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When did fashion stop being fashionable? To paraphrase Hemingway, it happened slowly, and then very quickly. Probably the rot set in around the mid- to late 1980s, provoked by a boom-to-bust economy and the emergence of AIDS as a powerful metaphor for the delayed hangover that followed the 1970s. The effect of the disease was terrifyingly real as it tore through the creative economy, robbing it of some of its brightest emerging stars.
Not that this grim decade was entirely devoid of hope. By now the most interesting thing on the catwalk was definitely in prêt-à-porter, with extraordinary creations from Jean-Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler and Kenzo. Elsewhere, Karl Lagerfeld was busy revitalizing Chanel –where he was appointed in 1983 – and Christian Lacroix was showing flamboyant dresses inspired by his passion for opera, folklore and the history of costume. This was, after all, the time of the New Romantic. The period also saw the emergence of the Japanese designers, notably Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo (of Comme des Garçons), whose ethereal black numbers combined minimalist rigour with futuristic interpretations of traditional garb. More costume than dress, they served as inspiration for the monochrome severity that characterized the tail end of the 1980s.

More than anything, though, this was the era of the yuppie, the young upwardly mobile professional, whose clothing signified success. ‘Power dressing’ became a buzz phrase. Giorgio Armani’s unstructured but easily identifiable suits were worn as a badge of success. In the UK, while providing flashy City boys with eccentrically reworked interpretations of the tailored suit – his trademark ‘classics with a twist’ –
Paul Smith also discovered the Filofax, a leather-bound ‘personal organizer’ manufactured by a tiny East End company. By popularizing this combination of address book and diary, which implied that its user had people to see and places to go, Smith handed the yuppies their ultimate accessory.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Ralph Lauren had been steadily building one of the ultimate fashion brands. His rag trade-toriches story has been told many times before, but it’s worth briefly repeating here.

Born Ralph Lifshitz in 1939, America’s most upwardly mobile designer was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants from the Bronx. His father was a house painter, who changed the family name to Lauren when young Ralph was still at school. Ralph was brought up on the Hollywood movies of the 40s and 50s, mentally filing away images of Cary Grant and Fred Astaire so that he could recreate their style. He got his start in the fashion business selling suits at Brooks Brothers, and later became a wholesaler of ties and gloves in New York’s garment district. Soon he began designing his own ties, choosing the name ‘Polo’ for its aristocratic associations. The stylish neckwear proved a big hit at Bloomingdale’s, and by 1970 Ralph had taken over a corner of the Manhattan department store with an entire range of upmarket apparel. According to Teri Agins, ‘Lauren will go down in fashion history for introducing the concept of “lifestyle merchandising” in department stores. . . Lauren designed [his] outpost to feel like a gentlemen’s club, with mahogany panelling and brass fixtures.’ She goes on to say that Lauren’s stores ‘stirred all kinds of longings in people, the dream that the upwardly mobile shared for prestige, wealth and exotic adventure’. But Ralph Lauren is important for another reason. European luxury brands frequently dwell on their ‘heritage’ for marketing purposes, using a tradition of craftsmanship as a way of seducing consumers and justifying elevated prices (think of Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Dunhill and Asprey). Almost subconsciously, Lauren realized that, in the USA, history was irrelevant. This was the land of Hollywood, of fantasy for sale.
Lauren created a world of aristocratic good taste, but it was pure invention. In the end, his success rested on the quality of his clothes and his knack for branding. Lauren’s shops were film sets, and his advertising campaigns – shot by Bruce Weber – were stills from movies that had never been made. It’s no surprise to learn that Lauren designed the costumes for the film The Great Gatsby. In many ways, Lauren was Jay Gatsby – the man who created himself.

Ralph Lauren was the perfect brand for the 1980s, when fashion became less important than ‘lifestyle’. In fact, with the rise of the supermodel, the media seemed more interested in how the models lived than in the clothes they wore.
Fashion clutched its chest and keeled over some time in the 1990s. In The End of Fashion, Teri Agins suggests that women lost interest in fashion because they were more concerned about their careers: ‘[They] began to behave more like men in adopting their own uniform: skirts and blazers and pantsuits that gave them an authoritative, polished, power look.’

In addition, the Paris catwalks had lost their relevance in the face of MTV culture and streetwear. Levi’s, Nike and Gap seemed a lot more connected to quotidian reality than some ethereal vision on a runway. Tracksuit-wearing rappers and the chino-clad super-nerds of the dotcom boom were the new icons; ‘casual Friday’ elided into the rest of the week. Stores selling comfortable but unchallenging garments, mostly run up on the cheap in Asia, made dressing down not only affordable, but acceptable. The elitist stance once taken by fashion brands began to look stuffy and – horror of horrors – old-fashioned. Clothing became a commodity, spare and functional. Even supermodels began to look less ‘super’. Kate Moss, in her first incarnation as a grungy teenager, had nothing of the femme fatale about her. Calvin Klein built a phenomenally successful brand around posters featuring Moss and other androgynous youths sporting baggy jeans and nothing else; it was the ‘simple chic’ ethic taken to the nth degree.

Finally, many fashion houses were acquired by or grew into vast corporations, selling clothing, accessories, make-up and furniture. As Teri Agins explains, ‘Such fashion houses just also happen to be publicly traded companies, which must maintain steady, predictable growth for their shareholders. . . Fashion. . . requires a certain degree of risktaking and creativity that is impossible to explain to Wall Street.’ Further, she observes that the utilitarian blandness of Nineties clothing made marketing more important than ever. Branding played a critical role ‘in an era when. . . just about every store in the mall [was] peddling the same styles of clothes’.
Today, while branding remains as crucial as ever, its raison d’être has changed. Six years on from the publication of Agins’ book, fashion has – inevitably – transformed itself again. Style has come out of the closet.

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.

The one constant of fashion is constant change. Although Worth left his business in the capable hands of his two sons, Gaston and Jean-Philippe, his brand could not remain at the forefront of style for ever. This is not to say that it didn’t have a pretty good run. A stand at the Paris Exposition of 1900 did a roaring trade, and the Worth name continued to resonate up to and beyond the 1920s (with a branded Worth perfume being launched as late as 1925). By then, though, the torch had been passed on not once, but twice.

The young designer Paul Poiret, recruited to Maison Worth by Jean-Philippe, soon began to challenge the restrictive styles of his masters. The son of a fabric merchant, Poiret had started out as an apprentice umbrella maker. In his spare time he had begun using umbrella silk to dress dolls in experimental designs. Poiret wanted to free women from the over-complicated structures that encumbered the upper body. Eventually he would banish the corset altogether, revolutionizing the way women dressed. As François Baudot comments in his (1999) book Mode Du Siècle, ‘[Before then] no fashionable woman would, or could, lace herself into or escape from her carapace without the aid of a second person. They had to wait for Poiret before the appearance of clothes they could put on by themselves.’

As is often the case, Poiret’s employers weren’t ready to embrace his radical ideas, and in 1904 he opened his own shop in the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré. In the years that followed, Poiret altered the outline of women’s clothing for good. First came his interpretation of the Empire line: long straight dresses falling from a high waist that emphasized the bust. Then there was the ‘hobble’ skirt, cut so straight and narrow that its wearer could take only tiny steps (somewhat undermining claims that his clothes ‘liberated’ women). Inspired by fantasies of the Orient and the exotic Ballets Russes, Poiret devised variants of the kimono and baggy harem pants. The latter caused a sensation because, in fashion as in relationships, women were not expected to wear the trousers. Poiret went on to blur the boundaries between art and fashion, recruiting painters such as Georges Lapape and Raoul Dufy to illustrate his catalogues, and decorating his store in a style that prefigured Art Deco.

Like Worth before him, Poiret had a practical yet sophisticated approach to promoting his products. In 1911 he became the first couturier to launch a branded perfume, which he called Rosine, after his eldest daughter. Poiret picked out the fragrance and designed the bottle, the packaging and the advertising. That same year, he threw a lavish party called ‘The Thousand and Second Night’, a fancy-dress extravaganza to which guests came as Persian royalty or cohorts of Scheherazade. The designer himself sported a natty gold turban. The most fashionable names in Europe were there, along with selected members of the press.

Poiret opened branded boutiques in major French cities, and organized travelling fashion shows. He designed dresses for the actress Sarah Bernhardt, his very own celebrity muse. Later, when he refused to sell any more dresses to a certain member of the Rothschild family – who had apparently dared to mutter a criticism at one of his shows – he made sure the decision was widely broadcast.

Not all of his marketing efforts were entirely self-serving, however. In that golden year of 1911, he opened an atelier in which Parisian girls ‘from modest backgrounds’ were trained to produce fabrics, rugs, lampshades, and other accessories for the home. These were sold in a boutique and several department stores under the Poiret sub-brand ‘Martine’, this time named after his youngest daughter. But despite his talent, his marketing prowess and his influence, Poiret could not halt the onward march of fashion. His star was already descending after the First World War, and by the 1920s he was locked in bitter rivalry with the woman who was to become the fashion icon of the era, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel. According to Guillaume Erner in the book Victimes de la Mode? (2004), Poiret referred to Coco as ‘the inventor of misery’. Bumping into Chanel in her black ensemble one evening, Poiret exclaimed, ‘You must be in mourning! But for whom?’ Chanel is reputed to have replied, ‘For you, my dear.’

Poiret wasn’t quite ready to slip away. In 1925, during the Art Deco Exposition, he hired three vast Seine barges. The first he turned into a restaurant, the second a hairdressing salon, and the third a boutique selling his perfumes, accessories and furnishings. It was to be his last extravagance. In the words of Erner, ‘While the barges stayed afloat, the business sunk.’

For our purposes, fashion originated in Paris at the end of the 19th century. That was when the first designer label was created. Although its main market was France, its founder was English. Charles Frederick Worth changed the rules of the game. Before he came along, dressmakers did not create styles or dictate fashion; they were mere suppliers, who ran up copies of gowns that their wealthy clients had seen in illustrated journals, or admired at society gatherings. The clients themselves chose the fabrics and colours, and dresses were constructed around them, rather like scaffolding. Worth was the first couturier to impose his own taste on women – in effect, he was the prototype celebrity fashion designer.

Worth was born in the town of Bourne, Lincolnshire on 13 October 1826. Like many of today’s most flamboyant designers – Galliano, Gaultier, McQueen – he came from a relatively humble background. (Indeed, the desire to escape a humdrum existence via sumptuous dresses and beautiful women is a thread running through the history of fashion.) He was the son of a local solicitor, William Worth, who appears to have run into financial difficulties when Charles was just a boy. Assuming that it was now up to him to put bread on the family table, Charles headed for London, where he became an apprentice and later a bookkeeper at a drapery firm called Swan and Edgar in Piccadilly. It was here that he developed an eye for sumptuous fabrics, and showed the prodigious flair for salesmanship that was to serve him so well. At the age of 20, and by now burning with ambition, he left for Paris.

Worth got a job at the drapery house of Gagelin and Opigez at 83 Rue Richelieu. When he was not busy attending to the needs of his clients, he designed dresses for his new French bride, Marie Vernet, who also worked in the store. Soon, customers began to notice these elegant creations, which, although adhering to the bottom-heavy style of the day, seemed to have an extra dash of cut and colour. Worth was given a small department at the back of the establishment in which to display his designs. These could be made to measure for customers who admired them.

Gagelin and Opigez were unwilling to let Worth expand his business, so, with the backing of a wealthy young Swedish draper called Otto Bobergh, he branched out on his own. Worth & Bobergh was established at 7 Rue de la Paix in 1858. Although Worth had a number of influential clients, his big break came when he designed a gown for Princess Metternich, wife of the Austrian ambassador to Paris. Empress Eugénie spotted the dress at a ball in the Tuileries Palace, and summoned its designer.

Worth was soon dressing the world’s most glamorous women. Unlike his predecessors, he was not a fawning servant, forced to make imitations of gowns his clients had seen elsewhere. As far as he was concerned, he had a better idea of how to enhance their looks than they did. Slowly but surely, he did away with bonnets and crinolines and begun cutting dresses closer to the body. Hoop skirts were replaced by the infinitely more seductive ‘sheath’ dress – albeit garnished with bustles and trains that required cascades of expensive fabric. More to the point, Worth was a marketing genius. Previously, dress designs had been displayed on wooden busts. (Scaled-down versions were sewn minutely on to dolls, which were sent out to potential clients as promotional devices.) Worth was the first couturier to sit his clients down and give them a little show – having first dressed a series of attractive young women he called sosies, or ‘doubles’, in his creations – thus inventing the concept of the fashion model. He would also identify fashionable women on whom he could place his dresses, knowing they would create a buzz as they mingled in high society. In private, he contemptuously referred to them as ‘jockeys’. In addition, Worth looked and acted like a proper fashion designer. Dapper and moustachioed, dressed from head to toe in velvet, a beret perched on his head, a cigar between his ostentatiously be-ringed fingers, he would greet clients while reclining on a divan. He had a capricious temper, too – there are reports of him furiously ripping halffinished garments to pieces because they were not exactly as he had envisaged them. Potential clients could be turned down, existing customers banished.

Here, already, we have many of the ingredients of contemporary fashion marketing: runway shows, celebrity models, elitism, and, of course, a charismatic brand spokesman. Dictatorial and flamboyant, this was a man who rose from obscurity to become deified by the fabulously rich – by the time he died, on 10 March 1885, Worth had established a pattern for all other designers to follow. Certainly, he exhibited a high level of artistry, but of all the dressmakers of that period, he was the first to wrap his own name in a fairytale, and resell it at a profit.

Fashion brands employ many techniques to persuade us to part with our hard-earned cash in return for the transient thrill of wearing something new. In our hearts, we know it’s all smoke and mirrors – most of us have plenty to wear, and none of it is going to fall apart for a while yet. So why do we keep buying clothes? Can it really all be about marketing? As fashion scholar Bruno Remaury points out, ‘Traditional marketing is based on need. You take a product that corresponds to an existing demand, and attempt to prove that your product is the best in its category. But fashion is based on creating a need where, in reality, there is none. Fashion is a factory that manufactures desire.’

Many of those who work in the fashion business seem surprised – or at least mildly amused – by consumers’ willingness to be seduced. Fashion consultant Jean-Jacques Picart, who has worked with brands such as Christian Lacroix and Louis Vuitton, comments as follows: ‘For the people who are genuinely obsessed with fashion, it’s a sort of drug. This is a personal theory, but I believe it’s because they equate exterior change with interior change. They feel that, if they’ve changed their “look”, they’ve also evolved emotionally.’ He hints that a preoccupation with fashion reveals a level of insecurity. ‘The most extreme fashionistas have a vulnerable quality about them. It’s as if they are worried about being judged. They live in a state of perpetual anxiety about their appearance.’ With disarming frankness, Picart describes his job as ‘a little cynical, a little perverse’. ‘The metier of fashion has a sole objective: to create brand appeal, in the same way that one might try to create sex appeal.

Everything we do is designed to make people fall in love with our brand. All the trimmings of our industry – the shows, the advertising, the celebrities, the media coverage – all of these things work together so that, if we’ve done our job well, somebody will push open the door of a shop.’

It all sounds fiendishly modern. But of course, although the bait has grown in sophistication, fashion branding has been around almost as long as the Venus flytrap.

Everything began in Paris. Later we’ll turn to New York and Milan, to London and Tokyo, but most experts agree that fashion, as we know it today, was born in the French capital.
From the days when the couturier Worth designed dresses for Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, to the final episode of Sex and the City – surely the most fashion-conscious television series of recent times – Paris has been a byword for style. As Bruno Remaury, social anthropologist and lecturer at the Institut Français de la Mode, the leading French fashion school, points out, ‘The very word “fashion” comes from the French: façon means to work in a certain manner, and travaux à façon is the traditional French term for dressmaking.’ Paris still perspires fashion. On the Right Bank, historically the commercial heart of the city, the fashion zone opens like a jewelled fan from the fulcrum of the Musée de la Mode, housed in a wing of the Louvre. It takes in the glittering boutiques along the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré (also home to the French edition of Vogue), the über-hip designer outlet Colette, the department stores of Samaritaine, Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, and several branches of the hyper-successful retail chains H&M and Zara – not to mention acres of billboard space promoting lingerie, perfume, bags or sunglasses, depending on the season. And this is by no means all: outside that better-known fashion zone, there are many other significant style hotspots, including the Avenue Montaigne, Saint Germain and Le Marais. In all of these places you’ll find queues in front of waiting rooms and people drooling over window displays, branded handbags slung over their arms. Those who work in the fashion industry will tell you it’s in crisis, but on the streets there is little evidence to back up this claim. The activity during the sales season in Paris is like a cross breed of rugby and boxing, without the nice manners. At the beginning of the 21st century, it’s terribly trendy to be fashionable. The question is – why?