From the archives: Our interview with Ralph Lauren in 1989.
He told the FT his philosophy of running a fashion empire: “Most of all you have to be sure that you control everything. Otherwise the licensee might think that they have a hot name and sell in all the wrong places. Before you know it, your name has gone.”
Almost 30 years later, Ralph Lauren the company is preparing for a future without its namesake at the helm. For more, read about Lauren's decision this week to step down from his companyhttp://on.ft.com/1MGqgXT and our analysis about Lauren's importance to the company he's leaving behind http://on.ft.com/1FEy3Gm.
Charles James (18 July 1906 in Sandhurst, Berkshire - September 23, 1978 in New York City) was a fashion designer known as America's first couturier. He is considered a master of cutting and is known for his highly structured aesthetic.
Contents
Early life
His father was a British army officer and his mother a Chicago "patrician".[1] In 1919, he attended Harrow School, where he met Evelyn Waugh, Francis Rose, and, most importantly, Cecil Beaton, with whom he formed a longstanding friendship. He was expelled from Harrow for a "sexual escapade".[2]At the age of nineteen in 1926, Charles James opens his first hat shop in Chicago, using the name of a schoolfriend, "Charles Boucheron".
In 1928, he left Chicago for Long Island with 70 cents, a Pierce Arrow, and a number of hats as his only possessions. He later opened a hat shop above a garage in Murray Hill, Queens, New York, beginning his first dress designs.[3]
Career
From New York James moved to London, setting up shop in Mayfair. He also spent spent time in Paris in the early 1930s, studying, but was primarily a self-taught designer.[2]James showed one of his most successful collections in Paris in 1947. In the 1950s, he spent most of his time in New York.
According to Harold Koda, The Costume Institute curator in charge, James "transformed fashion design" and his "many advancements included the spiral cut and the taxi dress (created in 1929 and so easy to wear it could be slipped on in the backseat of a taxi)."[4] James also "championed strapless in the Thirties; invented the figure-eight skirt, the puffer jacket and the Pavlovian waistband that expands after a meal, and was an early proponent of licensing."[4] Christian Dior is "said to have credited James with inspiring The New Look."[4]
James looked upon his dresses as works of art, as did many of his customers. Year after year, he reworked original designs, ignoring the sacrosanct schedule of seasons. The components of the precisely constructed designs were interchangeable so that James had a never-ending fund of ideas on which to draw. He is most famous for his sculpted ball gowns made of lavish fabrics and to exacting tailoring standards,[2] but is also remembered for his capes and coats, often trimmed with fur and embroidery, his spiral zipped dresses, and his white satin quilted jackets.
In 1954 James married Nancy Lee Gregory, a well-off girl from Kansas 20 years younger than himself; the two were married for 10 years and had a son and daughter.[2] After the birth of his son, Charles James Jr. in 1956, he also produced a children's collection.
He designed the interior and several pieces of furniture for the Houston home of John and Dominique de Menil.
After returning to New York City from Paris, Scaasi worked for James for two years.[5] James retired in 1958. Homer Layne, a graduate student at that time, was "James’ assistant for several years until his death in 1978."[4]
He died alone, of bronchial pneumonia, at the Chelsea Hotel, in New York City, which had three sixth-floor rooms for James' work space, office, and apartment.[4]
In 2014, his work was the subject of the opening exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Anna Wintour Costume Center called Charles James: Beyond Fashion.[4] At a preview of the exhibit, Elettra Wiedemann modeled a replica of the Clover Leaf ballgown James originally created for Austine Hearst.[4] It was the dress James ranked as the best of his creations.[2] At the preview event, the Costume Institute "detailed the designer’s significance today and showed a 1969 video of a James-led retrospective fashion show." [4]
At the Galleries
Dressing Up
How Charles James elevated American fashion.
by Judith Thurman May 5, 2014
James in 1948. Dior
called him “the greatest talent of my generation,” but he was often too
early to get credit for his breakthroughs. Photograph by Irving Penn.
- Keywords
- Style;
- Fashion;
- Charles James;
- Dresses;
- Gowns;
- Dressmakers;
- Tailoring
I have never met any of the
lucky women who owned a dress by Charles James. A college friend,
though, had an aunt who wore a James to her engagement party, in the
late nineteen-fifties. It must have been one of his last creations,
since he went out of business in 1958. “Imagine that! A James in the
family!” my friend said, as if she were speaking of a Vermeer. “I’ve
always wondered what happened to it.”
I’ve always wondered what
happened to James. His name draws a blank outside the fashion world,
although Christian Dior called him “the greatest talent of my
generation,” and Balenciaga, a miser with his enthusiasms, considered
James “the only one in the world who has raised dressmaking from an
applied art to a pure art.” But by the time this compliment reached
James’s ears he was living at the Chelsea Hotel, nearly destitute, and
estranged from all but a few devotees. They were mostly members of a
wild younger generation that included Halston, a former protégé, who
briefly gave James a job and, in 1969, produced a retrospective of his
work in an East Village night club. James turned on him, though, as he
had on so many friends and benefactors. He was demanding at his best,
and substance abuse heightened his volatility.Like Proust, who gave his mother’s furniture to a brothel, James sometimes lent a couture outfit to a club kid. But he also liked to model the clothes himself; his physique was elfin. Diana Vreeland recalled meeting James in the late nineteen-twenties, when he was voguing on a beach in the Hamptons in women’s hats of his own creation and “beautiful robes.” He was about to make his début as one of those boy wonders who have played an outsize role in the history of fashion. And there always was something of the boy wonder about him: a puerile sense of entitlement that did him in, a prodigious imagination that never gave out, and a conviction that he was immortal. James died at seventy-two, and at the end of his life he was wizened and frail, but he still had the luxuriant dark hair of a matinée idol. His grudges were luxuriant, too. He had so much bitterness to discharge, so much glory to recall, and such philosophy to impart—a whole science of couture—that he talked through the night to whoever would listen.
James’s years of obscurity never shook his confidence that posterity would give him his due, and, sure enough, the largest James retrospective ever mounted, “Charles James: Beyond Fashion,” opens on May 8th at the newly refurbished Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show’s curators, Harold Koda and Jan Glier Reeder, and its conservators, Sarah Scaturro and Glenn Petersen, have, in effect, rescued, restored, and annotated a lost gospel. Reeder, a James expert, spent three years demystifying a biography that James embroidered. Her catalogue essay is the first reliable chronology of the life and the work, and James’s range will astonish anyone who knows him only through a few photographs by Cecil Beaton. One of those images—a classical frieze, in which eight swanlike beauties are posed in a grand salon—is on the cover of the catalogue. Each ball gown is a pearly cascade of satin or taffeta, undergirded by an armature of bone, padding, or tulle.
By rights, he should be remembered, like Chanel, as one of those revolutionary pragmatists who changed the way that women dress. But James was often too early to get credit for his breakthroughs. He introduced an A-line coat ten years before Yves Saint Laurent, who had just taken over at Dior, made headlines with the Trapeze dress. It must also be said that Chanel and Saint Laurent focussed on women’s lives, while James fixated zealously on their proportions. “The feminine figure,” he believed, is “intrinsically wrong,” i.e. not platonically ideal by his standards. His mission to correct its flaws with a nip and a tuck, an arcing seam, a buckram implant, a cushion of air between skin and cloth diminished his relevance, even as it enhanced his prestige as an anatomist. The young find remedial fashion intrinsically uncool.
Charlie
James, as he was known to his familiars, was born on July 18, 1906, at
Agincourt House, not far from the Royal Military College in Sandhurst,
England, where his father, Ralph, was an Army staff officer. The baby
was named in honor of his late maternal grandfather, Charles Wilson
Brega, a Chicago shipping and real-estate magnate. His daughter Louise
had met Ralph on a world cruise with her family; he was returning from a
posting in China.
In 1910, the Jameses moved into a
sixteen-room mansion in London. At five or six, Charles began composing
for the piano. He was sent to boarding school at eight, and, at
fourteen, enrolled at Harrow, though he left before graduation, with
dismal grades. He later suggested that his departure was precipitated by
a “minor escapade,” although Reeder found no official record of it.
James was openly gay from his late teens, she notes, and for the friends
in his clique—Beaton among them—beautiful manners and bad behavior were
the essence of chic. They shared a taste for fancy dress, makeup, and
dramatics. (In the nineteen-thirties, James became a successful costume
designer.) Ralph James considered his son a disgrace, and the antipathy
was mutual. James turned to fashion, he explained to a correspondent,
“out of a compulsion to be involved in a business of which my father
disapproved.”By 1924, James was living in his mother’s home town, and working for Commonwealth Edison, in a desk job arranged by the company’s president, a family friend. When the flamboyant teen-ager staged a fashion show—of batik beach wraps—at the office, he was reassigned to the architecture department, where he absorbed some of the technical concepts that he would apply to couture. In 1926, however, he did something unthinkable for a member of his class, male or female: he opened a millinery shop. Ralph forbade his wife and daughters (one older, one younger than their brother) to patronize it. Louise sent her friends, however, and the doyennes of Chicago society loyally helped to underwrite the ventures of her prodigy. James shaped his hats directly on clients’ heads, cutting, twisting, and scrunching the felt or straw into whimsical shapes. A red cloche had a Jack Russell’s cocked earflap; a turban molded to the skull suggested Amelia Earhart’s flight helmet.
Most American couturiers have been, at best, middle class. Adrian was the son of a milliner, Norell of a haberdasher; Mainbocher worked in the complaints department at Sears, Roebuck; Galanos’s parents ran a Greek restaurant in New Jersey. Debonair Bill Blass, the son of a travelling salesman, could recall a time when he and his lowly ilk were asked to use the service elevator. James’s connections gave him a ready clientele for the couture business that he launched in 1928, when he added a line of clothing to his hats and opened a salon in Manhattan, on the second story of a former stable owned by Noël Coward. Beaton promoted his work in Vogue, and James, who had considerable flair as a huckster, seduced the fashion press on both sides of the Atlantic.
In 1929, he was back in London, preceded by his reputation. Lady Ottoline Morrell became a client, and Virginia Woolf first heard of “the man milliner who was dropped by Heaven” through her friend Mary Hutchinson, a cousin of Lytton Strachey. “So geometrical is Charlie James,” Woolf reported to her lover Vita Sackville-West, “that if a stitch is crooked, Vita, the whole dress is torn to shreds, which Mary bears without wincing.” Hutchinson wore a James blouse for her portrait by Matisse, at the artist’s request. But, she later recalled, “Charlie was sometimes so entranced by the shape he was ‘sculpting’ over one’s own” that when a dress arrived “it was impossible to get into.”
James’s entrée to Bloomsbury was sponsored, in part, by his Harrow schoolmate Stephen Tennant, the gay aesthete who was a model for eccentric characters in novels by Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. James ran up a fetchingly polymorphous wardrobe for him that included slinky beach pajamas. Tennant gushed in a letter to Beaton about an “ineffably limp” dress shirt in creamy satin and the “stunningest” black trousers, which “seem glued to every fissure & ripple of thigh & bottom.” Yet, if James flirted with cross-dressing, he didn’t let his female clients take the same liberty. He claimed to prize character above beauty in a woman, but he was an absolutist in his reverence for an old-school ideal of femininity.
Between the two world wars, James owned exclusive salons in Paris, London, and New York. He tacked between them, stretching his resources (which is to say borrowed resources) thin. Financial improvidence eventually destroyed his business, and his artistic scruples—the only kind he possessed—routinely jeopardized his deadlines and contracts. Balenciaga’s couture ateliers produced some three hundred ensembles a year. James managed to create fewer than two thousand in the course of four decades. He once reworked a sleeve so many times that the labor and the materials invested in it supposedly amounted to twenty thousand dollars. The cost of such obsessiveness couldn’t be recouped, even at the astronomical prices that the world’s best-dressed women were happy to pay, while his opportunism strained their good will. The Countess of Rosse, a devoted patron, once brought a rich friend to James’s atelier. He told her, “I couldn’t possibly make anything for a frump like you.”
No one, least
of all James, has ever accounted for his artistry as a tailor.
Apparently, he spent time in Paris studying his trade, though where or
under whose aegis is uncertain. He thought of his vocation as sartorial
engineering, but Harold Koda believes that there was more instinct than
science to James’s craft, and Richard Martin, the late fashion
historian, dared to suggest that James “pretended to give serious
thought to the structural elements of the dress, but a study . . . shows
that he simply applied more and more layers until he achieved the
needed density and shape.”
Instinct and reason, however, are
both aspects of spatial intelligence. James could visualize a complex
pattern in three dimensions, then wrap or drape it directly on a body.
The manipulation of material was one of his signatures, and he had no
qualms about distressing it, or combining classic luxury fabrics with
funky synthetics, like a fuzzy white plush that resembled wet feathers.
The architect of the Pantheon’s dome would have admired his cantilevered
skirts, one of which, belonging to the Petal dress, had a circumference
of nearly eighty feet. James’s masterpiece, by his own just assessment,
was the famous Clover Leaf ball gown. I tried but failed to follow the
cutaway drawings that illustrate its construction—it had thirty pattern
pieces and weighed ten pounds—or Reeder’s description of “the semi-bias
in the asymmetrical outer layer” and the “sequence of undulating curves,
that work in symphony . . . with top and bottom curves undulating in
opposite directions.” For a 2011 James show at the Chicago History
Museum, the curators resorted to CT-scan technology to expose the bones
of a James under its flesh. A photograph shows three bemused-looking
technicians grappling with what looks like a supine débutante who wound
up in the E.R. after the ball. It is actually James’s Swan dress
strapped to a gurney.Koda told me that “to really understand” a James “you have to take it apart.” But his catalogue essay, “The Calculus of Fashion,” does an excellent job of noninvasive deconstruction. And if you strip a James to its foundation what you find is sex. The true function of fashion, James said, is to arouse the mating instinct. The Broadway star Gertrude Lawrence was quoted as saying that she had never bought anything more respectable than a James—or as “utterly indecent.” His Taxi dress, of the early thirties, spiralled seamlessly around the body and clasped at the hip. (Later models zipped across the torso on a rakish diagonal.) The dress got its name, James explained, because he wanted to design a garment that a woman could slip into—or out of—in the back of a cab. A deceptively austere sheath, like the Coq Noir, of 1937, swaddled the figure like a mummy’s wrapping, but James bunched the excess silk at the back, forming an obscenely gorgeous labial bustle. A James gown invites you to imagine the lobes and crevices of the nude body beneath it, and it wasn’t for the faint of heart. “Elegance,” he wrote, “is not a social distinction but a sensual distinction.” Gypsy Rose Lee, the queen of burlesque, was a favorite client.
Upper-class life carried on during the Depression with an insouciant disregard for the general misery. Vreeland and her husband, a banker, who were living abroad, kept a liveried chauffeur for their Bugatti. By the end of the decade, James was juggling fully staffed couture ateliers in London and in Paris, where he stayed at the venerable Hôtel Lancaster. His friend Jean Cocteau lived across the hall, and Cocteau’s influence is apparent in a series of grosgrain opera coats that Beaton photographed against a background by Christian Bérard. The coats were an experiment in using humble materials for exalted purposes, and they have an aura—stark, dreamy, faintly vampiric—of costumes for a Surrealist chatelaine.
Cocteau also allegedly saved James from a suicide attempt, which was not his first. In Chicago, James had tried to kill himself over an unrequited love, having taken pains with the décor of his death scene: flickering candles, gilded mirrors, an ether-soaked handkerchief. “Racked by the pain in his nose,” Reeder writes, he was rushed to a hospital that his grandfather had funded. In some respects, however, James had an unusually robust survival instinct. He decamped from Paris for London in August of 1939, then sailed for New York.
The
Second World War was a golden age for American fashion. Stylish women
who had shopped in Paris were forced to become locavores. James opened a
couture salon on East Fifty-seventh Street, but he also established
relationships with leading retailers. In 1941, B. Altman mounted a show
of his trouser-skirts. Wearing pants was still largely taboo for
middle-class women—slacks were acceptable on the factory floor and for
the construction jobs that women had stepped up to fill—but James
devised a clever solution for the conflicting demands of comfort and
propriety. The skirt was essentially a bifurcated sarong, threaded
between the thighs. It freed the legs and their stride, but a crossover
front panel dissembled their separation. A sporty knee-length version
anticipated the culotte; a resort-wear evening ensemble came with a
midriff-baring top. The respectable and the indecent were never far
apart.
New York was tonic for James. He liked to deplore the
vulgarity of garmentos, but he was nothing if not a man on the make. He
found a kindred spirit in Florence Nightingale Graham, a former nursing
student and makeup salesgirl from a small town in Ontario who had
reinvented herself as Elizabeth Arden. James was her walker in New York
and Chicago, although his mother failed to get her into the society
pages—she was “trade.” When Arden became engaged to a Russian prince,
James designed her trousseau. She shared James’s ambition to correct
women’s flaws, and in 1943, when she decided to expand her beauty
business to include custom-made clothes, she hired him to head the
department. Their partnership ended in bickering over money and credit
for his designs (she was not the first or the last of his associates
whom he accused of piracy), and she was incensed by a backlit red vase
that he had placed prominently in the window, giving her tony
establishment, she felt, the air of a bordello. But, thanks in part to
Arden’s patronage, James met Millicent Rogers, Babe Paley, Marietta
Tree, Slim Keith, and Austine Hearst, among other glamorous clients, who
inspired and subsidized some of his greatest work. Hearst commissioned
the Clover Leaf gown for Eisenhower’s Inaugural ball, though she had to
wear something else—it wasn’t ready.When the war ended, James hired Japanese-Americans recently liberated from internment camps to staff his new atelier, on Madison Avenue. They worked, he wrote, on “my most important bigger clothes, ball dresses and such”—including the sumptuous baroque gowns in an advertising campaign, photographed by Beaton, for Modess sanitary napkins. The idea was “that any woman at a difficult moment can imagine herself a Duchess,” although, at a difficult moment, you could never have squeezed a James gown into the stall of a ladies’ room. The Japanese had “a special quality of precision” that James found lacking in the New York labor pool. Harold Koda, however, told me that James was a selective perfectionist. He violated the integrity of his fabrics, and, Koda said, “I was shocked to discover how shoddy some of his seams are.”
After the war, French fashion regained its predominance, which is to say its American market. Although James was among the world’s most expensive couturiers—he charged seven hundred to fifteen hundred dollars for a dress—he fulminated at the disproportionate profits and the obsequious coverage that his counterparts in Paris were reaping. The problem, as he saw it, was partly a lack of competition from an American fashion industry enfeebled by mediocrity and rife with plagiarism. To encourage native talent and originality, he joined forces with Michelle Murphy, of the Brooklyn Museum, and he created the prototype for a dress dummy whose figure held the promise, he thought, of transforming the fit of American sportswear. The Jennie was a slim but realistic modern Eve, with a small bust, a convex tummy, and a slouch. It never caught on commercially, though James’s advocacy did have a lasting consequence: He persuaded Millicent Rogers to donate twenty-four of her James gowns to the Brooklyn Museum. Her bequest set a precedent for treating couture as art—and as a tax deduction.
James’s career was approaching its zenith. In 1950, he won a prestigious Coty Award, the first of two, and, in 1953, the Neiman Marcus Award—fashion’s Oscar. (He startled the black-tie audience by appearing in jeans at the ceremony. “The bluejean is the only art form in apparel,” he explained.) He also branched out into other fields. The philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil hired James to decorate their house in Houston, designed by Philip Johnson. James’s voluptuous biomorphic furniture and hot color scheme—fuchsia, crimson, and tobacco halls; pewter, gold, and chartreuse upholstery—eroticized the modernist architecture. Johnson excluded the house from surveys of his work.
But no departure was more radical for James than his church wedding, in 1954, to Nancy Lee Gregory, a wealthy divorcée from Kansas, twenty years his junior. Some of their friends suspected venal motives, though James insisted he had married for love. “My wife knew I was homosexual,” he said in an interview years later, adding that “all of society is double-gaited.” When a son, Charles, Jr., was born, in 1956, James celebrated his new status with a collection of children’s wear. One of the pieces was a baby’s cape, in robin’s-egg blue, eccentrically cut, like the carapace of a tortoise, with front-set armholes designed to limit an infant’s “flailing.” Princess Grace of Monaco ordered eighteen items for the layette of her daughter, Caroline.
A late marriage and fatherhood sometimes mellow a restless bachelor, but they seemed to exacerbate James’s disaffections. The fine print of his financial dealings, documented by Elizabeth Ann Coleman, the curator of an important James show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1982, trace the death spiral of a grandiose enterprise out of control. The business had been diversified into a labyrinth of corporations that handled contracts for couture, ready-to-wear, faux furs, costume design, maternity fashions, the children’s wear, prom dresses, accessories, and other projects, many unrealized, including a foundation. In the first year of the marriage, when the couple was living at the Sherry Netherland Hotel, and James had just leased a sprawling new atelier, Charles James Manufacturers recorded revenues of $112,963, against expenditures of $310,266.
Bitter litigation with his licensees contributed to the brewing debacle. For much of the next four years, the couple lived on the run from their creditors—a list of their addresses includes more than a dozen hotels in New York, New Orleans, Kansas City, and Chicago. In 1957, days before the birth of their daughter, Louise, the Internal Revenue Service seized the contents of James’s showroom; a year later, city marshals raided his office, and the business sank under its debts. Nancy’s money was gone, and Charles was using amphetamines prescribed by Max Jacobson, the infamous Dr. Feelgood. “I do not know,” James said, “if I did right to marry and ruin Nancy, but . . . the necessity of success and achievement came first.” Nevertheless, their mutual tenderness survived divorce, and Nancy helped to preserve the James legacy. But she took the children and moved back to Kansas.
James landed at the
Chelsea in 1964. The maids refused to clean his squalid rooms, which he
shared with a beagle named Sputnik. He continued to produce custom
clothing for the occasional client, but, fuelled by speed, he indulged
in an orgy of blame. James ended his fifty-year friendship with Beaton
over a perceived disloyalty, accused the Brooklyn Museum of stealing
materials that he had left there for storage, returned his awards in a
fit of pique, and denigrated Vreeland for a long list of slights.
Yet,
in destitution, James discovered a talent for generosity as a teacher.
He embarked on a series of projects focussed on “fashion engineering”
with the Art Students League and Pratt Institute, and he won a
Guggenheim Fellowship to write a textbook on the same subject. His young
friends saw him as a link to the heroic age of couture. Antonio Lopez,
the illustrator, preserved a record of James’s work in hundreds of
drawings. Homer Layne, a Pratt student from Tennessee, became his chief
assistant and the steward of his archives, which he gave to the Met last
year. The photographer Bill Cunningham documented the late-night
“seminars” at which James held forth on “the fine points of couture, the
follies of the rich, and ‘the plagiarists of Seventh Avenue.’ ”James never produced the textbook, and he never finished a memoir he was writing, which he intended to call “Beyond Fashion.” But in 1974 a British magazine published his autobiographical sketch, “A Portrait of a Genius by a Genius.” That is how he had lived—with a messianic faith in his uniqueness—and that is how he left the scene. On Friday, September 22, 1978, the day before he succumbed to pneumonia and heart disease, an ambulance was called to the hotel. “It may not mean anything to you,” James told the medics, “but I am what is popularly regarded as the greatest couturier in the Western world.”
Layne spent the weekend clearing out the rooms before the hotel could seize their contents. James owed six months of back rent. ♦
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute opens “Charles James: Beyond Fashion”
on May 8, the exhibition will have 70 outfits, making it the largest
show devoted to the designer, who died in 1978 at age 72. Among them are
the Taxi dress, designed in 1929, which wrapped around the body and
fastened with Bakelite clasps, so that a woman could slip into it while
in the back of a taxi, and the Clover Leaf dress of 1952, which did not
touch the floor but undulated while the woman walked.
There
is also a black silk bias-cut dress designed 20 years before that, with
short kimono sleeves, a deep V-back and two black silk streamers that
fluttered in the back, at the waist, as the breeze blew.
That was the dress that I wore on the night of June 20, 1975, nearly 40 years ago. That night, I was Charles James’s walker.
I
went with the designer, as his date, to the Everson Museum of Art in
Syracuse for the opening of “Charles James,” an exhibit of 215 of
Charles’s drawings of his designs (and 50 by Antonio Lopez, the fashion
artist, and his collaborator, Juan Ramos), along with one of Charles’s
famous curvaceous Butterfly sofas that resembled a woman’s buttocks,
first designed in 1950 for Dominique de Menil. Other clients included
Lily Pons and Gypsy Rose Lee, Babe Paley and Millicent Rogers, Mrs.
William Randolph Hearst, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney and Jeanne
Bultman, the wife of the artist Fritz Bultman.
Jerry
Hall was in the caravan that drove to Syracuse that night with Mr.
Lopez; Mr. Ramos; Homer Layne, Charles’s assistant and pattern maker;
Sputnik, the designer’s beagle; and me.
By
day, I was the editor of Art Direction magazine; by night, I was a
fashionista. I haunted vintage shops like Harriet Love, and dressed up
at midnight to go to Max’s Kansas City, with feathers woven in my hair. I
had wanted to publish Juan and Antonio’s work, and told them I wanted
to write about fashion. They introduced me to Charles, who wanted a
writer to help him do his autobiography.
I
first met him at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan, in his bedroom/studio,
Room 624. He was not an intimidating man. He stood 5 feet 6 inches,
just an inch taller than me. His hair was a gleaming black, and his dark
eyebrows were bushy, his eyes friendly and highly intelligent. He spoke
with an English accent. The room had a mysterious scent, unidentifiable
and slightly medicinal. Charles made his own perfumes, often using
civet and ambergris. He also burned fragrances from Floris, the English
company.
Sometimes
we would go to the workroom, down the hall in 618, which was filled
with dress forms, a sewing machine and a cutting table placed over a
bed. That was where Mr. Layne, then in his 30s, made patterns, from 1970
until Charles James’s death. “I did the cutting and sewing,” said Mr.
Layne (now retired after a long career working for the designers Tom and
Linda Platt), adding with a laugh, “When he sold something, he’d give
me $500, and then he’d borrow back about half of that.”
But
Charles was generous in other ways. “One time, we were shopping at Sy
Syms, and he saw this coat — a camel-color wool coat, a winter coat with
a tie belt — and he bought it for me,” said Mr. Layne, who also walked
Sputnik, drove Charles around the city and made their meager lunch of
boiled rice sealed in a plastic bag, then adding vegetables to it.
“He
didn’t care about food,” Mr. Layne said. Twice a week, they would go to
a nearby restaurant he remembered as the Wild Mushroom, where Charles
would eat a burger, and Mr. Layne the sautéed chicken livers and onions.
But on those days, when they had so little money that boiled rice would
be all that they could afford, I would excuse myself, and go home.
(In
2013, Mr. Layne sold a collection of more than 100 items of the
designer’s clothing, accessories and ephemera to the Met, for a sum
neither would disclose.)
It
was not always easy to be a friend of Charles, and Mr. Layne survived —
with a submissive grace — the designer’s mercurial personality.
One
such feud involved Halston: In 1975, Charles wrote an article for
Metropolis magazine, accusing the younger designer, whom he had known
since 1958 and who had hired him to help re-engineer some clothing, of
plagiarism after Halston didn’t include Charles’s name on the label.
When Charles wasn’t attacking Halston in print, he would attack him
verbally, to me. He would call Halston “that thief, that copycat.”
He
also accused Diana Vreeland, the longtime editor of Vogue and then a
special consultant to the Costume Institute, of purposefully ignoring
him. “If he thought you had crossed him, you were off his list,” Mr.
Layne said. “He felt that Diana Vreeland was in a conspiracy to keep his
work out of the magazine.” ( His clothes had not appeared in Vogue
since 1957.) He wanted me to write an article that would be critical of
Ms. Vreeland, but I wanted to concentrate on his talent, not these
furies.
I
was sometimes at the studio at night, when Antonio was drawing a model,
maybe Eija Vehka Aho or Nancy North. I would ask Charles how he made
the skirt flare, or shaped a bodice, and he would explain calmly and
meticulously. “He was vain,” said Paul Caranicas, an artist who was Mr.
Ramos’s partner from 1972 to 1995, when Mr. Ramos died. “And if you paid
him attention, he wouldn’t be cranky.”
To
keep Charles amiable at the Everson show, Mr. Ramos and Mr. Lopez
invited me to be his companion for the evening. I was to keep him
constant company, flatter him on the drawings and smile benevolently as
people came up to congratulate him. I was to prevent him from mentioning
either Halston or Ms. Vreeland.
I went to his workroom so he could choose a dress for me one June day, a week or two before the opening.
“Try this,” he said.
He
held up a brilliant orange silk satin dress, with slender straps, a
snug bodice with a décolleté neckline and a tight form-fitting skirt to
just above the knees, where a white stiffened satin band, reaching to
the floor, flared out. I squeezed myself in and couldn’t breathe or
walk.
“The dress is fantastic,” I said. “But I can’t wear it. It’s structured. It’s formal. It’s too small. It isn’t me.”
He
designed the dress in 1974 as a gift for Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas, a
sculptor in Manhattan and occasional patron, finishing it a few years
later. (Ms. Strong-Cuevas said that the dress was so tight on her, she
broke the zipper once.)
He asked me what I liked.
“The 1920s and ’30s,” I said. “Black, preferably, bias-cut, no structure and easy to move in.”
Days
later, I went to the workroom, and there was the 1932 number. It was
the most beautiful and erotic dress. The fabric slithered over the body,
just barely touching the skin. Air circulated between the body and the
dress, so when the silk did brush against the skin, it felt like a
caress. I was ecstatic. “That’s me,” I said. Charles looked pleased.
On the night of the opening, Charles went in early to inspect the show. He was not happy.
Mr.
Caranicas said, “Antonio’s drawings were framed, and Charles had a
vision of how he wanted them hung, on black lacquered panels,
triptychs.” One of the triptychs was in the wrong place. “Charles took
it off the wall,” Mr. Caranicas said, “and started going to our hotel
with it. We saw him leaving with it, and we got into the car, and Juan
jumped out of the car, and persuaded him to return it, so it was hung
where he wanted it.”
Charles
wore a navy wool blazer and tan pants that night, Mr. Layne recalled,
store-bought. “He never made anything for himself,” Mr. Layne said,
except once, a swimsuit when he went to Capri, in the 1920s.
Floating
in the black dress and Manolo Blahnik black silk shoes, I circulated
next to Charles, and at dinner, nudged him (gently) to eat a bite or two
of food. Ms. Hall, tall, lithe and bubbling with that outsize Texan
charm, swanned about the museum, wearing another Charles James dress,
under a glamorous white eiderdown jacket from 1938. I gaped at the
jacket, and said to Charles how wildly beautiful it was. Halfway through
dinner, as plates were being cleared from the table, Charles said, “I
think you should wear that jacket now.” He went over to Ms. Hall, asked
her for the jacket, and then held it out for me to slip on.
It
was my first and last time wearing haute couture. It was a singular
moment, to be clothed in pure silk, inside and out, head to toe, a white
puff of a jacket over a slink of a black dress. I was in a state of
bliss.
The next day, I was back to my own clothes: jeans, Indian cotton gauze top, sandals.
That summer, I met with Charles maybe once or twice at the Chelsea. In October, my phone rang.
“This is Charles James,” the English-accented voice said.
He had called to invite me to a black-tie dinner, somewhere in New York, with Juan and Antonio, the next night.
“Oh,
Charles, thank you so much,” I said. “I would love to go with you, but
in the last month, I have fallen in love with a wonderful man, and
tomorrow night, we’re going to a Knicks game.”
There was silence at the other end.
Finally, Charles, who was once married and was the father of two children, said, in a warm voice, “I wish you happiness.”
But this was not the end of my relationship with him.
My
boyfriend, Gerry Sussman, an editor at The National Lampoon, wanted to
meet Charles James. Gerry loved the Knicks, but he also loved clothes.
He sometimes had his sports jackets custom-made, and certainly his
tuxedo.
Gerry
understood Charles’s genius. But he also wondered about his hair, still
jet black despite the advancing years. What kind of dye did the
designer use? Was it shoe polish? No, it was a black commercial hair
gel, Mr. Layne said.
Gerry
was such a fan of Charles’s that I had the bright idea of commissioning
my wedding dress from Charles. It was January 1977, and we were going
to get married that June.
By
then, the book project with Charles James was dormant. But Antonio and
Juan often invited Gerry and me to go to a cocktail party for Charles.
One day, I was visiting Charles in his studio at the hotel, where he was
sewing pieces of Chinese jade, beautifully carved small pieces in
clear, deep green, onto the waistband of a pale pink silk satin
full-length skirt. The jade pieces were going to be buttons, to close
the waistband.
Who’s that for? I asked.
“A young Chinese lady who has a lot of jade,” he said.
“Wait,” I said to myself. “I’m a young Chinese lady who has a lot of jade” (in the form of pendants, bracelets and rings given to me by my mother).
I raced home to Gerry.
“What if Charles were to design me a wedding dress,” I said, “using some of the family jade?”
“Sure,” Gerry said. “What do you think it would cost?”
“Twenty-five hundred?” I said. “He’s kind of penniless these days.”
“O.K.,” Gerry said. “But first ask Juan and Antonio what they think of the idea.”
I
called Juan, left a message, and later that night he called back. I
told him the idea, to commission a wedding dress from Charles, to be
ready in six months, by June.
“Forget about it,” Juan said in his high-pitched but street-raspy voice. “We like Gerry.”
“What does that have to do with commissioning the dress?” I asked.
“Charles will never finish the dress,” Juan said.
That
Charles James was such a perfectionist that he often did not finish
dresses was not a myth. “He wanted to get it right,” Mr. Layne said.
“Most clothing, you feel it pulling on your shoulder, and it’s not
balanced properly. He put the weight on the trapezius muscle that runs
across the ridge of your shoulders. That’s what carries the weight, and
that’s why they felt so light.”
“If you want to marry Gerry, marry Gerry,” Juan said. “Wear anything. Just forget about the dress.”
And so I did.
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