All We Know: Three Lives (34 page)

Professor Garland and Lady Ashton, photographed by Paul Tanqueray (MGP, courtesy Estate of Paul Tanqueray / NPG)

The Professor of Fashion was tough, she was a snob, and she was sometimes intimidated by her students. Some were clear favorites, which demoralized those who were not. “I definitely would say that I was one,” said Sassoon, “and that’s why people laughed at me. Because she was terribly cruel to some people. She came into the room one day, and I said, ‘Oh Mrs. Garland, what a wonderful hat!’ And she said, ‘Do you like it? It’s by Aage Thaarup.’ And when she’d gone out of the room the others said, ‘You jammy bugger, fancy telling her she looked good in that hat.’…A lot of students were frightened of her and therefore didn’t like her.” “She was really very mean to some people that she took against,” said Brogden, and was disconnected from the reality of students’ lives—she “thought that she wouldn’t intimidate.” It was that “she thought she had to play that grande dame part,” said Sassoon. “When I left college she was much nicer and warmer.”

However they felt, the effect of this visionary program was that by the end of the 1950s, and with shifts in social life and improvements in the economy (rationing was in effect until 1956), the College had become recognized for its training in fashion, and companies began to conceive of “employing a designer, and a young designer,” as Tyrrell put it. As a result, men and women could now plan careers in fashion, and many of those who had studied under Madge began to make their mark. The excitement of the London fashion scene in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is in part a result of her work. By the end of the 1950s, however, she had resigned from the College, saying that she was ready to move on to other projects. “In 1948, when I took over,” Robin Darwin wrote to her, “I believed that a School of Fashion Design here might eventually make a real contribution to industry, but I knew it would be a tremendously uphill task, and if Allan had not told me all about you and I had not met you…I very much doubt whether we would have gone ahead with the project at the time. In the event, your success and that of the School far outstripped my most optimistic dreams and everything has been due to your vision and energy.” This was his gracious goodbye, on paper. But they had argued, or she had, and she was privately unhappy to leave. Certainly she was combative, or not afraid to stand up for herself. She also seems to have taken offense at decisions he made, some seemingly minor, to do with protocol concerning the Queen Mother’s visit to the Royal College. He may have pressured her to go, wanting to appoint Janey Ironside—formerly Madge’s assistant, with whom he was having an affair—in her place. As soon as Madge resigned, he made Ironside the new principal of the school.

Still, for many years, Madge was invited back to speak to students. “She’d arrive staggeringly dressed, usually in black, and was quite riveting about her experiences, the people she knew, her life on
Vogue
and at College,” said Tyrrell, who remembered her as “immaculately turned out, with wonderful hair and pearls, looking stunning, sitting on a large settee, the students crowded around.” Her influence also continued, as many of the designers hired to teach in the program were her ex-students. She made a point of buying from their collections and directing friends to their work; Ernestine Carter, the most powerful fashion journalist in England during those years and a close friend of Madge’s, helped publicize their accomplishments. Carter was an American trained in art and design who had worked at the Museum of Modern Art as curator of architecture and industrial art in the 1930s. She was the fashion editor of
Harper’s Bazaar
in London after the war, then a writer and editor at the
Times
in the 1950s and ’60s. Like Madge, she was an intelligent advocate for fashion who was attuned to its connections to other forms of design.

The School of Fashion was a novelty. It was dedicated to the idea of fashion’s significance. And it was invented in an atmosphere that verged on disdain. In 1951, in a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts, when the school was still viewed skeptically by many, Madge attempted to explain the school and to present a theory of English fashion. During the postwar years, a period broadly characterized by both aggressive investment in the future and nostalgic glances backward, she also continued to focus on the creation of the present. In this lecture, she linked the School of Fashion, the complex attention to the current moment that is the fashion designer’s purview, and the grammar of modernism: “The proper function of this School,” she said, “is not the dissection of motives, not the study of the past. Rather is it concerned with the translation of the immediate past into what Gertrude Stein called ‘The continuous present.’” Citing Stein, she was gesturing to a more respected art form, but she was also invoking an artist whose radical rethinking of representation affirmed the quotidian.

Madge also argued that the endemic English “lack of professional expertize, brought about by our tendency to consider fashion as a frivolous subject suitable only for female amateurs, totally ignored the knowledge of the designer and the craftsmanship of the worker (let alone the number of people employed in the fashion industries).” Together, these issues did “much to account for the slow development of a national style.” Part of the problem was that “most people think they know something about fashion,” she said,

Establishing an atmosphere of intelligent analysis was crucial: “The fashion writer is usually only a reporter; an informed critic is rare,” she wrote in 1962. “This creates a very different climate from the bracing cut and thrust of ordinary journalism and is largely responsible for the vast amount of nonsense written about fashion.”

In Paris, in contrast, fashion was “based on a solid foundation of skilled workers, surrounded by artists, critics, and beautiful women, fed by a magnificent fabric industry, with a large home market and a big export trade, the inheritor of a long tradition of culture.” She had dramatized this seriousness in another description of a visit to a
maison de couture
in
Britannia and Eve
in 1930:

The English ethos of antiprofessionalism influenced every aspect of the arts, Madge believed, and could result in work of real integrity. “The English have always been inspired amateurs,” she said, citing Beaton’s approach to his craft: “Cecil would come [to the
Vogue
photography studio]…and he’d arrange everything too beautifully and then he’d say to the boy underneath the velvet cape, ‘Well, now take it!’ He never was a technician,” and yet he was an example of “this English amateurism which has great quality.” Some of the “decorations done by Vanessa [Bell] and Duncan [Grant],” however, lacked that quality. And of the products of Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop, she said, it’s not “enough to paint a kitchen table, you’ve got to make the kitchen table first, and they hadn’t got the knowledge.”

But her commitment was not only to a field of knowledge; it was to a way of being and feeling. Pleasure was as important as professionalism, and both were as powerful as her occasional dismissals of her work. Clothes were a place where emotion and expertise collided. Janey Ironside recalled “how sensually she adored colour and texture. She did all but eat her little [textile] samples” on her desk at the Royal College. “What woman does not know that comforting feeling of ‘looking her best,’ and the immense self-confidence imparted by a really becoming new gown?” Madge asked in
Britannia and Eve
in 1930. Much “serious” writing about the field—whether it described fashion as a reflection of social and political forces or as itself constituting them—was inadequate, she believed, because it did not account for the expressive experience of shopping for and wearing wonderful clothes: “There is a considerable body of work concerned with the history of fashion, and there is also what is known as the psychological approach to fashion,” she said in her lecture to the Royal Society. “But no amount of reading Veblen and Flügel has managed to give me that appalling sense of guilt which can be conferred by a mere gusset, or even allowed me that spark of excitement derived from a glimpse of vice discreetly indulged in.” She concluded her talk: “I can, with truth, say with Mme de Sévigné, ‘Dieu, comme j’aime la mode.’”

If being the Professor of Fashion meant believing in and articulating, over and over, the importance of what she and others knew, and made, and wore, it also involved making visible as work what was seen as natural. “We admire a faultlessly dressed woman,” she argued, “without realizing that this deceptive simplicity hides a world of calculation.” Far from trafficking in clichés about women’s duplicitous surfaces, Madge was describing the work and affective experience of fashionable dress—acknowledging that pleasurable self-transformation involves physical, psychic, and intellectual labor. “Apart from money, the two chief requirements are time and attention,” she wrote in “How to Dress on Nothing a Year,” in the midst of the Depression. “Good dressing takes up a lot of time, and it also requires much concentrated thought.” In other words, style is thinking.

In the late 1920s, she had assisted a friend who was a
mannequin de ville
, a socially prominent woman who was given an expensive wardrobe by a
maison de couture
that gained prestige and publicity when she wore its clothes to every opening and ball. Madge described the routine as “really hard
work
” for her friend. Each season, this woman received between twenty and thirty new models and returned the previous collection (which was then sold at a discount by the designer). “The selection of the shoes, coats, bags, gloves, and underwear to match the bi-annual new wardrobe was a work of patience and application which required two or three weeks in Paris,” she wrote, because everything was made to measure. Her friend had appointments all day long, going from one accessory firm to another, bringing the patterns “pinned to a sheet of paper, and standing for hours under the arc lights of the salons,” so that everything “match[ed] perfectly” and “every line fitted.” Her point in describing this little-known practice was that all of these preparations for dressing perfectly in “three outfits a day, every day”—a morning suit, something for five o’clock to eight o’clock, and evening wear—were “done in a professional way.” Even being dressed “at no cost” by a couturier was not what it sounded like, she noted, since a
mannequin de ville
had to have a husband or lover with a ready reserve to pay for furs, jewels, and so on. In other words, at a time when it was neither ordinary nor politic to do so, Madge Garland wanted to make visible the time, effort, and money that went into creating public femininity—and to acknowledge the expert standard that was achieved. “In those days,” she wrote in 1962, “the job of being a fashionable beauty was a full-time one and entailed the wearer’s complete subjection to her appearance—everything else came second…There are few women today who would be prepared to undertake such an existence even if they had the necessary money.”

As for herself: Being a woman who personified fashion at its highest levels and who also labored in the industry was a kind of oxymoron, since couture is all about the look of leisure. “To consume without producing has always been the prerogative of the privileged,” she observed in British
Vogue
in the 1960s; “to appear to do so was until lately the ambition of the middle classes whose women wished to ape the leisured lady.” Writing in the mid-1970s about the interplay of fashion, architecture, art, and the decorative arts in the first part of the twentieth century, she called the simplicity of twenties couture—the sweater suits and straight chemise dresses—“as deceptive as the [decade’s] plain furnishings. Chanel’s little cardigan suits were of the finest wool lined with the same rich silk as the accompanying blouse, belts had jeweled buckles with matching clips for neckline and the ‘cloche’ hat. It was a rich woman’s whim of pretending to dress like a poor one and demanded expensive perfection in every detail.”

Even before the top-down model of fashion began to shift in the 1960s—when street fashion began to influence high fashion—imitation and exchange had been fundamental to the industry, in part because many of its practitioners were middle-class adepts who aspired to, and made careers promulgating, the image and actuality of haute couture, and the elite world on which it depended. Madge was one of those outsiders who moved up in what is called “the fashionable world.” She understood the industry’s dependence on the invisibility of labor and the visibility of leisure, but she was proud that she had worked all her life. She believed that the period between the wars had made possible “the best life for women,” but acknowledged that her freedom, by which she meant her ability to have a career, had depended on the availability of cheap domestic labor by working-class and immigrant women. As a fashion icon, she modeled aspects of femininity while distancing herself from others (domestic labor). And if her talents and lifetime of work made her an authority in the field, her position was also emblematic of many women’s relationships to femininity, in which distinctions between production and consumption, labor and leisure, often blur.