From Baudelaire to Christian Dior: The Poetics of FashionAuthor(s): Rémy G. SaisselinReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Sep., 1959), pp. 109-115Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/427727 .Accessed: 17/07/2012 11:19

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FROM BAUDELAIRE TO CHRISTIAN DIOR: THE POETICS OF FASHION

RIRMY G. SAISSELIN

Poets and women have been inseparable since the days of Alienor of Aquitaine, but it is only since Baudelaire's time that poets have also considered women and fashion. Baudelaire, indeed, taught poets to look at fashion in a new manner, a manner being a fusion of what one might call a phenomenological approach and essentialist thought. This revolution in perception we may better understand if we consider that in the Middle Ages and the Ancien Regime, woman was thought of in terms of an essence. Woman had a nature particularly her own, a nature summed up in the term the eternal feminine. Consequently it was not necessary to consider dress too much. Thus what is apparent in the centuries previous to the French Revolution is the primacy of woman over dress, so that we may state, and so finally enter into our subject, a sort of first principle or a first step in the dialectics of fashion, and say, paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre's dictum existence precedes essence: Woman precedes essence.

This indeed sums up the metaphysical situation of woman in the eight cen- turies preceding the Revolution. Yet fashion was not completely ignored and dress was an important social phenomenon. However, it was the moralists like Moliere, La Bruyere, Montesquieu and others who thought about fashion. The moralists satirized those who thought they could enhance their station in life by adding more ribbons to their dress or more feathers to their hats. Dress was thus considered an attribute of class and excess in dress was judged in terms of human vanity. Implied was that no matter how much you tried, clothes did not make the man, for a gentleman could always tell another, no matter what his dress was. To sum up then: dress, fashion, had social and human implications, but no metaphysical overtones.

With Baudelaire a change occurs in this conception of the relation of fashion, not only to society, but also to woman, and what is more, to life itself. The change occurs in terms of a reconsideration of woman, one delineated by aesthetic con- siderations: it is as if Baudelaire, turning from painting to women, saw the latter with the painter's eye and so concluded, to use his own words, that woman is surtout une harmonie generate, above all a general harmony. But most interesting is that this harmony was not that of the nude. It was also that of fashion. "What poet would dare," he writes in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, "in the depiction of the pleasure caused by the apparition of a beauty, separate the woman from the dress?" The implications of this view are, as we shall demonstrate, epoch- making. They lead us into the second moment of the dialectics of fashion. For, accepting Baudelaire's judgment, we are forced to revise our first principle and say, Woman and fashion are inseparable. It is Baudelaire's concept of woman which explains his reasoning. To be sure he defined woman as a "general har- mony," but this merely referred to what might be called the form: this is woman observed; but woman understood intuitively, woman understood in her essence

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110 BEMY G. SAISSELIN

is something else. What then is woman's essence? Baudelaire answers that she is a being "peut-etre incomprehensible que parce qu'il n'a rien a communiquer ... un miroitement de toutes les graces de la nature condensees dans un seul etre ... une espece d'idole, stupide peut-etre, mais eblouissante."

In other words woman is a mystery, a notion in which we may perceive the romantic notion of the femme fatale, but more important still, woman is nature, and Baudelaire rejected nature as evil, so that his final appreciation of woman is summed up as follows: "La femme est naturelle, c'est-a-dire abominable."

But woman ceases to be abominable precisely through fashion, for then she ceases to be natural. A well-dressed woman thus is one who liberates herself from her abominable feminine condition. Or, to state this principle in a more succinct and significant manner: the difference between a female and a woman is eight centuries of civilization. Woman well dressed ceases to be nature and be- comes an approximation to art.

Baudelaire's considerations led him to a sort of metaphysical or transcendent definition of fashion and dress: "Fashion must be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which has survived in the human mind above all the rude- ness, the earthly, and the ignoble which natural life has accumulated there. It must be regarded as a sublime deformation of nature, or rather as a permanent and successive effort for the reformation of nature." It follows from this defini- tion and the concept of woman examined above, that we must once more modify our principles and say, Fashion precedes woman.

For after all, if Baudelaire is right, the charming creature called woman has been created by fashion. Woman is thus a work of art and the eternal feminine has disappeared beneath the ever-changing perspective of fashion. Woman has become a figment of man's imagination, a dream of poets, and a dress-designer's concept.

For Baudelaire then, fashion participates in the artistic activity which he de- fines as reformation of nature. It is a phrase worth noting, as well as the defini- tion of fashion as a permanent and successive effort to reform nature. Fashion might thus be envisaged as an autonomous activity, evolving to its own laws, exerting its empire over women, and responding to profound human aspirations rather than the necessity of wearing clothes merely for protection.

Baudelaire was not the only poet to interest himself in fashion. Mallarme founded and edited and wrote most of the articles for La Derniere Mode. What he has to say about fashion is less metaphysical than what Baudelaire wrote; however, his approach to fashion is based upon the same premises. And he too looks at woman and fashion through a veil of poetry, or through the poetic fancy, so that his articles in La Derniere Mode rather sound like prose poems.

When Mallarme writes of women he says nothing essentially different from what Baudelaire had said. For the poet of the Afternoon of a Faun, as for the poet of Les Fleurs du Mal, woman and fashion are inseparable. Thus speaking of ballroom dresses he notes, "The tradition which most formal dresses more or less obey, I should call or define as that of rendering light, vaporous, aerial, for that superior way of walking which is called dancing, the divinity appearing in their

BAUDELAIRE TO CHRISTIAN DIOR: POETICS OF FASHION 111

cloud" (Mallarme, Oeuvres completes [Pleiade], p. 797). We see that here too the dress is meant to transform woman, into more than a mere approximation to art; woman has become a divinity. The dress indeed it is which makes of woman a mystery, at least surrounds her with an aura of mystery: "If the classic mate- rials of formal wear are pleased to envelop us in a sort of lifting fog made of all the whites imaginable, the dress itself, on the contrary, corsage and skirt, molds the person more than ever: savant and delicious opposition between the vague and the distinctive outline" (idem.). Let us note the last phrase, that delicious opposition between the vague and the sharp. Could we not so interpret all of Mallarme's poetry? Might not this delicious opposition sum up the essence of a poetry whose syllables and sounds evoke crystalline purity but whose meaning is lost, impenetrable to the reason, so to speak in a fog of whites of all shades? Should the reader still have doubts concerning the affinity of fashion and the poetic vision, let him ponder this description of a certain beauty of Mallarme's time, Madame Rattazzi: "What a miraculous vision! a tableau to dream about rather than paint it: for her beauty suggests certain impressions analogous to those of the poet, profound and fugitive" (pp. 832-833).

It was the period of the vision fugitive. Women were not described with the verb to be: they always appeared, setting young poets such as Laforgue to dream of a world of beauty beyond the reach of mortals. Thus was the young Marcel set to dream when he saw his miraculous vision, Madame Swann in the Bois de Boulogne:

Suddenly, on the sand of the allee, sluggish, slow, and luxuriant like the most beautiful of flowers who would open only at noon, Madame Swann appeared, expanding about her an ever differing toilette but which I recall to be mauve; and then she hoisted on a long stalk, at the moment of her brightest irradiation, the silken colors of a large umbrella of the same nuances as the flowering petals of her dress.

In the period of the fin de siecle women always appeared and ever evoked a senti- ment of poetry, grace, charm. Poetry and fashion had become inseparable. But it was a poetry of reverie. The twentieth century would bring a poetry of intel- lectual rigor.

We now come to a more difficult part of our subject, namely to find a link between the poetics of Valery and the constructions of Dior. A difficult task be- cause in all probability no such link exists. However, a reading of the memoirs of Dior entitled Christian Dior et moi convinced this writer that his spirit was akin to that of Valery and that what the latter said about poetry, the former said about fashion designing. I thus formulated the following question: Could it be that Dior is the classic of fashion as Valery is the classic of Modern Poetry?

What then is poetry for Valery? Let us enter into this subject by pondering this general declaration:

We have decided to submit nature,-that is to say language,-to certain rules other than its own, and which are not necessary but which are our own; and we go so far as not even to invent these rules; we receive them as they are [i.e. from tradition].'

1Valery, Morceaux choisis (N. R. F., 1946), p. 148.

112 REMY G. SAISSELIN

This definition of poetry could easily be applied to that of fashion: one need but substitute the word woman for language, or dress for language; the rules of poetry would then become the tradition of fashion, received as such. This un- willingness to break with the past, with a heritage, is a classical trait. Valery speaks of classicism in these terms: "Classical art tells the poet: thou shalt not sacrifice to idols, which are beauties of detail" (ibid., p. 157). He also emphasizes form, which he considers to be a passion of the mind. But equally important is the quality of workmanship, la maitrise. Classicism he thus further defines as an imitation of mastery, that is to say: "To seem to command the means of art,- rather than be visibly commanded by them" (ibid., p. 166). Finally the poem must be, for Valery, a feast of the intellect: "Un poeme doit etre une fete de l'Intellect. II ne peut etre autre chose" (p. 159). This is, as we shall see, a capital point. But let us sum up Valery's points: poetry deals with language, which is a natural phenomenon, having its own laws but on which the poet imposes other laws; classicism is above all the cult of form, which is an intellectual passion; finally what is important in a work of art such as a poem is the unity rather than the details. Dior, we shall see, will say about the same thing on the subject of fashion.

The link between fashion and poetry will perhaps become more apparent if we consider the history of fashion as it existed before 1914. One may say that before the Great War, fashion was, referring to Valery's concept of classicism, in its romantic period, for the couturiers sacrificed to the idols of detail. Thus what changed in the evolution of fashion before 1914 were details rather than the ensemble of the dress. This was also the result of the organization of the trade of dress-making, this organization being such that several dressmakers worked on one dress. A dress was evaluated, judged, appreciated, not in terms of its general line, but rather its finish, material, workmanship, ruffles, lace, embroidery, frous-frous and chichis. Thus the general line remained unchanged for many seasons while the details changed, so that we may call this the romantic period of dress-designing, in contrast to a classical period which would emphasize general line.

One may say too that if the general line did not change, it was also because woman was still considered in essentialist terms: on a basic concept of woman, on an inalterable base, only details were altered. It was not until woman was thought of in non-essentialist terms that the dress-designers altered the base. This transformation occurred just before 1914 with the work of Doucet and Madeleine Viennot, and was continued after the war by Jeanne Laurin and Mademoiselle Chanel. What happened? The dress became, to use Dior's term, an expression of personality. This was done by the dress's becoming a unity, by an insistence on the whole rather than on details. Details were sacrificed to unity. This trend toward what might then be called, within quotation marks, classicism, manifested itself in the 1930's despite the surrealist dresses of Madame Schiapa- relli, and it is this tendency which, interrupted by the war, eventually became the New Look.

Dior called the New Look an art of pleasing, a definition significant in itself, because we may recall that French eighteenth-century classicism was founded

BAUDELAIRE TO CHRISTIAN DIOR: POETICS OF FASHION 113

upon precisely this requirement: the art of pleasing a cultivated elite. However, the New Look was much more than that; it was also a rehabilitation of feminin- ity. Dior writes:

We were emerging from a period of war, of uniforms, of women-soldiers built like boxers. I drew women-flowers, soft shoulders, flowering busts, fine waists like liana and wide skirts like corolla. But it is well known that such fragile appearances are obtained only at the price of a rigorous construction... I wanted my dresses to be constructed, molded upon the curves of the feminine body whose sweep they would stylize. (Christian Dior et moi, p. 35)

Several points are worth noting: Dior's New Look was a reaction against history, against the ugly in life, as Baudelaire would have said, and so the New Look responded to man's aspirations toward the ideal; also Dior was putting femininity into value, thereby decreeing what woman should be. Finally let us note the contrast established between a fragile appearance and a rigorous con- struction, a contrast we already saw in the thought on fashion of Mallarme. But Dior goes further than the poets, who had been content to view women through a poeticizing veil. Dior gives his dresses the names of what could easily be poems, certainly-names evoking poetic feeling:

I believe Alphonse Daudet once wrote: "I should like to be, through my works, a merchant of happiness." In my modest field of dress-designer, I pursue the same dream. My first dresses were called Love, Tenderness, Corolla, Happiness. (p. 51)

And pursuing his reflections on his trade further, he is, like Mallarme, brought to a comparison of his activity to poetic reverie:

The dress-designer is not a painter of the Barbizon school, he does not work on the grounds; his creation is more likely to be akin to poetic expression. A certain nostalgia is necessary. Summer is dreamt in the midst of winter and vice versa. (p. 80)

If we now wish to know whether this poet-designer is to be considered a classic or a romantic, let us ponder the following declaration: "But what above all guides me, is form" (p. 92). One may wonder if it is Dior or Valery. Of course it is this emphasis on form, the form itself which makes of woman what Baudelaire called an approximation to art. Dior, who had in his youth wanted to be an architect, insists on form as much as Valery:

The woman's body being its base, the art of the dress designer is to establish and to propor- tion upon it an ensemble of volumes which would exalt the forms of the body. For myself a collection could validly be expressed in black or in white.... (p. 92)

Obviously one thinks more of a sculptor than a poet. But equally obvious is this: the metaphysics of fashion are the same as Baudelaire's and the perception, the evaluation of the finished product is the same as Valery's: it is intellectual. This insistence on form Dior expressed happily in a delicious maxim imitated from La Rochefoucauld's "II y a de bons mariages, mais il n'y en a point de delicieux," and which in Dior's words becomes: "La coutre est avant tout un mariage entre la forme et le tissu. On sait qu'il en est beaucoup d'exquis, mais on en cite de malheureux" (p. 97). This marriage between material and form is furthered by economy and simplicity of means: "Une robe bien coupee est une robe peu coupee..." And going in this vein, one reminding us of Valery's precepts on

114 REMY G. SAISSELIN

poetry, Dior writes: "Today's fashion is above all a question of general line: from the shoes to the hat, the silhouette is a whole" (p. 104). So that finally we get this revealing summing-up worthy of Baudelaire: "Comme tu est jolie aujourd'hui! veut souvent dire:-Comme ton chapeau te va bien" (p. 105)!

Dior answers Baudelaire's metaphysics of fashion: woman, abominable crea- ture of nature, has been completely transformed by art; woman, a simple base for Dior, has become a sort of poem of curves, lines, and volumes; woman has become style. And style for Dior means form, unity, rather than detail. So that we may formulate the following conclusion concerning the style of Dior: A dress by Dior, like a poem by Valery, is a feast of the intellect.

Having thus followed the dialectics of fashion from Baudelaire to Dior, we shall now attempt a dialectical jump at some conclusions. In this task we shall not be without assistance. Mademoiselle Chanel drew her own conclusion in the course of a controversy over fashion in 1956. Here is what she told the Parisian fashion designers:

Why do you work in the realm of genius? We are not artists but producers of dresses. The essence of authentic works of art is to appear ugly and to become beautiful. The essence of fashion is to appear pretty and to become ugly. We do not need genius, but much workman- ship and a little taste. (Quoted in L'Express, 7th August, 1956.)

In other words Mademoiselle Chanel criticizes everything the couturiers and poets had been saying, and her reproaches bear out our premise to the effect that fashion had become a sort of art, an autonomous activity, having separated itself from its function, to dress women, and even separated itself from women to enter a realm of abstraction. Thus a reporter from L'Express wrote: "In the domain of spectacle, French haute couture has attained a sort of perfection. In the art of dehumanizing women it has almost succeeded." The dress makers, in short, have attempted, perhaps unwittingly, to make of their trade an art and instead of producing dresses have tried to produce masterpieces which instead of appearing pretty and then becoming ugly, would be eternally beautiful. It would seem too that the Parisian fashion-designers are in much the same predicament as certain American architects who do not quite know whether they are artists, architects, or moralists, and who wish to transform society by transforming architecture.

One wonders if fashion has not, along with all artistic activity, suffered from a general phenomenon referred to as alienation and also as the "dehumanization of art," to use Ortega y Gasset's term. T. E. Hulme in his essay on Humanism, Vladimir Weidle in Les Abeilles d'Aristee, and Herman Broch in Die Schlaf- wandler have explored this problem at length and in depth. In the course of this process of dehumanization leading to abstraction, what occurs is that each art becomes an end in itself: a common denominator, a common value about which all the arts are ordered, disappears. Such a common denominator was presumably God for the Middle Ages, Man since the Renaissance. Once the common value disappears and ceases to inspire the artist, writer, or poet, the only thing left him is his art. That usually comes to mean insistence on technique and one gets pure poetry, abstract art, and alliterature. Perhaps a similar development produced

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itself in fashion and the end product of it is what one might term the absolute woman inseparable from the absolute dress.

Woman has thus become an abstract creature, a beautiful creature made for the contemplation of the intellect, "La froide majeste de la femme sterile." Fash- ion thus, which with Baudelaire decrees that it creates woman, implying an exis- tentialist view of woman, has come full circle and created a new essentialism: that of the cold, architectural, unapproachable goddess photographed in front of a background of the Place de la Concorde, the Arch of Triumph, an Hotel particulier of the eighteenth century, or the coldly glimmering skyscrapers of New York. These are our new Beatrices and Lauras and we need not remind the reader that these ethereal creatures were the creations of poets. Our poets have simply gone toward the abstract.

In a sense this dehumanization of women via fashion is quite in order, is almost fitting. It is, so to speak, in the vein of the logic of the modern world and takes part in a general trend toward a universal style, called by some critics a non- style, namely functionalism. Thus women conceived by the Parisian couturiers do quite well in front of Swedish or Danish backgrounds, in the midst of modern furniture, squares, lines, and geometric color shapes as well as utensils which look like surgical instruments.

It is not certain that this trend will last, however. Fashion today inspires itself from history and the creations of today are photographed against a background of Malmaison. All of which merely goes to prove that women always need some sort of support in order to exist. The women, of course, have other views on this and it is perhaps these counterviews which provide the motion necessary to a dialectic of fashion which we may summarize as follows:

(1) Fashion creates woman, but woman, having some autonomy, and full autonomy in the U.S.A., reacts, thus creating, or giving rise to a revolution in fashion.

(2) This revolution occurs when woman feels herself threatened in her femi- ninity, feels herself de-humanized.

(3) Dehumanization occurs when fashion is dominated by abstraction, or aesthetic considerations, when it tends to become an absolute and when feeling gives way to intellectualism.

These various considerations will enlighten us on the nature of fashion: it is essentially an ambiguous one and the history of fashion might be written in terms of an oscillation between the dress's necessity of being a garment and the dress designer's desire to make of it a work of art, a representation of an aspira- tion to the sublime. Fashion is thus a pseudo-art, for, after all, a dress is an item of utility.

However, rather than close on this dreary note of utilitarianism and practi- cality, let us admit that a dress may be at some moment of its existence, a poem of form, color, and motion, and that at such a privileged instant the dress may transform the wearer into a poetic apparition. It thus becomes possible to define woman as a sometime poem alive, and to define fashion as the poetry of femi- ninity.