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Caroline Evans
To cite this article: Caroline Evans (2001) The Enchanted Spectacle, Fashion Theory, 5:3,
271-310
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ON
HARDCOPY
The Enchanted
Caroline Evans Spectacle
Caroline Evans is Reader in Fashion shifts overall appearance into the order of theatricality, seduction
Fashion Studies at Central
and enchanted spectacle. (Lipovetsky 1994: 26)
Saint Martins College of Art
and Design, London.
The fashion show has played a key role in the development of the modern
fashion industry. From approximately 1900, fashion shows began to be
staged in couture houses and department stores and as charity fund-raising
events in Britain, France and the USA. As “the theatricalisation of fashion
marketing” par excellence (Kaplan and Stowell 1994: 117) the fashion
show also has a relationship to art, theater and film; to consumerism;
and to the commodification and eroticization of the female form in mass
culture; in short, to the wider formations of gender, image, desire and
272 Caroline Evans
commerce in the twentieth century. This article maps the bare bones of
the fashion show’s first hundred years; it is an introductory and still only
partially researched history, the first stage of a larger and more ambitious
work in progress. Elsewhere I scrutinize the fashion model in relation to
a range of concepts: modernity, commodity fetishism, the uncanny and
trauma (Evans 2002, forthcoming). Whereas that article frames the
historical origins of the fashion model theoretically, the present one
situates the fashion show historically, by reference to more empirical
material.
Both articles proceed from the assumption that there is a complex
relationship to be unraveled between the fashion show and capitalist
spectacle. That, in turn, has a relationship to the spectacle of women from
the late nineteenth century to the present. Guy Debord described the
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society of the spectacle as one in which image effaces reality; and this
could be a paradigm of how the fashion show has operated in the past to
disguise its commercial origins and goals (Debord 1994: para 1). The rise
of the model, and the fashion show, are directly linked to the rise of mass
production in the wake of industrialization; living mannequins were first
used in the nineteenth century, and they began to model in fashion shows
at the beginning of the twentieth. When the haute couture houses began
to show their clothes on live models, these figures were mirrored by the
dummies of the department store windows. The clothes they displayed
were bought by middle- and upper-class women. As active consumers of
luxury goods, these women can be construed as subjects of the society of
the spectacle; yet, when they turned themselves into a vision by donning
their purchases they became, simultaneously, its object and image too.
Their iconic status as metropolitan women of fashion also had a class
dimension, thrown into relief by the parallel image of their working-
class counterparts: waitresses, shop assistants, seamstresses, laundresses,
milliners, hairdressers. The salaries of nineteenth-century working women
in Paris were so meager that many were driven to augment them through
prostitution (Wilson 1991: 49–50). To Walter Benjamin the prostitute
was a pivotal emblem of modernity because she was, in his phrase, “both
seller and wares in one” (Buck Morss 1991: 184).
Such images of spectacular women are linked to a confusion between,
on the one hand, the fetishism of the commodity and, on the other, the
commodification of sexuality in the form of the increasing visibility of
women as spectacle in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century
(Bailey 1990; Solomon-Godeau 1996; Evans 2002). Ed Lilley has argued
that in the Paris of the 1860s the eroticism of the nude in art began to be
displaced on to the fashionably dressed figure owing to the vast strides
being made by consumerism, making body and dress indistinguishable.
The nude—never value-free anyway—“was revealed in the modern world
as neither an attribute of classical goddesses nor a time-honored refuge
of the ideal in art, but as a commodity to be purchased . . . other, fresher
objects were for sale, whether from a couturier like Worth or from a
The Enchanted Spectacle 273
department store like the Bon Marché” (Lilley 2001: 75). Something of
this paradox also typified the fashion mannequin in the same period,
where an ambiguity arose as to what, exactly, was for sale: the dress, or
the woman modeling it.
This legacy continues in the present: despite the first and second waves
of feminism, the social meanings of women’s engagement with fashion
and beauty continue to be contested. From Worth’s mannequins of the
1850s to today’s models, the ambiguous image of woman as spectacle
has haunted the fashion show. Yet to understand the fashion show solely
as a symptom of the objectification of women is to miss its complexity,
for the fluid and theatrical space of the catwalk simultaneously permits
the modeling of gendered identity as a cultural construct. Rhonda Garelick
has traced the idea of the dandy from his nineteenth-century historical
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origins into the present day, arguing that the figure of the dandy merges
with the fin-de-siècle figure of the woman on stage and emerges as the
twentieth-century icon: Jackie Onassis, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson
and the artist formerly known as Prince (Garelick 1998). To this list I
would add the fashion model and her spectacular appearance on the
catwalk, a space of artifice that offers a particularly modern platform
for the performance of gender as image and idea. And it is this transition
of the principles of dandyism, displaced on to women in the modern
period, that, I believe, also underwrites the evolution of the runway show.
Origins
although Worth showed two collections a year, there were no fixed dates
for collections as there are now, and no organized fashion shows.
As well as employing house mannequins, Worth also sent Marie outside
the privacy of the salon to wear his creations at the racecourse at
Longchamp and in the Bois de Boulogne, both fashionable parading
grounds for dress. There, unlike the mannequins in the salon, she would
mix socially with Maison Worth’s clientele. Later Paquin too sent her
models to the Longchamp races. Alice Ivimy’s A Woman’s Guide to Paris
described the race track in 1909: “you will find all the leaders of fashion
displaying the latest creations . . . the most striking and audacious gowns
are worn by ‘mannequins’ or dressmakers’ models who are paid to be
stared at” (cited in Steele 1998: 170). In 1908 Poiret accompanied three
of his mannequins in identical Hellenistic gowns to the races where their
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illusion that I was inviting my friends to some afternoon party rather than
to a place of business” (1994: 68–9). Her first parade was attended by
Princess Alice, Ellen Terry, Lily Langtree, the Duchess of Westminster and
Margot Asquith.
Contrary to her assertion, Lucile’s parades, like Poiret’s in Paris, were
intended for male as well as female viewers, the former “lured by the
prospect of inspecting flesh as well as fabric” (Kaplan and Stowell 1994:
119). Lucile’s coup was to commodify sensuality through her gowns and
their presentation. Lucile replaced the conventional dressmaker’s habit
of numbering the gowns by giving them suggestive names such as “Love
in a Mist” and “The Captain With Whiskers,” which she would call out
as the mannequin appeared. There was a precedent for this in corsetry
advertisements, which, from the 1890s, commonly gave the corsets names
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276
Caroline Evans
and Stowell 1994: 6). De Marley comments that, in the nineteenth century,
male observers at Maison Worth such as Count Primoli and Edmond
de Goncourt “were intrigued by the thought of the svelte-bodied models,”
and suggests that “the model girl was beginning to replace the seamstress
and the shopgirl in the imagination of the predatory male as the sort of
girl who was ripe for seduction but not for marriage” (de Marly 1980:
140). Poiret, too, in his autobiography, refers to “more than one duke”
whose fancy was taken by his mannequins in the early twentieth century
(Poiret 1931: 146). As the fashion show became theatricalized by Lucile
and Poiret, the gaze that was solicited shifted from an exclusively female
form of consumption to a male gaze that rested, judging from contemp-
orary accounts, as much on the mannequin as on her dress. Tellingly,
Lucile used the word “model” to mean both the gown and the mannequin,
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thus eliding the difference between the two, commodifying the flesh in
the same breath as the fabric.3
In 1910 Lucile opened a branch in New York, taking with her for the
opening parade four of her London mannequins, Gamela, Corisande,
Florence and Phyllis. There she built a stage replicating the London one.
Mauve invitation cards were sent out, an orchestra played, little cakes
were devoured and, once again, Lucile, in her own words, “turned the
serious business of buying clothes into a social occasion” (Gordon 1932:
136). In 1911, the year that Paul Poiret presented his oriental collection,
Figure 1 Lucile opened a branch in Paris where her English mannequins’ striking
Dinarzade in a gown by Lucile, height (often around six feet) and dramatic modeling style made them
c.1916. The mannequin’s
stance and demeanor are notorious. Dolores and Hebe in particular were the first mannequins to
typical of Lucile’s become famous since Marie Worth. Lucile’s first Parisian presentation
presentations; in the capitalized on the tango craze by replicating a thé dansant in which
background can be seen the
raised stage and curtains that her mannequins tangoed while an orchestra played and the clients took
she introduced to her tea. There were many such other tango teas, which gave couturiers the
showrooms. Dinarzade was a opportunity to present their models in motion as the mannequins moved
Texan mannequin called Lillian
Farley whom Lucile recruited in to the music, a performance derided by many contemporaries but that,
New York in 1915. In 1924 nowadays, forms an integral part of the fashion show (Steele 1998: 228).
Dinarzade was one of six New Lucile claimed that she was responsible for the first mannequin parades
York mannequins chosen by
audition to go to Paris to in Paris at the beginning of the century, when the Parisian couture houses
model for Jean Patou. had “living models” but no parades (Gordon 1932: 67), but in fact this
Photograph: Joel Feder. was not so.4 Organized fashion shows began to be presented between
Courtesy of Central Saint
Martins College of Art and 1908 and 1910 at a fixed time in the afternoon in the great fashion houses,
Design, London. where they were popular and well-attended (Figure 2). By this period a
number of mannequins would be employed by a typical Parisian maison
de couture (Figure 3). All the major houses, including Worth, Paquin
and Doucet, had mannequin parades; but their presentations were more
sober than Lucile’s, reflecting the social status of their clientele. Most
278 Caroline Evans
Figure 2
“Paquin’s at five o’clock” by
Henri Gervex, c.1910. IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY
Courtesy of Central Saint
Martins College of Art and
Design, London.
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Figure 3
House mannequins in a Paris
maison de couture, c.1910. By
this date the mannequins no
longer wore the long-sleeved IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY
and high-necked black satin or
crêpe maillot underneath the
models. Courtesy of Central
Saint Martins College of Art
and Design, London.
The Enchanted Spectacle 279
Figure 4
Poiret’s mannequins in an
open-air parade in front of the
formal parterre of his premises
on the avenue d’Antin. From
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY
L‘Illustration 9 July 1910.
Courtesy of Central Saint
Martins College of Art and
Design, London.
280 Caroline Evans
Figure 5
Tango Tea at the Queen’s
Theatre, London, 1913. The
seats of the stalls were
removed so that the clientele
could take tea while on stage
an orchestra accompanied a
tango demonstration followed
by a “dress parade of all the
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The Fashion Fête’s aim was to promote American designers rather than
French, the proceeds to go to European war relief. In return, Vogue
sponsored a French Fashion Fête in New York in November 1915. The
French couture houses stipulated that their fashions should be presented
in a kind of play with a simple plot involving a bride, her mother and her
trousseau. From their inception, fashion shows relied on narrative and
drama; in another war charity Fashion Fête the ballerina Lydia Lopokova
lay concealed in a huge garden urn before emerging to dance in wisps of
chiffon. In another, probably Lucile’s, the mannequins Dolores and Hebe
drifted in and out of misty blue and green drapery (Chase 1954: 107,
113). These descriptions recall the dance performances from the 1890s
in Paris of the American Loie Fuller, whose talent lay not in her face or
figure, nor in her dance ability, but in her manipulation of fabric. Fuller
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had her own pavilion in the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition, its art
nouveau curves modeled on her swirling fabrics. Rhonda Garelick
describes her as an “illusion-producing machine” adept at “the careful
choreography of veils,” a moving sculpture in fabric (Garelick 1998: 101).
In her Lys du Nil dance she manipulated a costume of 500 yards of white
silk that was extended ten feet beyond her body by means of batons sewn
into the fabric. Another contemporary dancer, famed for her classical
dress, bare feet and lack of undergarments, was Isadora Duncan, who
performed in Paris in 1907, the year that Madeleine Vionnet claimed
to have presented the house mannequins at Doucet in bare feet and
uncorseted (Bertin 1956: 172). While I have yet to find clear evidence of
influence either way, it is worth noting that these new types of dance-
spectacle coincided with the development of the fashion show.
Lucile’s Paris parades had attracted audiences of eight hundred. In New
York her audiences swelled to two to three thousand. In 1916 she staged
her own charity fashion show, hiring a theater to put on a two-and-a-
half hour performance that dramatized the story of a Parisian mannequin
in war-torn France, a true story recounted to her by her sister Elinor
Glyn. Entitled “Fleurette’s Dream,” it opened with a vision of the refugee
Fleurette asleep on a pile of dirty sacking while she dreamt of her former
life in Paris:
As with Vogue parades, proceeds went to European war relief. The cast
was recruited from Lucile’s house mannequins (Phyllis starred as the
protagonist Fleurette), who had been given acting coaching and who
received a standing ovation. Although this was not a show intended
The Enchanted Spectacle 283
primarily to sell Lucile’s models, it can hardly have failed to promote them.
The play subsequently toured the USA as a vaudeville review, playing
18 towns in six months, for which Lucile was forced to cut her usual
show length from three hours to half an hour, showing 68 dresses in
28 minutes (Gordon 1932: 239). It is tempting to draw a parallel here
with the accelerated speed and syncopated rhythms of modernity (Kern
1983; Lhamon 1990). However, this breakneck pace was not to become
common in the fashion show until the 1960s after it had been pioneered
by Mary Quant.
The impresario Florenz Ziegfeld bought the opening scene of “Fleur-
ette’s Dream” and reworked it for the Ziegfeld Follies, starring Dolores
(Kathleen Rose) who had been discovered by Lucile while working as an
errand girl in her London salon. Pygmalion-like, she groomed and trained
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Figure 6
Bathing beauties modeling the
latest costumes and beach
sandals at a Lilley & Skinner
fashion show at the Holborn
Restaurant, London, 22 June
1934. Hulton Getty Picture
Library.
The Enchanted Spectacle 285
on Oxford Street, Lilley & Skinner, in 1934. Selfridges was just one of
many fashion promotions; in the 1930s the “stars” of the Selfridges
department store fashion shows were the models Dawn and Gloria who
worked there until 1936, when they left to set up a modeling school
together.9
In 1911 Poiret was the first couturier to use a film of a mannequin
parade to promote his fashions. Throughout Europe and the United
States, film rapidly became a medium through which knowledge of élite
fashion was disseminated to a mass audience. From 1910 British newsreel
companies such as Pathé and Gaumont included footage of Paris fashions
on their newsreels, and in 1911 Pathé produced a series of short films on
forthcoming fashions. In 1911 Liberty in London participated in a film
of mannequins parading. In 1913 the film Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette
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Figure 7
“The slender American Diana”
replaces “the rounded French
Venus”: Jean Patou and his
American mannequins en route
for Paris, 1924. One of them is
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY
Lillian Farley, also shown in
Figure 1. Courtesy of Central
Saint Martins College of Art
and Design, London.
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288
Caroline Evans
actress. In Britain, Vera Ashby gave up her career as a show girl to model
under the name of Sumurun, first for Lucile and then for Captain
Molyneux as his principal mannequin in Paris in the 1920s. She described
her appearance in the finale of a charity fashion show, the annual Bal
des petits lits blancs, where mannequins from the top couture houses were
dressed by famous couturiers (Figure 9). Sumurun had pride of place and
entered last:
At a certain point the lights were lowered, and I pressed the battery-
light. All the jewels on my turban and my costume lit up, and there
was such excitement among the aristocracy and the famous, that
they rushed forward to gather up the rose petals strewn before me
(Cited in Castle 1977: 21).
290
Caroline Evans
Figure 9 This revolution in showing fashions depended entirely on the speed and
Vera Ashby, or Sumurun, style of the mannequins’ presentation, rather than on the theatrical mis-
modeling in the 1920s for
Captain Molyneux at the en-scènes that had typified the fashion shows of the early twentieth
annual charity fashion show in century. Figure 10 shows Dior’s style of presentation in 1955, as well
Paris, the Bal des petits lits as the audience’s engagement with it. The crammed audience and the
blancs. The lights on her
headpiece lit up and the two seating plan, with influential journalists in the front rows, was by now
small boys preceded her an established protocol, and illustrates the key role played by American
scattering rose petals in her magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in the promotion of French
path. Courtesy of Central Saint
Martins College of Art and fashion.
Design, London. There did, of course, continue to be spectacular shows in the post-war
period, Pierre Balmain’s in particular. When Balmain was still at Lelong’s,
which he left in 1946, he once had the model Praline enter the showroom
on a bicycle. At the House of Balmain she became his chief mannequin,
and “she came with us on all our tours. I had her emerge in evening dress
292 Caroline Evans
from a hat-box that four Negro porters carried into the Waldorf-Astoria
in New York” (Balmain 1964: 151). The runway image of a Western
goddess attended by “native” men is a persistent orientalist fantasy,
harking back to Poiret’s fashions of 1911 and to Captain Molyneux’s
presentations of the 1920s, when the turbanned Sumurun was preceded
by two little black boys scattering rose petals. In 1948 a fashion parade
of leading French couturiers was held under the Eiffel Tower, where Praline
modeled for Balmain on the back of a pink elephant. Balmain’s 1951
Spring–Summer show launched his jolie Madame style with a model in a
mauve outfit with matching turban and a mauve poodle with a diamond
collar. The presentation caused a small furore, drawing wild applause,
some disapproval, and a complaint from the French Society for the Pro-
tection of Animals. However, in general, after 1947 it was the imprimatur
of a particular model that marked the style and presentation of a couture
house as, increasingly, the Paris collections were dominated by the iconic
status of the house mannequins.
The Enchanted Spectacle 293
Piranhas in Furs
The 1950s was the decade in which the cabine developed its own
mythology. Figuratively the cabine refers to all the models, generally a
maximum of fourteen to eighteen, who worked for one couturier. The
cabine (literally, a studio) had its own codes of humor, language and
tradition, and its own ranking of seniority as to where each woman sat
Figure 10 at her own place in the long, corridor-like room in front of a table with
A model at the Dior show in a mirror above it. Mannequins moved between couturiers, but tended
Paris, August 1955. Seated in
to model principally for one, and hence became associated with that
the center of the front row are
Marie Louise Bousquet, Paris particular style of presentation. Bettina modeled for Jacques Fath,
Editor of Harper’s Bazaar and Capucine for Givenchy, Praline for Lelong and then Balmain after he
Carmel Snow, Editor in Chief of
opened in 1946, Bronwen Pugh for Balmain, and Hiroko Matsumoto
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294
Caroline Evans
suggested a trace of life” (Liaut 1996: 147). Her very simple, tight-fitting
dress was covered in diamonds borrowed from the jewelers Van Cleef
and Arpels: rivières, bracelets, earrings and brooches. She was flanked
on one side by a mannequin similarly dressed in blue, covered with
sapphires, and on the other by a mannequin in red, studded with rubies.
Balmain described how “she rose angular and distinguished, then froze
into a statue between her two colleagues, making a living tricolour. The
band struck up the national anthem, and through the high bay windows,
the golden rain of fireworks reflected upon the blasé diner the atmosphere
of the Apocalypse” (Balmain 1964: 149).
Yet the average show was more sedate. In the 1950s and the first half
of the 1960s Parisian couture shows were usually presented in the
couturier’s salon, or some other space decorated in ancien régime style.
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Caroline Evans
in 1955. Her first fashion show took place on a promotional tour for
British fashion, in the Palace Hotel in St Moritz. She realized that unless
she dramatized her presentation her simple styles would be lost among
the more ornate ones being shown. Accordingly she made an impromptu
decision to show her collection to jazz music, and rapidly rehearsed
the models so that they opened the show in the staid ballroom of the
hotel by kicking, dancing, running and jumping, to produce an electric
atmosphere. Quant repeated the idea in her first London press show,
where she used photographic rather than runway models because of how
they moved. Quant’s rapid-fire presentation had the models running down
the stairs to hot jazz, a wind machine trained on their skirts to increase
the impression of speed and movement. By her own account, she showed
40 garments in 14 minutes (Quant 1966: 95). A further innovation was
styling, as it is nowadays called. Quant styled Norfolk jackets trimmed
with fox collars by sending the models out holding a shotgun or a dead
pheasant (one model swung the thawing pheasant round her head so
energetically that blood began to spurt all over the newly painted walls).
Models in party dresses held glasses of champagne or clutched copies of
Marx and Engels to look “dreamily intellectual” (Quant 1966: 95).
Quant’s speed and style of showing was pronounced “revolutionary”
by Clare Rendelsham, then at British Vogue and subsequently manager
of the Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche boutique in London. It was next
shown in Paris, to international journalists and buyers, who received it
in stunned silence, at the Hôtel de Crillon. This time Quant showed 60
dresses in 15 minutes, again using photographic models for their ability
Figure 12
Mary Quant (center) with two to hold a graphic pose. Quant continued to use these distinctive elements
models wearing her “Viva Viva” to define her shows, both in Europe and in the USA (Figure 12). She never
collection at a fashion show in pre-planned her shows meticulously but, instead, relied on the inspiration
Milan, March 1967. Hulton
Getty Picture Library. of the moment for her theatrical effects. At the Crillon she mobilized the
eleven-year-old daughter of a friend to open the show:
by many other designers in the 1960s owed less to changes in the wider
culture, although their themes might reflect those changes, than they did
to enormous changes in the fashion industry itself. The origins of today’s
spectacular fashion shows lie in the 1960s, and are directly connected to
the rise of designer ready-to-wear, and its expansion to include menswear.
In 1959 Pierre Cardin showed his first ready-to-wear collection for women
at the Paris department store Printemps, thus breaking with the strict rules
of couture. Implicitly recognizing the role of the spectacle in fashion
shows, he said “I established the TNP [National Popular Theatre] of
couture” (cited in Lipovetsky 1994: 92). In 1960 Cardin presented his
first haute couture menswear collection in the Hôtel de Crillon. The
collection featured an entirely new silhouette for men, with lapel-less
and collarless corduroy suits buttoned all the way up over starched
white shirts and narrow ties. The models wore sunglasses and had their
hair slicked back. Gauging correctly that their reaction would be more
enthusiastic than the fashion journalists’, Cardin arranged for 200
Sorbonne students to be strategically dotted throughout the audience.
In 1961 he presented his first ready-to-wear men’s collection in Paris,
modelled by university students because the professional male model did
not then exist (Morais 1991: 93). In the mid-1960s he staged his first
New York ready-to-wear menswear show in the department store Bonwit
Teller with a collection that was considered novel and shocking to his
American audience. Richard Morais suggests that “the show was heavily
laced with a smouldering, homo-erotic virility” and Gloria Emerson in
the New York Times wrote: “some of the models came out smoking, with
a hunted look in their eyes. They all had lots of courage and good legs.
Everyone knew about their legs because they also wore silk bathrobes
and very abbreviated bathing trunks” (Morais 1991: 104). Some of the
clothes drew laughter; they were extremely fitted, so tight as to impede
movement, with wide lapels and narrow arms in shiny fabrics and vibrant
colors, worn with wide ties and leather boots.
In 1966 Yves Saint Laurent created his first ready-to-wear collection
for women, and later that year opened his first Rive Gauche boutique.
The Enchanted Spectacle 299
In this period the ready-to-wear show joined the fashion calendar, taking
place two weeks after the couture shows in March and October. With
the decline of haute couture and its tradition of gentle and discreet shows
designed to flatter the customer into believing that they were for her and
her alone, the fashion show was reborn, Phoenix-like, in the 1960s as
spectacle. The ready-to-wear show became a one-off event for press and
buyers rather than a daily presentation to private customers. However,
although their function changed, the couture shows continued. Through-
out the 1950s the majority of Paris couturiers had negotiated licensing
deals as the couture side of their business became less secure; in the 1960s,
under further threat from the ready-to-wear, much of the couture side of
the business became a loss-leader, generating the publicity and prestige
necessary for the licensing deals, perfumes and cosmetics that brought
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the profits in. Thus the couture fashion show became, in reality, a market-
ing rather than a sales tool, which generated an image of luxury and
exclusivity. In the 1970s every couturier had his cabine of models, and
would hire in half a dozen extras for the shows. Marie Helvin modeled
haute couture for Yves Saint Laurent for five years in the 1970s, and
remembers the pleasures of haute couture modeling as being about contact
with hand-made, one-off clothes. It required “the knack of wearing the
clothes rather than photogenic beauty or the showgirl instinct” (Helvin
1985: 84).
Helvin was referring to the split nature of the modeling profession.
In the magazines of the early twentieth century, actresses and society
women tended to be used as photographic models, rather than the trained
mannequins who wore the clothes in the couture houses. Even when there
came to be professional photographic models, the distinction between
photographic and runway modeling continued, with a few exceptions
such as Bettina in the 1950s. Indeed, the iconic models of the 1960s, such
as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, made their mark as photographic models.
The distinction began to disappear in the 1970s. The American model
Jerry Hall made an explicit link between catwalk performance and fashion
as representation: “runway modelling’s great training for high fashion
because there’s so much attitude in it” (Hall 1985: 138). Reminiscent
of Quant’s photographic models who froze into haughty poses on the
runway, Hall practiced her poses in front of the mirror and looked at
books showing the human shape doing something interesting and
then practiced making her body “like a movement or a line” (Hall 1985:
47). Runway modeling taught Hall to compose her own image as a
graphic representation, translating a real-life performance into a stylized
image.
These show-stopping modeling techniques were, in the 1970s, reserved
for the ready-to-wear. Helvin described how the “social geography of the
catwalk” changed in this period; in the 1960s the ready-to-wear show
was “distinctly downmarket,” particularly in Britain (Helvin 1985: 87);
but all that changed in the 1970s, when live fashion turned into show
300 Caroline Evans
business and the showgirl (that is, the model) became a star. The new
models in demand were the ones with personality who were able to bring
the press in and also to sell the clothes to the buyers. Charles Castle
describes how, in the 1950s, models “slithered” along the catwalk, at most
pulling on or off a glove; but in the 1960s and 1970s they started to act
and dance as pop music was played through the stereo speakers, and
choreographers and show directors were employed to stage the shows
(Castle 1977: 45). Models began to be chosen for their sense of humor,
their ability to bubble over and clown; or, alternatively, to be dramatic.
They needed “energy and verve, and the ability to act the part” (Helvin
1985: 88). Their pay went rocketing, and the top models could command
$1,000 for an hour show in Milan, a little more for one in Paris.
The Japanese designer Kenzo brought the new form of show to Paris,
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89). Jerry Hall compared the backstage at Paris shows in this period to
“showgirls and vaudeville” (Hall 1985: 48). She arrived in Paris in 1973,
and recalled it as a period when fashion shows were becoming more like
entertainment, no longer just for buyers. Hall adapted for the runway
the dance routines she had tried out in clubs the previous night. She
claimed she learnt her runway techniques by watching black girls move
and turn: “The black girls used to walk like magic and drive everyone
wild . . . A lot of people who weren’t involved with fashion would try to
crash it because it was so exciting. It was a black thing, definitely . . .
plus the music was mostly black” (Hall 1985: 44, 47). In the 1950s Pierre
Cardin had recruited the Japanese model Hiroko, and one of Dior’s
models was half-Chinese. In the 1960s Paco Rabanne used black models
on the runway; but non-European models were nevertheless cast as an
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302
Caroline Evans
Figure 13 sold beforehand, and the show thus became a kind of showcase of the
Thierry Mugler, autumn/winter 1984.
The photograph shows the huge scale designer’s mind. The “aura” that Walter Benjamin ascribed to the artwork
of the show, the size of the venue and had become detached from the goods and associated with the designer’s
the unusual shape of the especially “vision.”
constructed runway. Photograph Niall
McInerney. A parallel development among more conceptual designers was to
distinguish their practice by making analogies with fine art through their
shows. In 1971 Miyake had showed for the first time in New York, and
he continued to show there twice a year through the following decades.
His shows were like happenings, and borrowed more from fine art than
Figure 14 fashion. He also pioneered the use of unusual show spaces, such as a
Alexander McQueen, spring/summer
1998. This show was called “untitled” swimming-pool (New York 1988) and a disused metro station (Paris
as the sponsors, American Express, 1989). At Porte des Lilas, on the outskirts of Paris, press and buyers were
had objected to McQueen’s title crushed on to one platform while the models paraded on the other. At
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Walking Identity
In the last thirty to forty years of the century, the image of the model on
the runway became increasingly graphic, starting from Quant’s use of
photographic models on the runway. More than creative innovation, this
trend was due to the altered role of the image as a promotional and
marketing tool from the 1960s on. In 1966 Pierre Cardin resigned from
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the French guild that controlled haute couture, the Chambre syndicale
de la couture française, because of its 30-day embargo on publishing
photographs of the new collections. This restriction benefited magazines
like Vogue; but Cardin, with his world-wide licensing deals, needed the
instant publicity of newspaper coverage to promote his designs as far
afield as Japan and Argentina. And whereas sketching was forbidden and
photography rigorously controlled in the 1950s couture show, by the
1970s fashion illustrators were producing runway sketches from the
ready-to-wear collections for the newspapers; from the 1980s runway
photographers’ work began to appear widely in magazines and news-
papers. From the mid-1980s the twice-yearly ready-to-wear collections
began to be broadcast through satellite and television stations world-wide.
In 1996, when Hubert de Givenchy presented his last couture show, he
said to the press, “You make couture for the woman not for the magazine”
(Videofashion News, Spring–Summer 1996). Like Balenciaga before him,
Givenchy lamented the changes in modern fashion, in his case the new
prominence of media and image in haute couture, which had had such a
profound influence on the presentation of fashion on the catwalk.
This graphic, or photographic, quality of the runway show grew out
of a commercial emphasis on the image in fashion promotion and market-
ing from the 1960s onwards. In the late twentieth century, the relationship
between image and identity began to be explored in other areas of cultural
production, spanning popular culture, personal politics, and academic
theory, from pop art and pop music in the 1960s, to identity politics and
critical theory in the 1980s and 1990s. I would argue that the fashion
show can be understood both in the context of commerce, and in the
context of the late-twentieth-century concern with image and identity.
For our identities and identifications are framed and given shape by the
context of commercial relations, and fashion is a modern paradigm that
brings together commerce, culture and identity in a particularly (post)-
modern formation on the runway.
The earliest fashion show audiences had a déclassé quality to their social
mix, replicating that of the models on stage. Lucile claimed that her first
The Enchanted Spectacle 305
This group is the opposite of the fashion crowd, for the fashion audience
is one of privilege rather than abject poverty; yet the descriptions tally
as each other’s opposites in their lively heterogeneity, and in the way
that the individuals described fall between the cracks of social class and
stratification.
Social fluidity has been associated with metropolitan fashion since the
eighteenth century, if not before, and the fluidity that has characterized
the fashion audience since 1900 reflects the fluidity of fashion itself in
this period. The amorality and lack of class consciousness that Marx
ascribed to the nineteenth-century lumpenproletariat is also a character-
istic of the twentieth-century fashion crowd. The flux of the crowd
(a key trope of literary modernism in the writings of Baudelaire and
Benjamin) can be identified in the heterogeneity of the fashion audience;
and, I would argue, it was further played out in the 1990s in the form of
306 Caroline Evans
1990). The fashion show, with its emphasis on novelty and spectacle,
became a switching station for postmodern identities.
In the fields of popular culture and art, Madonna’s continual recreation
of her image from the late 1980s and Cindy Sherman’s recycling of her
own image in her “Untitled Film Stills” and later work from the 1980s
and 1990s were comparable examples of the contemporary concern with
image and identity. This form of aestheticism can be traced back to the
nineteenth-century figure of the dandy. In “What is Enlightenment?”
Foucault identified Baudelaire’s dandy in particular as the man “who
makes of his body, his behaviour, his feelings and passions, his very
existence, a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man
who goes off to discover himself . . . he is the man who tries to invent
himself” (Rabinow 1984: 41–2). And Rosalind Williams wrote that
dandyism is part of “the aesthetic that the small details of fashion reveal
the innermost principles of modern thought: the assumption that such
details can carry a weight of significance” (Williams 1982: 117). Accord-
ing to this definition, the late twentieth century could be identified as a
dandyish moment. The theoretical interest in identity as a construct
converts, in its cultural formations, into a number of mutant forms:
the fashion show, or the media cult of celebrity, are simply different
articulations of the aestheticization of the self. At the beginning of this
article I referred to Rhonda Garelick’s argument that the nineteenth-
century practice of dandyism could be tracked through the fin-de-siècle
woman to the contemporary cult of personality, and I would myself chase
it even further, on to the catwalk. Garelick comments on the structural
similarities between dandyism and fashion itself, citing Habermas’s ident-
ification of the dandy’s kinship with fashion: “he is the expert on the
fleeting pleasures of the moment” (Garelick 1998: 59). And it is on the
contemporary catwalk, just as much as in the posturing of our stars and
celebrities, that the performance of identity through superficial detail and
spectacular gesture finds its apotheosis.
The Enchanted Spectacle 307
Notes
1. Paul Poiret’s autobiography is the source for the erroneous claim, made
in many fashion books, that Worth was the first to use live mannequins
(Poiret 1931: 145). Diana de Marly argues that Worth merely increased
the number of house mannequins used by many Parisian dressmakers,
and draws attention to the mercer Gagelin’s mannequin parades (de
Marly 1980: 103–4).
2. The renaming of mannequins when they entered a couture house
recalls the nineteenth-century practice in France of renaming pros-
titutes with a single name such as Blondinette when they joined a
maison close or regulated brothel (Evans 2002). As late as the 1950s,
Balmain’s chief mannequin Praline was renamed in a mock christening
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9. This paragraph reflects the fact that my preliminary research has been
done in London, and so all the examples are English; I anticipate
that future research in Paris and American cities will yield more
information on department store mannequin parades in France and
the USA.
10. Dormer considered that the features that made Bronwen Pugh a good
catwalk model were the same features, described in this passage, that
made her unsuited to photographic modeling. In the 1950s show
mannequins were deemed unphotogenic and the press photographers
usually photographed the clothes on photographic models after
the shows (though a few models such as Bettina did both kinds of
modeling).
11. That Lucie Clayton’s London model agency doubled as an influential
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Williams, Rosalind H. 1982. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late
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Wilson, Elizabeth. 1991. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control
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