Making the Cut

For many of us, the idea that the great Gabrielle Chanel was not the first woman to design modern clothing holds little interest. Our daily experience, after all, remains bookended by her legacies: the pantsuit and the little black dress. But occasionally, we are reminded that the Pantheon of couture includes at least five other Madames – Lanvin, Vionnet, Paquin, Schiaparelli, Gres – and one long-forgotten Lady: Lucy Duff Gordon, the British couturiere known as Lucile (1863-1935). The new Fashion Institute of Technology exhibition,” Designing the It Girl: Lucile and Her Style,” takes a stab at reviving her legacy.The exhibition – shockingly, the first ever on Lucile – is produced on a humble scale, organized by graduate students in fashion and textile studies who plunged into the Lucile archive at the Gladys Marcus Library at FIT. Composed of 80 black-and-white photographs and colored sketches, various fashion accessories, and four exemplary outfits – including that Lucile specialty, the diaphanous silk gown – the exhibit is an introduction to the woman who changed the face of fashion by tossing out the corset, inventing the fashion show, hiring glamorous, unsmiling models, and operating salons in London, New York, Paris, and Chicago. She also occupied herself with dressing actors in 70 stage productions and 20 silent films, writing a trend column for Harper’s Bazaar, and introducing the first designer ready-to-wear line in the 1917 Sears Roebuck & Company catalog. The resourceful Lucile even managed to survive the sinking of the Titanic by scandalously commandeering a lifeboat with her husband and maid. She was a pint-size, red-haired publicity machine, and, it could be argued, matched only by the indomitable cosmetics tycoon Helena Rubinstein. She was, in essence, the first “pop designer,” who understood the benefits of linking fashion with celebrity and fame.Lucile’s dominance peaked in the 1910s, casting her as a rival of sorts to Paul Poiret. Both appropriated the colorful exoticism of Leon Bakst, designer of the famed Russian ballet troupe Les Ballets Russes. But upon encountering the first group of photos, the viewer must try hard to conjure those famous Lucile colors: petunia pink, fog gray, violet, French blue, and emerald green. It’s virtually impossible to see how the sheer layers of color and embellishments startled the eye since the few pieces of clothing on display lack the abundant fur trim, feathers, beading, embroidery, and ribbon-work – all the detailing she was so famous for. We are forced to gaze at the colorful sketches and then transpose the feeling of color onto neighboring gray images. Those black-and-white publicity shots of tea gowns and evening dresses, however, do teach us about the body language and settings that were styled by Lucile. “One of the positive aspects about the reliance on photos is that we get to see how the clothing was worn on the body,” said Molly Sorkin, one of the curators. “You get to see how Lucile paired her models with gowns, and how she posed them.” Usually the models stand in classical, frieze-like poses, staring into the distance, aloof. Each look, however, is completely distinct; collectively they represent a schizophrenic array: Some dresses quote the past, particularly the grandes coquettes of the 18th-century French court with their cinched waists, decollete, and voluminous skirts, while others are startlingly forward-looking, linear, geometric, black. One begins to understand why Lucile slipped out from the history books and museums – she is very much a transitional figure, though a dashing one at that.From the beginning, Lucile was trying to create “personality dresses” in opposition to the made-to-measure specifications of the times. “In those days virtue was too often expressed by dowdiness,” Lucile wrote in her 1932 memoir, “Discretions and Indiscretions,” “and I had no use for the dull, stiff, bone-bodiced brigade. So I loosed upon a startled London, a London of flannel underclothes, woolen stockings, and voluminous petticoats, a cascade of chiffons, of draperies as lovely as those of ancient Greece.”She was the first to advocate fashion as self-expression, and she encouraged her clients – first members of the British aristocracy but quickly thereafter demimondaines and actresses such as Irene Castle – to develop their unique personal style, whether that meant sipping tea, piloting an airplane, or getting married. She dressed the It Girls of her day – a term coined by Lucile’s sister, the socialite-novelist-screenwriter Elinor Glyn – and many of them grace the walls here, including her models, “Crusaders of the Dream Dresses,” that she anointed with names like Corisande, Sumurun, and Arjamand. Some might say her publicity tactics outlasted her draping techniques.The last time Lucile made the fashion pages (other than her 1935 obituary) was this past October, when an evening dress from her 37 West 36th Street salon, created in 1910 for American heiress Margaret Daly Brown, grabbed the spotlight at the Doyle New York couture auction. Preserved in a trunk for 90 years, it sold for $35,850 to a private bidder who disclosed only that it was purchased for a woman in Europe and destined for private use. The Chanels – not just the suits from the 1950s, but even the rare black Chantilly lace flapper dress from the mid-1920s – didn’t elicit nearly as much excitement.There was something in the layers of fluid, sheer silks, the happy bohemian clashing of gold, violet, and pale acid green, the thick obi-like sash at the waist, and the graphic voided pattern. “Color has been my religion,” Lucile wrote in a 1916 column for Harper’s Bazaar, “for I see all beauty in terms of it.” The old dress eloquently summed up the contemporary idea of formal wear: It must be luxurious but also comfortable; it must hint at, if not cling to, the body beneath; and, ideally, it should be – or just look like – a one-of-a-kind dress. Most dresses from 1910 are costumes to our eyes, so unlike the current mode. But everyone wanted to slip into that Lucile and walk out the door, into the New York night.“Designing the It Girl: Lucile and Her Style” through April 16 at the Museum at FIT, Seventh Ave. at 27th St., 212-217-5970, www.fitnyc.suny.edu; admission is free.

Making the Cut

Making the Cut

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