Early Twentieth-Century Fashion Designer Life Writing (Critical Essay‪)‬

As Caroline Evans notes in a discussion of French designer Jean Patou's American mannequins, in fashion, "the look of standardization and an industrial aesthetic was commonly perceived to be an American one" (250). Evans traces "tensions in early-twentieth-century modernity: between creativity and business, between France and America, and between elite consumption and mass production" (261). She builds on the work of Nancy Troy, who shows in her 2003 book, Couture Culture, how early twentieth-century designers promoted concepts of authenticity in an anxious battle to suppress the inbuilt logic of copying and standardization that defined fashion, and that mining the perceived opposition between France and the United States was an important strategy in that battle. Here, I work from the important insights of Troy and Evans, to foreground the strained relationship between France and America in the discourses of fashion houses. But I begin from the autobiographical articulations of designers themselves, because they open up new dimensions--an epistemological one, and an intimate, psychic one--that allow us to think about how the designer her or himself is implicated in the maintenance of a discourse of national differences--and further, what the designer might tell us about the role of fashion in modernity. The autobiographical work of fashion designers has enjoyed little sustained critical attention in its own right. Probably because of its obviously commercial underpinnings it has not been taken seriously as documentation of designers' subjectivity. To look for designers' subjectivity, however, misses the point about designer memoirs and autobiographies: that, particularly in the modern era, the era of fashion's massification, of its increasingly visible cultural presence, these texts are crucial indices of designers' attempts to craft a public persona--and to secure a lasting cultural legacy. No matter whether they are ghostwritten or penned by the designers themselves, no matter how carefully strategized and potentially "inauthentic" their expressions of sentiment might be, they stand as documents of the peculiar condition of fashion designer celebrity--and in this way, I argue, they speak to larger questions about the place taken by fashion and the designer in the cultural landscape of early twentieth-century modernity. Indeed, when we read the designer autobiography as a document of celebrity self-fashioning, its relevance to the question of the modern--to both cultural modernism and industrial modernity--becomes clear. Most early twentieth-century designers were engaged on some level with the logic of the new; the critical and commercial success of fashion was associated with a drive toward novelty that aligned it both with the drive of cultural avant-gardistes toward innovation in idea and artistic form, and with the increasing technological sophistication of industrial production, which itself signified a very different kind of newness. As a line of fashion theorists stretching from Walter Benjamin through Ulrich Lehmann and Caroline Evans has shown, fashion's attachment to novelty is consistently compromised from within, or haunted, by the past, which reappears constantly in its cycles and is often referenced explicitly in couture. Fashion, in this account, has been shown to be a constellation of past and present, to use the terms of Walter Benjamin (see also Evans Fashion at the Edge; Lehmann; Vinken). Of course, this was not explicitly acknowledged in the early twentieth century. In this period, designers' careers were built upon these two poles--aesthetic and industrial--of modernity; success depended on their ability to convincingly establish themselves as modern subjects, who held the sartorial keys to admitting others into the promise of the modern. If they were successful enough to publish memoirs and other autobiographical writings, then these careers were also, of necessity, exercises in the production and ma