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Gabrielle Chanel considered that Poiret’s dresses were costumes rather than clothes, and a growing number of women seemed to agree with her. ‘Eccentricity was dying: I hoped, by the way, that I helped to kill it,’ she said, as quoted in the book L’Allure de Chanel by Paul Morand (1996). Rubbing salt into the wound, she added that it was easy to attract attention dressed as Scheherazade, but a little black dress showed more class. ‘Extravagance kills personality,’ she pronounced. Whatever the truth of these claims, there is no arguing with the fact that Chanel took fashion into the 20th century. But the move had actually been precipitated by social change. During the First World War, women worked in factories and fields, and grew accustomed to the simplicity of uniforms. When it was all over, they were underfed but hardy, and unwilling to slip back into the traditional housewife/goddess role. (Many of them had, in any case, lost husbands and fiancés.) This was also the era of the automobile, which led to a more practical approach: short hair, skirts above the knee and tweed car coats. Women became less overtly feminine. Chanel and others – notably Jean Patou – adopted and embellished the androgynous style. With her quotable wit and her talent for mixing with the right crowd, Coco fits right in to our alternative history of fashion – one that emphasizes the power of marketing. We certainly shouldn’t forget her perfume, simply named No.5 because it was the fifth in a series of samples she had to choose from. It was notable for being the first unabashedly synthetic scent, which contributed to its image of modernity. Even today, according to François Baudot, ‘A veritable gold mine, [the scent] continues, in the most condensed form, to propagate the style, the allure and the resonance of a personality. . . to equal Picasso, Stravinsky or Cocteau. . .’

While Chanel was busy twisting the fashion writers around her little finger, other designers were demonstrating that they also knew a promotional trick or two. Although her brand did not prove as resistant as that of Chanel (and, let’s face it, few did), Elsa Schiaparelli was a formidable pre-war competitor. Salvador Dali collaborated on her dress designs –notably providing a cheeky lobster print – and the curvaceous bottle containing her perfume, Shocking, was supposed to have been modelled on the bust of the actress Mae West. Unfortunately, such publicity coups could not sustain her business through the dark years of the 1940s. War, of course, changed everything again. Although a number of fashion houses sprang up in occupied Paris, Jacques Fath and Nina Ricci among them, the focus shifted to the United States. Until that time, fashionable American women bought expensive gowns that had been imported from Paris, or had more affordable copies run up closer to home. Even before the war, manufacturers on Seventh Avenue in New York had begun experimenting with synthetic fabrics, faster production techniques and light, interchangeable garments. This development accelerated in the 1940s, and New York became the birthplace of ready-to-wear. By the time peace broke out, the hegemony of Paris as the world’s fashion capital was being challenged. Wartime innovations had shown that ‘chic’ need not mean personal dressmakers or ‘haute couture’. For the first time, fashion was no longer the preserve of the wealthy elite.

Not that Paris had relinquished its importance. The 1950s saw the rise of Christian Dior, a man whose fervour for promotion outstripped even that of his predecessors. As well as being a visionary designer, the inventor of ‘The New Look’ was a moneymaking machine. He launched his first perfume in 1947 and a ready-to-wear store in New York in 1948. By the end of the decade, he had licensed his brand to a range of ties and stockings. He opened branches all over the world, from London to Havana. By the time he died prematurely, in 1957, he was employing over a thousand people – a situation previously unheard of for a couturier. More than anybody before him, Dior realized that luxury could be repackaged as a mass product. Not only that, he considered it the key to the survival and profitability of a brand. As quoted by Erner, he once commented, ‘You know fashion: one day success, the next the descent into hell,’ adding, ‘I know lots of recipes, and one day. . . they might come in useful. Dior ham? Dior roast beef? Who knows?’ Perhaps it’s no surprise that, today, the Dior brand is owned by the LVMH (Louis-Vuitton Moët Hennessy) empire – the ultimate expression of luxury as big business.

Beyond Dior, the dictatorship of the brand took hold. Even in the 1960s, when fashion was democratized and everyone claimed the right to be stylish, the marketers had the upper hand. When asked who invented the mini-skirt, herself or the French designer André Courrèges, Mary Quant replied generously, ‘Neither – it was invented by the street.’ Nevertheless, Quant was one of several designers who translated Sixties youth culture into profit, with considerable success. Another such designer, on an entirely different scale, was Pierre Cardin, a man for whom extending the brand was little short of a crusade. A protégé of Christian Dior, naturally, Cardin noted very early on the decline of haute couture and acknowledged the potential of readyto-wear (prêt-à-porter). He opened one store called Eve and another named Adam. He demanded, and got, a corner of the Parisian department store Printemps reserved exclusively for his brand. A darling of the media, he followed Dior’s example by licensing his increasingly marketable identity, and today more than 800 different products around the world bear his name. In her (1999) book The End of Fashion, Teri Agins comments, ‘There was always a manufacturer somewhere who was ready to slap “Pierre Cardin” on hair dryers, alarm clocks, bidets, and frying pans. “My name is more important than myself,” Cardin once said.’ Agins goes on to quote Henri Berghauer, who helped to manage Cardin’s empire in the 1950s: ‘Pierre realized early that he wanted to be more of a label than a designer. He wanted to be Renault.’ Although this strategy generated a vast personal fortune, it also undermined the sense of exclusivity that is the core value of any luxury brand. The Cardin label has languished in the purgatory of the un-hip since the 1990s, and is only now seeing the first glimmer of a resurgence. The future of the brand could depend on whether the designer, aged 82 at the time of writing, succeeds in selling his business – although buyers have apparently balked at the €400 million asking price, according to the French newspaper Le Monde (‘L’homme d’affaires chercherait à vendre son empire’, 2 October 2004). The same article suggests that Cardin’s licences continue to rake in around €36 million a year. With that performance, he can afford to dismiss accusations that his brand name is no longer fashionable.

It’s impossible to talk about the fashion brands of the 1960s – or indeed the 1970s – without mentioning Yves Saint Laurent. Initially the successor to Dior, Saint Laurent quickly broke away to follow his own path, and it soon transpired that he was able to have his cake and eat it too. He was hailed as a genius of haute couture by the runway-watchers, while at the same time luring shoppers to his ‘luxury prêt-à-porter’ store, Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, in Paris’s Saint Germain district. YSL was keen on licensing, too, but, along with his business partner, Pierre Bergé, he kept a closer eye on quality control than Cardin had done. His biggest hit was a perfume, Opium, which launched in 1978 and remains popular today.
Throughout the 1970s, the democratization of fashion continued apace. Art schools pumped out rebellious young designers, rock fell in love with avant-garde clothing, the fashion press exploded and the first generation of ‘stylists’ – those benign dictators of dress – told consumers what to wear and how to wear it.

In France, the ancien régime of haute couture experienced a paroxysm of self-doubt, as prêt-à-porter took the high ground and streetwear usurped aristocratic glamour. The French also faced a new challenge from across the Alps, where the Italian textile and leather merchants began developing their own brands. In Repères Mode 2003, a collection of essays published by the Institut Français de la Mode, Ampelio Bucci makes the following note: ‘In only 20 years (from 1970 to 1990), [the Italian brands’] notoriety had risen to a global level and they had established a presence in all the principal markets.’ As early as 1965, the Italian leather goods and fur business Fendi was working with a talented young designer called Karl Lagerfeld, who helped to turn the small company into a ravishing brand. And Fendi was not the only Italian player; among the many others were Armani, Gucci, Cerruti, Krizia and Missoni, to name but a few. The London of the 1970s boasted plenty of fresh ideas, associated with names such as Ossie Clark, Anthony Price, Zandra Rhodes, and the short-lived concept store Biba, but the real powerhouses of the future were being created in Milan. Until a French tycoon called Bernard Arnault began laying the foundations for LVMH in the 1980s, the Milanese seemed to have the monopoly on luxury as a business. They were traders at heart, and they knew how to marry art with commerce in a way that many French labels hadn’t quite grasped.

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