All We Know: Three Lives (33 page)

Back in London, Madge submitted her report to the Board of Trade (“where I expect it lingers to this very day,” she wrote thirty years later) and became an even more vocal advocate for English fashion. In a culture where quality was reserved historically for men’s clothing and where feminine chic was elusive, and at a time, given the devastation of the country, when anything to do with fashionable dress was even more easily dismissed as trivial, Madge insisted on the importance of women being well dressed and on the possibility that good clothes did not have to be the province of an elite. As postwar governments across Europe pushed exports to help pay off debts, many found ways to support new designers, provided that their fashions emphasized their country’s materials. Madge touted English textiles and argued for improved standards of design. One newspaper article on her return from New York, headlined “Dress Reformer,” described her as a “colorful, impudently gay, yet shrewdly practical, working woman,” who “says, and proves, that being well-dressed has nothing to do with being rich” and who is trying to get “pretty, well-designed, low-priced clothes made here to equal those in America.” The parallels between her work and Elizabeth David’s postwar education of the English palate are unmistakable.

And the demand was real. Life in England—“this poverty stricken island”—was difficult, dark, and meager long after the war was over. One waited hours in queues to buy meat (John Strachey, Minister of Food from 1946 to 1950, was responsible for postwar rationing); returning factories to civilian manufacture was a slow process; there were strict limits on the movement of money and goods in and out of Britain; the fuel shortage was acute. At Bourne and Hollingsworth, consumer need was so intense after years of wartime deprivation, and goods still so scarce, that Madge’s most difficult task was to keep merchandise on the shelves. Like many civilians and everyone she knew, she was constantly ill from malnutrition and stress. Her childhood back problems also returned. “I have a good job here & work for people I like & respect,” she wrote to Gerald. It “is really too big & exacting for my strength, still I have made it myself & it has much to recommend it.” The winter of 1947 was one of the coldest on record, and she kept warm at home by shutting up most of her flat, but her office at Bourne and Hollingsworth was “
icy
…With the temperature well below freezing this is no fun at all. Then the store is in partial darkness & absolutely deserted, the factory closed etc. a most gloomy outlook—we are all desperately depressed—& the blackout at night doesn’t add to the ease of getting about in frozen streets with treacherous mounds of frozen snow everywhere.”

When the postwar trade pacts were signed, in March 1946, she traveled to France to look at materials and styles that might be copied. The trip was “epic: fourteen hours from London to Paris—about as long as it took by packet in Victorian days. Hours of standing in queues, masses of papers and visas and permits and customs.” In Paris there were “no buses or taxis on the streets and only a handful of private cars. No one talks of anything but food and the situation is awful. The rations just are not sufficient, those who cannot afford the Black Market starve: it is quite horrible.” To get a seat on a train south she had to offer a bribe of 500 francs. She did business at the Syndicat de la Soie in Lyons, then went on to Cannes, where she was reunited with Evelyn Wyld, who had spent part of the war in an internment camp in the Vaucluse. Madge was her first visitor after the war, as she had been to the Huxleys, bringing news from England, butter from the black market in Paris, and coffee.

In spite of it all, she wrote to Gerald, “the clothes in Paris are heaven, it is unbelievable that they should have so much taste and flair even in such conditions—a real pleasure for me to see good hats.” She bought one at Legroux, which she intended to use as a model. The artificial silks she saw in Lyons “you would have to see and above all to feel…to believe—and the maisons de couture say they handle and make up better than real silk. All very interesting.” Prices were still too high to do business with France during that trip, but she was back at the end of the year to supervise hat buying when Bourne and Hollingsworth was granted its first import license. In the autumn of 1947 the Council of Industrial Design, founded in the last years of the war to improve design across British industry, appointed her “to set up a prototype design center” covering all types of clothing, fabrics, and accessories. As part of this job, she returned to Paris with £1,000 of government money to acquire the accessories of the New Look for British manufacturers to copy, buying gloves, shoes, and underwear to accompany the fitted jacket and long, full skirt that Christian Dior had introduced to such acclaim (and censure) that year. On this trip she also found Marie Laurencin and other friends; in a gallery on the rue des Saint-Pères, she found Laurencin’s still life
The Lemon and the Rose
and was able to buy it. Several times in the past fifteen years she had had, as she wrote to Gerald, “to remake my career from top to bottom (or rather the other way up).” Now she was “in the thick of the export drive…only a temporary civil servant & have joined the Council just to put on this demonstration—& after I don’t know what I shall do.”

Look at her again: It is London in the early 1950s. She is teetering down the street on enormously high Ferragamo shoes (“as soft and easy to wear as a pair of gloves,” she said), draped in a broad-shouldered coat of skunk pelts, drenched in Worth’s Je Reviens. Her students at the Fashion School of the Royal College of Art peer out the window, watching her. “Madge is coming!” they cry. They laugh but are also afraid. She is in her early fifties, but owning up to her forties. They are young queer men with a feeling for fabric and drape; talented, driven young women; and good girls from good families who are there to raise the tone of the school, many of whom will end up casualties of what Madge called its “high marriage wastage.” Madge is coming—and she seems to have appeared from nowhere. Has a taxi dropped her around the corner? Is she taking a bus but not using the stop closest to the College, so as not to be seen descending from something so plebeian? She is preceded by these questions; by this mixture of respect, anxiety, and scorn; by her perfume; and by the vision of her outrageous coat and precarious-looking, cantilever-heeled shoes. She is “London’s most unusual professor.” She is “The First Professor of Fashion.”

When she left Bourne and Hollingsworth, she turned her experience in the United States into a way to earn a living, working as a freelance representative of five English textile and fashion firms, promoting their products in the United States and reporting to them on the American market. She continued to appear on television, to give radio talks, and to lecture on textiles and fashion to industry associations all over England and Ireland. She imagined that she would do this kind of freelance work for the rest of her career. But in June 1948 she began work at the Royal College of Art. During the war, the College, founded in 1837, had evacuated to Cumberland and scaled back. Now, led by Robin Darwin, a painter and descendant of the scientist, its mission was to produce graduates in design who could revitalize devastated peacetime manufacturing. When Darwin realized that the College did not train students for the fashion industry, he consulted Victor Stiebel; Audrey Withers, who had become the editor of British
Vogue
during the war; and Allan Walton, who had his own textile business and had directed the Glasgow School of Art, and whom Darwin had just appointed head of the Royal College’s textiles program. Walton recommended Madge and persuaded her to take the job. Darwin made her Professor of Fashion and Principal of the School of Fashion, which she then created. She took one more long trip to New York, where she did her usual consulting, but also studied the curriculum at the Parsons School of Design. Walton’s sudden death in September 1948 was a blow that almost deterred her, she said later, but she did not give up the chance for this new sort of legitimacy.

What did it mean to profess fashion? For Madge, it meant, first, being what she had been denied: a woman associated with higher education. In 1949 the Royal College of Art gave her an honorary degree. Proud, self-deprecating, and still angry, she wrote to her brother:

It isn’t really of importance: The Fashion School was “not only the first thing of its kind” in England, noted
Harper’s Bazaar
in a profile of Madge, but also “the first official recognition of fashion as a serious industry.” Designing the school, Madge Garland was creating a program that would produce a crop of native English designers. She did not teach courses, but she invented the curriculum, critiqued students’ work, ran the school, promoted it, and sat on the College’s governing board. Her knowledge, contacts in the industry, and style made it a success. The only competition was a program at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, started by Muriel Pemberton at around the same time, which focused more on art training than on training for the fashion industry.

Like many passionate autodidacts, Madge had strong views about education. The College was under government supervision, and she began her tenure by fighting with “the civil servant stuffed shirts”: the Ministry of Education and Sir Stafford Cripps (former president of the Board of Trade, then minister for economic affairs and chancellor of the exchequer). The dispute took place because she insisted on hiring professionals in the field, not teachers of art: Digby Morton’s tailor gave the instruction in tailoring; a cutter from Berketex taught designing wholesale clothing to scale; Victor Stiebel’s dressmaker trained students in pattern making; a representative from Wolsey taught knitwear. She also hired a number of refugees, Jews who had worked in textiles or design in Europe and were starting over in England. “I wanted people from the trade,” she said, but “trade was a dreadful word to use in connection with art.” It was, in many ways, a revolution in her own thinking. But it was also another version of the sort of mixing she had worked on early in her career. “I tried so hard to marry art and industry,” she said. The curriculum included “costume history, cutting, designing with a price limit, millinery, accessories, embroidery,” toile making, children’s clothing, and lingerie. Madge studied fashion magazines with the students. She arranged for them to sit in on editorial conferences at magazines and in business meetings at manufacturers. She required them to work for a designer, in a textile mill, or in a factory for at least two months. To help place graduates, she appointed a committee that included representatives of the top wholesalers. The year-end student fashion show, first presented in July 1949, became an annual tradition—in high style and including royal guests.

Along with these intensely practical requirements and goals, she wanted the students—who had grown up during wartime and postwar austerity and had often completed degrees at their local art colleges, but hardly knew London, let alone the rest of the world—to learn things that may not have been teachable. She wanted to create for them something like what she had experienced at school in Paris, to impart not only “facts and technique,” noted
Harper’s Bazaar
, “but…that rare, undefinable but essential quality—sophistication.” She arranged for them to see plays as well as fashion shows, clothing factories, milliners’ workrooms, and beauty demonstrations. She invited them to her home, “to train you how to behave in society,” noted Joanne Brogden, an early graduate who went on to direct the school from 1971 to 1989, and who found these occasions “frightening…awful.” Every year, she took two students with her to the Paris collections. (She would see Esther Murphy on these trips.) “She was an entrée to anywhere you wanted to go,” recalls the couturier David Sassoon, who matriculated in 1955. David Watts, a student of the early 1950s who designed for Jaeger for forty years, concurred:

Madge’s own look and taste were also a lesson. “She wears clothes with an easy authority,” British
Vogue
noted, in the article to which she referred Gerald, and “educates with intelligent wit.” In one of Beaton’s photographs for this feature she wears a wasp-waisted “late-day suit of blue-black brocade” by Bianca Mosca, a version of the New Look. There are multiple strands of pearls around her neck and wrist. A straw cartwheel hat by the milliner Rose Vernier frames her face, and there is an eruption of blond curls on her forehead. With her hands in her pockets, her shoulders thrown back, her gaze calmly meeting the camera, she is the image of cool, intelligent, feminine postwar style. Set against the intact, ornate moldings and marble mantel of Londonderry House, the image is also one of personal and architectural endurance in the face of the ravaged reality of London in the 1940s. Another profile from this period described her “original approach to fashion” as the “easy elegance of the woman who seizes instantly upon each new trend and stamps it with her individuality.” When she had students to her house for dinner, David Watts recalled, she would appear in “a very glamorous house coat”—evening wear, not something in which to do housework—“with an enormous black satin skirt and a fitted blouse…buttoned all the way up the front with long tight sleeves.” “She was what fashion was about,” said David Sassoon. “There was a woman actually walking around in couture clothes…That to me was heaven.” It was “the way she was, not just her clothes,” said the designer Gina Fratini; she “epitomized everything to do with fashion, with style…and I sat in awe.”

Because of Madge’s predilections, the Fashion School was referred to as “Paris, Kensington.” It was set apart from the main College buildings—in a town house in Ennismore Gardens, behind the Brompton Oratory, on a square where lamplighters still illuminated gas streetlamps every evening—and was separate in other ways, too. “We were a very precious little society of our own,” recalled the designer Anne Tyrrell. The building contributed to this atmosphere: Students worked in a huge L-shaped space, a Victorian reception room that had two fireplaces and extended the length of the building. This room was also the setting for parties to which Madge “would invite all sorts of amazing people.” And then there was her own setting: “Madge’s office I can never forget,” said Watts. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It was like a drawing room; it wasn’t like an office at all.” The walls were pale pink and covered with paintings and sketches, including the work of Marie Laurencin. The curtains were thick hangings of pink glazed chintz, lined and interlined. The cornices were ornate, and the space was lit theatrically. Her desk was placed on the bias. She sat there in front of a bay window, often playing with fabric samples from Miki Sekers’s factory with her “immaculate scarlet varnished nails—this fair, well-coiffed person with astonishing blue eyes,” said Joanne Brogden. “If you came from the suburbs of London,” this mise-en-scène was “frightfully impressive and grand…I really was so bowled over.”

She had continued to consult about experimental textiles for Sekers (rayon) and Imperial Chemical Industries (their polyester was called Terylene), helping to develop these fabrics for women’s clothing and interior decoration. On breaks between terms, she traveled all over Europe to promote Sekers’s and ICI’s materials and to learn about innovations in French textiles. She also represented a French textile company in England. She traveled regularly to the North of England and at one visit to the mills “addressed 600 locals,” showing them the clothes that had been made from their materials and exported. Writing later about the history of these fabrics, she noted bluntly, “The early attempts to create synthetic materials date back to the last century, but for a long time ‘art silk’ was as repellant as its title was vulgar; it was harsh to handle, had a sleazy surface, and creased abominably…the rude forebear of the delicious materials which have transformed women’s clothes today.” Edward Molyneux and Bianca Mosca in London, and Dior, Pierre Cardin, Givenchy, Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath, Jean Patou, and Balenciaga in Paris were among the houses supplied by Sekers. Some of these fabrics were “staggeringly beautiful,” notes Brogden, and favored students were allowed to use samples. There was a sense in which it “was never a favor, because no one really knew how to use them, but they were exciting because you didn’t see them anywhere else except at couture houses.”

A newspaper article from the period noted “the rigorous self-discipline which Mrs. Garland has displayed in allowing her students freedom of experiment,” which produced “twenty personalities, instead of twenty reflections of Mrs. Garland’s personal, powerful and professional taste.” Still, if some students found her inspiring and supportive, to others she was terrifying and autocratic. The school was run like a couture house, and dicta about hair and clothes and makeup were part of the program. Madge’s secretary told the students when to arrive and leave and had them sign in to a book opposite her desk and door. Joanne Brogden remembered “walking in one day with what I thought was this wonderful new color of lipstick on, and Madge came wafting down the carpeted stone stairway: ‘My child, go and take that terrible lipstick off.’” The place had the air of a finishing school, said one student from the early years: