatale who corrupted married, killed lovers, or married into wealth.[vi]

Dolores Costello during her time as a Ziegfeld girl (ca 1923). Commons Wikimedia (Public Domain). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dolores_Costello,_Ziegfeld_girl,_by_Alfred_Cheney_Johnston,_ca._1923.jpg

Lucile’s had an excellent talent for generating spectacle. The way that spectacles could generate sales was not lost on her French contemporaries, who were quick to send mannequins (models) on tour to the United States.

Both Jeanne Paquin and Poiret made successful tours before the war. In Poiret’s second tour after the war, he advertised a beauty contest of American girls, which he invited to return to Paris with him along with his French models.

Poiret with his tailor and a model. http://designhistorypaulpoiret.blogspot.com/2009/04/breaking-into-fashion.html

Patou did a similar thing in 1924, a publicity stunt that had the added prestige of being associated with Vogue. Such examples are isolated ones among a growing spate of fashion spectacles whose only lull in its acceleration came as a result of the war. The model was at the epicentre of moving spectacles of entertainment and consumption.

The model had evolved from somatic, or bodily, support (the living stand-in for a shop dummy) to that of an actor in an invented and highly choreographed fantasy.[vii]

Similarly, Chanel's love of show drew her naturally to theatre and art. She and distinguished members of the artistic avant-garde, including Picasso and Matisse, designed for Diaghilev and his troupe. She was accustomed to turning her showroom the rue Cambon into a theatre, setting up her fashion shows like miniature plays.[viii]

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References:

[i] Rhonda Garelick, Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History, New York: Random House, 2014, 85

[ii] Evans, The Mechanical Smile, 187

[iii] Meredith Etherington-Smith, and Jeremy Rilcher, The It Girls: Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon the Couturiere ‘Lucile’ and Elinor Glyn, Romantic Novelist, London: H. Hamilton, 1986, 76. See also de Perhuis, Dying to Be Born Again, 99-100

[iv] C. Evans, ‘The Enchanted Spectacle’, Fashion Theory, 5.2, 2001, n. 2, 307.

[v] Etherington-Smith, and Rilcher, The It Girls, 162ff.

[vi] Evans, The Mechanical Smile, 185.

[vii] See also Evans, ‘The Enchanted Spectacle’, 271-310, and Evans, Ibid.

[viii] Garelick, Mademoiselle, 151