In Vanity Fair: A Tale of Frocks and Femininity. Brainerd Eleanor Hoyt
and a long file of the young women promenades through the room wearing frocks in which the illustrious customer may be interested. Monsieur comes out from the inner fastnesses and declares himself enchanted, honoured; materials are brought out and displayed, trimmings are suggested. The interview is a very serious one. No smallest word of the Princess is treated lightly. A beggarly dozen of frocks, all extravagant in price, are planned. A few costly furs are thrown in for good measure. The Princess rises languidly. Monsieur himself accompanies her to the door, and in the hall she passes La Petite Fleurette, who has danced herself into notoriety and into the heart of the Prince whose name and title Madame la Princesse bears. Evidently this is to be an expensive day for his Royal Highness.
Fleurette, too, is received with smiles, with effusive greetings. The credit of his Royal Highness is excellent. Monsieur stops on his way to his private rooms and returns to greet the danseuse. His manner to her is not what it was to the Princess. Quite as cordial, yes; but more familiar. The grave deference has disappeared. The saleswoman, too, is familiar. She calls the customer "ma chère" and "ma petite," flatters her openly, jests with her. The best in the cases is brought out for Fleurette as for the Princess, but it is a best of a more striking type, and the master artist's suggestions are not those he made to the Princess. One is always an artist, but one caters to the individual. Where Madame la Princesse has ordered a dozen gowns, la petite Fleurette orders a score, and when she goes Monsieur accompanies her also to the door, but as he turns he shrugs his shoulders.
"Oh la, la!" says the saleswoman, vulgarly, expressively, as she meets his eyes, and a buzz of conversation sounds from the corner where the mannequins are gathered.
The popular danseuse, chanteuse, diseuse, of the Fleurette type is usually a more profitable customer in her private capacity than is the great actress. She is the fad, the sensation of the moment, and her money comes easily and plentifully. No ambitious productions, no expensive theatrical experiments, eat up her income. Her art is not of the kind that absorbs her thoughts and hopes and dreams. It is a means to an end, and that end is gay and luxurious living. So la petite Fleurette spends her money prodigally in self-indulgence, and much of it goes to swell the profits of those alluring establishments on the Rue de la Paix and the Place Vendôme. Other chanteuses and diseuses there are in Paris who take their art as seriously as Bernhardt takes hers, and who make it, in its own way, as truly an art; but here again one finds women too deeply interested in their work to take an absorbing interest in chiffons. They may dress well, but not extravagantly well; and beside the splendours of Fleurette their mild sartorial radiance will seem dim indeed.
Of the actresses who stand at the head of their profession in Paris, Réjane is probably the best dressed, spends the most money for her personal and unofficial adornment. She loves pretty frocks and she wears them well, off the stage as on it; but even she does not rival in her toilettes certain lesser lights of the stage, for whom, in her capacity as artiste, she may well feel a good-natured contempt.
It is when the famous actress appears in a new play that she becomes important in the dressmaking world. Then, if you please, she is extravagant, exacting, full of whims. Then she and her chosen dressmaker have long and strenuous conferences, at which the most able assistants of the master artist are present with suggestion and advice. The play must be gravely, exhaustively considered. If it deals with some historic period, the fashions of that period must be studied down to their merest detail and adapted to present needs. The physical characteristics of the actress must have due attention. She must be made to look her best, – but the psychological subtleties of her rôle must also be taken into account in the planning of her costumes. Oh they are grave, very grave, the preliminary consultations concerning the costumes for a new and important rôle. Day after day, Réjane drives up to the door, behind her white mules, and is closeted with the master and his chosen aids. There are sketches, crinoline models, materials to be viewed and discussed, high converse to be held concerning points upon which artiste and artist are not at one. Then come fittings by the dozen, with Monsieur looking on, and the heads of the departments called in to receive orders or suggest improvements. The skirt drapery does not fall as it should. Madame shakes her head. Monsieur knits his brows.
"Ask Renoir to come here." The chief skirt hand appears.
"Tu vois, Renoir, ça ne va pas. It is a horror, that drapery. I have the air of a femme des Halles, n'est-ce pas?"
Renoir goes down upon her knees, rips a stitch here and there, gathers the material up in her quick fingers. A touch, a fold, a lifting here, a dropping there, while everyone watches anxiously.
The skirt takes on new lines, Madame looks over her shoulder at her reflection in the mirror, and her frown melts into a smile.
"Mais oui, c'est ça."
Monsieur smooths his furrowed brow, and the skirtmaker endeavours to look modest as she hurries back to the workroom, but she is proud, extremely proud. It is something to surmount serious difficulties under the eye of the master.
There is perhaps a miniature stage in one of the fitting-rooms, – a tiny stage, but large enough for a solitary figure in sweeping draperies, and lighted by footlights as is a real stage. So much depends upon those footlights. They may ruin totally the effect of a frock lovely under ordinary light, just as they will make the most perfect natural complexion look cadaverous, and the stage costume must be planned with reference to this problem of lighting.
Many dressmakers care little for the theatrical custom and seldom make stage costumes save when a modern society play is in question, but other houses cater largely to the stage trade. Doucet makes more of the costumes worn on the Parisian stage than any other one maker, but Redfern has had great success in that line, and Drecoll, too, has costumed some famous rôles, while, when it comes to the modern society play, actresses turn to any one of the autocrats who finds most favour with them.
The première of an important production always brings out, if not the great dressmakers themselves, at least their official representatives, whose task it is to garner fashion ideas wherever they are to be found. Even a period play may furnish some idea in colour, line, or detail that may be adapted to modern dress and inspire a new mode, and the elaborately costumed modern play is always interesting to students of the modes. Sometimes an actress wears a new and original frock that catches the fancy of Parisiennes and launches a mode, but, in general, the stage frock's influence is limited to the inspiring of ideas for modes rather than to the setting of fashions, and the stage trade is not of great importance in the great game of fashion-making.
Professional buyers fill the salons at certain seasons of the year, and are to be reckoned with seriously in the business calculations of Monsieur.
In early spring and late summer dressmakers and buyers from all parts of the world set their faces toward Paris, but by far the largest element of the pilgrimage is American. Every dressmaker of pretensions to-day makes her trips to Paris at least twice a year, views the advance season models, buys as many of them as she can, lays in a supply of exclusive materials and trimmings, and fills her note-book with ideas to be used for the benefit of her home customers. Often during her summer trip she takes a run to Trouville and to other Normandy resorts where the tide of fashion is at its highest as the summer draws to a close; and, in the late winter or early spring, the Riviera is a famous hunting-ground for fashions.
Before March brings the Auteuil races, Paris is, in the eyes of the ultra-chic, a wilderness. Women charmingly gowned may be there. The uninitiated may believe that the latest creations of the French dressmakers' art are on view. The elect know better. They understand that the gowns being worn in Paris before March are the gowns of yesteryear. They understand, too, that, all through the Paris winter, spring modes are having their trial, but that this trial is going on in far-away summer lands. The women who launch the modes, the exclusive few who set the fashion, are already wearing toilettes that will serve as models to the general public when spring comes, but they are wearing them at the winter resorts, each of which has its distinct season for the European smart set, and it is not until Auteuil calls fashionable folk back to Paris that the stay-at-homes know what is upon Fashion's spring programme.
CHAPTER IV
FIFI AND THE DUCHESS ON THE TURF
For fashionable Paris, the season begins with Auteuil. The