Israeli fashions and Israeli politics: 1934-85

At first glance there doesn’t seem to be much of a connection between the political values held by the people in a nation, and the clothes that a nation manufactures and wears. But if anyone needs to be convinced that the connection is real, consider the 1960s in the British countries that I knew well.

No self-respecting, progressive young woman in 1965 would buy her clothes in any shop other than the Handicrafts of Asia chain. The cotton clothes she bought from those shops made a clear political statement that the young woman was concerned about the following:
 1. natural (and not synthetic) materials;
 2. the rights of women workers in Third World countries;
 3. owning cheap, long lasting dresses;
 4. ignoring the dictates of fashion houses in Paris and Milan; and
 5. defying her mother’s tastes.

My Gap Year programme, 1966, Jerusalem. Dancing dresses 

In Israel, even more so than in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Consider the changes that took place in Israeli society from the 1930s (a time of mass migration from Nazi Europe) to the 1980s (when capitalism ran rampant). Just 50 years! The country’s worldview used to draw its inspiration from draining the malarial swamps via shared labour (even if most citizens had always lived in cities), and providing for the welfare and education of every citizen, regardless of his income level.

The Ata Textile Factory, that was founded in Kfar Ata near Haifa in 1934, was fascinating. It was established by the Moller family, Czech Jewish industrialists, at a time when the nation’s most important social organisations were the trade unions (Histadrut) and the Labour government. By 1946, Ata had over 900 workers living in Kiryat Ata, all enjoying the community rights that made life pleasant eg housing, childcare and subsidised groceries.

In addition to the socio-economic story, the history of Ata also relates the story of the factory and its textiles i.e the physical appearance of Israeli society. Israel’s workers and soldiers wore Ata clothing, as did members of youth movements. When every prime minister in the world would have worn a suit and tie, David Ben Gurion proudly chose khaki shirt and slacks that suggested he was a man of the people, a worker of the land. Sandals were de rigeur.

One of the primary values behind ATA clothing was national solidarity. The factory's fashionable products in its early years included a drill fabric called Army and a cotton satin called Officer. There were only four colours available - khaki, white, black and blue.
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David Ben Gurion, prime minister from 1949-1963 (except for 2 years).

How do I remember this so clearly? I lived in Israel in the middle 1960s.

In the 1960s, Ata realised the company needed to modernise its image so they established a female apparel division called Splendid Model. They started creating fashionable dresses in bright colours, not hippy but certainly reflecting the 1960s zeitgeist. But the times were changing faster than Ata was. The State of Israel was moving towards a capitalist model, raising the threat of privatisation, cutting the economy off from governmental management and making large cuts in welfare budgets. It was a tragedy for workers, but a great boon to industrialists. Soon urban and bourgeois Israelis preferred more stylish clothing from abroad, and they wouldn’t touch the old Ata lines with a barge pole.

The history of the Ata Company has been displayed at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, revealing the economic, political and social changes that took place in Israeli society during the most important decades in the state’s short history. The exhibition is called Factory, Fashion and Dream. It displays these national memories in a broad historical context, moving FROM pioneering spirit, workers’ rights, concern for the community and a commitment to basic, somewhat utilitarian clothes. It moves TO a rolling back of workers’ rights, modernity, private greed and lack of interest in the history of the state.

Ata: Factory, Fashion and Dream exhibition, Tel Aviv Museum

It was no wonder that the Ata factory closed down in 1985. Yet even then, the 3,000 Ata workers thought the government would save them from unemployment and poverty. It did not. The government stood aside, allowing a core part of Israeli society to close and workers to be cut adrift. For decades ATA had symbolised prosperous Israeli industry, proletarian pride and a struggle for the work place. Its closure meant that the sense of idealism, always a core part of Israeli identity, ended as well.

Coco Chanel - from neglected orphan to world famous designer

I had imagined that Gabrielle Chanel (1883-1971) was a neonate when she and her sib­lings lost their mother. Actually she was a young teenager when her impoverished father dumped them all in a Catholic orphanage, where she lived a rather horrible life until liberated six years later. The only advantage Chanel reported from orphanage life was learning to sew well.

Coco Chanel in her own outfit

Then I read Justine Picardie’s book Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life which was published by Harper Collins in 2010. Justine Picardie’s is not the first biography of Coco Chanel and each author has faced the same problem: what was the truth about Coco Chanel anyway? Certainly some aspects of Chanel's life were confusing: she herself gave so many different accounts to friends and biographers, particularly about her difficult childhood.  Fashion’s Most Wanted blog noted that Coco Chanel was so desperate to reinvent herself that she destroyed her own birth certificate and carefully hid her past.

On the other hand, it may not matter. She changed the world for style-conscious women. In 1910 Chanel opened a small business at 31 Rue Cambon, in Paris’ 1st arrondissement, and sold mainly hats. Within a couple of years, and still before WW1 broke out, Chanel expanded to Deauville, where she began selling casual resort outfits, jersey being an intelligent and flexible fabric for the cashed-up working women. Straight after the war ended, Chanel had established her fullblown couture house at the same 31 Rue Cambon, below her old flat and workshop.

Chanel’s lushly decorated flat could not have been more different from the prison-like orphanage in which she grew up. The flat is still famous today and everything is preserved just as it was left (see the photo below).

Chanel's shop, 31 Rue Cambon Paris

Chanel associated with endless numbers of important people, I am assuming for professional reasons in the first instance and later for more social reasons. But she could not have slept with every aristocrat, film star & musician, male and female, in Europe. From my perspective the most surprising relationship occurred when Chanel and Igor Stravinsky met, for a second time, in 1920. Stravinsky had emigrated to France following the Russian Revolution, with his wife and children, but that didn’t stop him moving the younger woman right into his marital home.

It is interesting to speculate on why Chanel never married. Not from lack of admirers. She seemed to have been attracted to people who could help her career or who were wheelers and dealers in their own lives: the Duke of Westminster, Pablo Picasso, Christian Dior, Elsa Shiaparelli, Yves Saint Laurent, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.

During the 1920s, Coco Chanel actively promoted further the freedom of women's fashion. She invented or popularised:
-the little black dress,
-arguably the most famous perfume on the planet,
-short hair,
-elegant slacks,
-the rather boxy Chanel suit and jacket, made from wool,
-strings of pearls and
-the most successful fashion brand of the era.

In short Chanel was a designer and dealer of elegance, an individual who helped change the way women wanted to look.

I am not at all clear on why a seamstress and fashion designer became involved with perfume, but she did. In 1922, the Chanel No 5 perfume was launched. Soon Coco needed someone with extensive experience in commerce, international business connections, and access to large amounts of capital to market the perfume professionally. In 1924, businessmen Pierre & Paul Wertheimer became Coco Chanel's partners in the House of Chanel perfume business.  During their partnership, Wertheimer owned 70% of the Chanel perfume company, Coco owned 10% and a friend of Coco's owned the rest.

Chanel's friendships just before and during WW2 seemed rightwing and very nasty. After the Germans occupied France in 1940, Chanel lived with the Nazi officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage in the Ritz Hotel in Paris. And she became a very close friend of Nazi General Walter Schellenberg. Chanel wanted to benefit from the law banning Jews from owning businesses, in order to take over 100% of the Chanel perfume company. She apparently forgot that the Jewish Wertheimer brothers were the very people who had saved her in the 1920s... or she did remember it perfectly well. Perhaps her friends the Duke and Duchess of Windsor encouraged her anti-Semitism. 

Actually Hal Vaughan suggested that she became fiercely anti-Semitic, long before it became a question of pleasing the Germans. Chanel had become rich by catering to the very rich, and shared their dislike of Jews, trade unions, socialism, Freemasons and communism."

Like quite a number of French women, Chanel was later charged as a collaborator with the Germans, but it isn't clear why the case wasn't pursued in court.  It is telling however that post-war, her new collection did not have much success in Paris.  Presumably this was explicitly because of her war-time relationship with the Nazis. The British and American public didn't care; they continued to buy up her new range with fervour.

The world was a different place in the 1950s and 1960s, so my story would have stopped here. But I want to mention one more Chanel success story. In 1953 she collaborated with French jeweller Robert Goossens to design a special line of jewellery to go with the Chanel suits. He successfully blended artificial jewels with semi-precious gems, and made the outfits look splendid.

There are many beautiful photos throughout the book, images which told a great deal about the life and times of Coco Chanel. It is difficult to imagine how one scared, lonely 12 year old girl, abandoned in an austere and very tough orphanage, turned into to leading designer of the fashion world and a companion of the rich and famous. But the book and the photos managed the task very well. As do the great photos in French Sampler blog.

Lounge room, Chanel's own beautiful design

At 87 Coco Chanel was still working as normal, preparing for the spring collection. She died in harness in January 1971.

A new book has come out with sheds light on the war years and after. Sleeping With The Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War, was written by Hal Vaughan and published by Knopf in 2011.

 

Lucile Duff-Gordon, couturier extraordinaire

Lucy Sutherland (1863–1935) had a very ordinary childhood, born in London and raised in Ontario, then taken to the Isle of Jersey from 1871 with her younger sister, Elinor. Lucy’s first marriage was a dismal failure that ended in divorce and poverty, but she had to support herself and her little girl, Esme (1885–1973). Thus Lucy began working as a dressmaker from home.

By 1894 Lucy had opened Maison Lucile in Old Burlington St, in London’s West End. Her first client was her younger sister, Elinor Glyn, later totally famous as a novelist and script writer for films. Lucy quickly gained a loyal following of women, which helped her first shop succeed. In 1897 a larger shop was opened at 17 Hanover Square London.

Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon was the 5th baronet of Halkin who enjoyed a family estate near Aberdeen. In 1900 Duff-Gordon married this soon-to-become famous London fashion designer, despite her being a divorcee. Lucy Sutherland became Lady Lucile Duff-Gordon.

By 1900 business was expanding further, all through Lucile’s own hard work and talent. Nonetheless it did not hurt that Sir Cosmo's backed and founded “Lucile Ltd” in 1903, to sell her designs around the world. His noble title also helped Lucile’s acceptance at court.

George St garden, mannequin parade, 1913

The George St London address was lovely. Inside the large 18th century town house were smart rooms for clients, leading to a garden, and airy workrooms for her staff of 400. And she decorated the interiors beautifully, adding antique furniture and paintings to make upper crust customers feel at home.

Presentations to the specially invited audience must have been splendid. Lucile had a stage built so that women could preview the clothes in comfort, and she installed curtains and scenery for added drama. She trained models in deportment and style, and paid them, so that they could do credit to her clothes. Thus the catwalk show, complete with beautiful walking mannequins, was born. Her style shows specialised in tea-time presentations, palm fronds, music from a string quartet and professionally printed programmes. She became most famous for her lingerie, tea gowns and evening wear, with her trademark style, classical draping and pastel colours.

Lucile Ltd served a wealthy clientele including aristocracy, royalty, and theatre stars. Her more noble and royal clientele included the Duchess of York, later Queen Mary and Countess Margot Asquith. Margot’s husband, Herbert Henry Asquith, became British Prime Minister in 1908-1916. Anyhow the business expanded, with branches opening in New York City, Paris and Chicago in 1910, 1911 and 1915 respectively.

Her branches of Lucile Ltd in New York and Paris were risky, because she was moving into these foreign centres of fashion culture, almost as an outsider. But apparently her famous fashion parades did well there too, perhaps wooing wealthy women over with traditional English afternoon teas and palm fronds. Perhaps they simply loved the diaphanous, soft materials, scalloped hemlines, silk sashes and sprays of hand-made flower trimmings. I certainly do!

Lucile's tea gowns, 1912

In 1912, Lucile travelled to America on business in connection with the New York branch of her salon. She and her husband, Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon, booked first class passage on the ocean liner RMS Titanic. I don’t want to discuss the Duff-Gordons experience on the Titanic except to say that during the evacuation, the couple escaped in a less-than-full lifeboat. There was a lot of nasty gossip, but for more detail about the Titanic episode, read Edwardian Promenade.

You might have expected Lucile Ltd to be defeated by World War One. But by 1915 Lucy was spending half the year in the USA where there was no war. The income from her New York shop was so great it apparently helped support the London and Paris branches. And at the very time when Parisian and London couturiers were seeing their businesses collapse, Lucile was reaching her financial and creative peak. She had a staff of over a thousand designers, models, seamstresses and advertising people.

The cleverest of her licensing ventures was a lower-priced, mail-order fashion line for Sears & Roebuck (1916–7), which promoted her clothing in rather lovely catalogues. These ready-to-wear clothes were priced for middle class women who had upper class aspirations.

I haven't space to examine Lucile's important role in exposing lingerie as a luxury item, but people who have an interest in these things should read Cemetarian La Dolce Vintage 's excellent post.

In 1917, Lucile lost a case that had nothing to do with the Titanic. In the New York Court of Appeals case of Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon. It was held that Lucile had a solid contract that assigned the sole right to market her name to her advertising agent, Otis F Wood. She was not bankrupted but her connection with her design empire began to falter, following a restructuring of Lucile Ltd in 1918–9. By Sept 1922 she had ceased designing for the company, and restricted herself to designing for a few individual clients, from private premises.

Lucile had always written a weekly syndicated fashion page for the Hearst newspapers (1910–22), and monthly columns for Harper's Bazaar and Good Housekeeping magazines (1912–22). So she continued as a fashion columnist and critic after her active career ended. Her designs were displayed in Pathé and Gaumont newsreels, and she appeared in the weekly British newsreel Around the Town.

In older age Lucile wrote her best-selling autobiography Discretions and Indiscretions in 1932. Apparently people in the fashion industry in London and Paris were getting their lawyers onto retainers, waiting to see which secrets she exposed. But she was discrete. And she soon died of breast cancer in a London nursing home in 1935, aged 71. She was buried with her husband, who had died in 1931, at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Lucy’s daughter from her first marriage became the wife of 2nd Earl Halsbury and mother of the 3rd Earl of Halsbury.

Designing the It Girl, FIT

Lucile's trusted assistant, Howard Greer, published memories of his years working with her in the book Designing Male 1950. A biography of Lucile and her sister Elinor Glyn, called The 'It' Girls, by Meredith Etherington-Smith, was published in 1986. As of 2006, the V&A Museum included a permanent Lucile exhibit. And note an exhibition devoted exclusively to Lucile's work by the Fashion Institute of Technology in NY: Designing the It Girl: Lucile and Her Style (2005). The Victoria & Albert Museum in London published Lucile Ltd by Amy de la Haye and Valerie D Mendes just recently. American Beauty by Patricia Mears was recommended by the House of Beauty and Culture.

After I finished this article, I found some beautiful images in the Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon blog.

Church Parades in Hyde Park

I found Garden Visit blog a very useful reference. Together with Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park forms a continuous park of 600+ acres in London. Stretching in a curve diagonally across the centre of both Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens is the Serpentine, an artificial lake of 41 acres. Slightly separated are Green Park and St James' Park, so that these four royal parks were and are a gorgeous and huge green area in the centre of an otherwise huge city.

Hyde Manor had belonged to the monks of Westminster Abbey from the Conquest right up until the Dissolution, when Henry VIII seized it and converted it into a royal hunting-park. Under Charles I, the place began to be a fashionable resort, though the deer were hunted until after the mid C18th. The King was laid out in Charles I's reign. It was a circular drive and race-course, located between the present Ring Tea House and the Ranger's Lodge. It was very popular with families who owned fashionable carriages.

Church Parade, Hyde Park by John Sanderson Wells, ? year
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During the Puritan Commonwealth, the park was sold and the public had to pay for admission; but at the Restoration it reverted to the crown and soon became the scene of fashion and frivolity so graphically described by Pepys. Rotten Row was established by William III at the end of the C17th. William wanted, for his own travelling comfort, a broad track on the south side of Hyde Park, leading from Hyde Park Corner to the west. In William’s time, Rotten Row was a fashionable place for upper-class Londoners to be seen. On weekend evenings and at midday, people would dress in their finest clothes in order to ride along the row and be seen.

So Hyde Park was always lovely, but by Queen Anne’s time and after, the most fashionable hours at which to visit it were 5-7 PM in the Season, and between 12-2 PM on Sunday during something called the Church Parade. What was the Church Parade?

In Hyde Park, its history and romance (1908), Ethel Alec-Tweedie said that although Queen Anne did not herself encourage people to waste their time in the Parks, her reign saw Society considerably broadened, somewhat to the disgust of the older families. The City merchants, with their fine ladies, moved into the park to join their friends, and the Church parade of well dressed, well heeled families became an important function. The footpaths on either side of Rotten Row were the chief rendezvous sports for Church Parade. Society spent most of its Sundays there in the season, meeting and chatting, and so began the custom of sitting out on sunny Sunday afternoons. Church-going seemed to be an opportunity for show, of bowing to acquaintances who were present at the prayer-meeting, and probably making arrangements for later social arrangements. The fashionable service was in the afternoon, after which people again repaired to the Park.

London Society, Hyde Park Church Parade, by Marchetti 1898 (engraving)
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I found many mentions by foreign visitors to the Church Parade during the Edwardian era. In The American Woman Abroad 1911 Blanche McManus reported that Hyde Park on Sundays had that peculiar English society function, the Church Parade. This is a more intimate occasion, for everybody hastens here after church to promenade, prayer-book in hand, among the budding crocuses and narcissi in a silver-grey spring noon. There is none of the contagious gaiety of the French crowd, but the decorous, well-bred English throng is able to hide any dubiousness under a Sabbath-day varnish. Friends sit in groups on the penny chairs, discuss plans for the coming week, engagements, temporary and for life, are manoeuvred by mammas, and the Sunday church parade is often used to introduce a daughter to the social world. After this every one goes home to a roast-beef dinner. By five o'clock the carriages are so densely massed that it is only by courtesy it could be called driving. Royalty drives out with the rest.

Edwardian Promenade  was very helpful. Society returned to London in late May and the traditional starting signal for the Season was the Private View at the Royal Academy where the latest frocks could be seen as ladies and gentlemen strolled about examining works of art and discussing them with their artists. From this point on was the height of the season. With late dinners and later balls, visits to old friends and acquaintances, the Sunday Church Parade at Hyde Park (another event in which to see and be seen), attendances at Covent Garden, charity bazaars, and young ladies and new wives of qualified gentlemen making their curtseys in Court Drawing Rooms, days and nights were packed to the brim. London was packed with not only Britain’s brightest and wealthiest, but Americans and colonial millionaires desiring entree into society and a bevy of European aristocrats.

The P.S.A. and Brotherhoods were very impressed South Africans, even during the early years of WW1. "A noteworthy occasion in connexion with the campaign was our visit to the Southall Brotherhood. We can hardly forget the day; it was on Crocus Sunday when thousands of Londoners went to Hampton Court in crowds to see the crocus bulbs in bloom. It was a glorious day and we remember it as the second day in 1915 on which the European sun shone through a cloudless sky from sunrise to sunset. Thousands of people attended at Hyde Park to witness the Church Parade, and still more thousands took advantage of the glorious spring day after a strenuous winter to flock to Epping Forest and other popular resorts".

Rotten Row c1900, from English Heritage

Of course the end was already in sight by then; I had expected that Rotten Row was going to end its starring role as the centre of Britain's upper class social life by 1914. Too many young men had been called up to serve on the Continent, too many families were grieving and even wealthy families would not have wanted to splash their money around when the economy was on a grim war footing. But there was something else. The decline of the horse and the popularity of the motor car changed Rotten Row for ever.