True Pleasures (18 page)

Discovered by famous fashion photographer Fred as she works, mouse-like, in a dark and cavernous bookshop, Audrey is whisked to Paris for a fashion shoot. At one stage she repudiates the shallow world of fashion and sneaks off to a smoky basement where a Sartrean guru holds court. She is adorably earnest in her intellectual black stovepipe pants, skivvy and ballet shoes. But we all know it won't last. Because what she really wants to do is put on a Dior frock and twirl deliriously under the Eiffel Tower, releasing a bunch of celebratory balloons. That's what tends to happen to bookish girls in Paris: you arrive an intellectual, you depart a fashion victim.

I head down the stairs, holding my hands carefully in front of me. They look lovely.

I was very disappointed the first time I walked down Avenue Montaigne. I thought it was too big. It's still too big. It's a big walk and the price tags are even bigger. This is
couture
row, and the signs say Christian Dior, Chanel, Emanuel Ungaro, Nina Ricci, Valentino …

Clothes are a funny business. No matter what we wear, we are saying something about ourselves to other people. If we are in fashion or out of it, expensively dressed or simply dressed, soberly or loudly or eccentrically attired – what we wear is a public message. And because we can
choose what we wear in a way that we can't choose our eye color or height, our clothes go beyond being a simple reflection of self to an active invention of public identity. As little girls we play dress-up, practicing being women. As women we still play dress-up, practicing being the women we want to be – or at least, be taken for.

The French understand this very well: in fact, clothes once played an important political role. At the court of Louis XIV, the nobles were classified by what they wore. The old nobility were known as the
noblesse d'épée
, the nobility of the sword. The new class of nobility was based on their juridical and administrative functions on behalf of the crown, and they were known as the
noblesse de la robe
. More generally, clothes were an all-purpose symbol of social status. The parties and balls of the court of Versailles were open to people of any rank, as long as they were dressed appropriately.

I always laugh when I read a women's magazine declaring that some starlet or other has an ‘individual' or ‘unique' style, when all she wears is a minute variation on prevailing fashions. In fact, all of us wear a modern uniform. And really, this is no bad thing. It's a way in which we all say that we consent to live with each other; that we accept the terms of modernity. I'm like you, our clothes say to each other, I'm with you. In many respects it's not all that different from the days of Louis XIV.

But there's one wonderful difference. Whereas in Louis XIV's day only the very rich could afford to wear the appropriate clothes, today mass production means most of us can afford some gesture towards the latest fashion, if we choose. Coco Chanel was the first designer to understand the democratization of fashion. She not only accepted this, she actively embraced it. She thought it was
wonderful that her clothes were widely copied, that a shop girl could achieve the same look as a countess.
A fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion
, was Chanel's view, and her supreme fashion insight.

When I read the various biographies of Coco Chanel, however, I learned a few things about
haute couture
. I discovered that it is special because it combines the art of design with the craft of tailoring. Coco Chanel would fit her clothes directly on her models so that they flowed and curved with the line of their bodies. In particular, she was obsessed with the cut of the sleeve. She would cut her dresses and jackets very high under the armpit. The effect was to give a woman a lean, long torso and slender arms. At the same time she carefully shaped the sleeve so that the woman would have maximum shoulder rotation and movement. The fit was perfect both for beauty and wearability.

After reading this I looked carefully at the photos of Chanel
couture
, and then at my own suit jackets. Hmm. My clothes looked like sacks by comparison. More importantly, I looked sack-ish in them. Chanel was also remarkable because she made her clothes to last. She was still wearing the same little suits thirty years after she first made them, and they still looked beautiful. She turned fashion into anti-fashion, by making it timeless. She turned fashion into style.

Looking in the windows of these elegant stores I can still see something of the fine tailoring and detailed work that makes
haute couture
special. And insanely expensive.

Edith Wharton only wore the finest clothes. She thought that beautiful clothes were an art form. One of the things she loved most about living in Paris was that the French agreed with her. She wrote:

The artistic integrity of the French has led them to feel from the beginning that there is no difference in kind between the curve of a woman's hat-brim and the curve of a Rodin marble, or between the droop of an upholsterer's curtain and that of the branches along a great avenue laid out by Le Nôtre
.

Gertrude Stein went a step further. She said:

It is funny about art and literature, fashions being part of it. Two years ago everybody was saying that France was down and out, was sinking to be a second rate power, etcetera, etcetera. And I said but I do not think so because not for years not since the war have hats been as various and lovely and as french as they are now. Not only are they to be found in the good shops but everywhere there is a real milliner there is a pretty french little hat
.

It has to be admitted that, even as she was writing this, Nazi Germany was about to invade France – but then, politics was never Miss Stein's strong point.

I am not sure that high fashion can, any longer, be equated to art and literature. Today it all seems so corporatized and commercial. And yet, every now and then something magical occurs when a great artist adorns beautiful bodies with beautiful clothes. At John Galliano's 1998 show for Christian Dior at the Opéra Garnier, people simply burst into tears because the clothes and atmosphere were so exquisite.

Nancy Mitford never bothered to analyze the social function or aesthetic value of clothes. She just adored them. Most of all, she adored Monsieur Dior, whose
atelier
was here, at number 30 Avenue Montaigne.
Have you heard about the New Look?
she wrote to Eddie Sackville-West, cousin of Vita.
You pad your hips & squeeze your waist &
skirts are to the ankle it is bliss
. She wrote to her mother:
I've got a beautiful Dior dress, day, which is worn over a crinoline, I feel like a Victorian lady for purposes of loo – very inconvenient! It's so plain that I can wear it in the street & I see by the looks I get that it is a smash hit
.

After a big burst of spending on the 1951 Dior Fall collections, Nancy Mitford admitted to Evelyn Waugh:

I went & ordered the plainest little wool dress you ever saw from Dior £168. It's the last time. I humbly asked if they wouldn't take off the 8 but no they cried you are very lucky. All the prices are going up next week. They made me feel I'd been too clever for words. But after I felt guilty – all the poor people in the world & so on. It's terrible to love clothes as much as I do
.

Today, even with my perfectly painted fingernails, I am too frightened to try and enter Dior. I fear some unpredictable humiliation inflicted by a shop assistant. This is unfair, as normally I find French shop assistants to be extremely courteous in their remote way, although Nancy Mitford once wrote gleefully about the time two English duchesses were turned away from this very shop because
the people at the entrance considered them too dowdy to be admitted
. Clothes shopping in general is a problem for me in Paris as I am 166 centimeters tall and have hips. And breasts. French women – and the clothes designed for them – are generally petite, slim-hipped and flat-chested. The clothes are beautiful, but not for me. Now the Italians, they know how to make clothes for women with curves.

In the midst of all the grand couture windows is a tiny boutique on a sunny corner. A single rococo chandelier twinkles over the room. It's Parfums Caron. I peer in the window at the amber-filled glass flasks lined up like so
many magic potions. Rachel told me that she was once asked as a favor to a friend to purchase some perfume here. She stood in front of these bottles: their names were like wishes:
N'aimez que moi
(Love no one but me!) and
French can can
. She looked at the slip of paper in her purse and indicated to the assistant, who languidly held a minuscule bottle under a tap. They watched together as tiny drops of golden syrup,
Tabac Blond
, leached into the bottle. The assistant then blandly quoted the cost. It was so unbelievably expensive that Rachel's blood began to drain from her head, only at a much faster rate than the dropping elixir. Afterwards she had to repair to the nearby Plaza Athénée for a reviving champagne. She kept checking her bag to make sure the lid of the little perfume bottle was firmly secured.

Different cultures approach the idea of personal decoration and adornment in different ways. Paris is still the center of the Western cultural ideal of feminine beauty. Women from all over the world come to Paris headquarters for a femininity infusion. Here we are all reminded of the global standard and here we undertake the necessary remedial tasks to bring ourselves back up to it: a new dress, an intake of beautiful art, long walks along the Seine, watching and being watched in a sidewalk café. Ah, yes, that's right, this is what being a woman is all about.

For an Australian woman there's another dimension to this essential Paris experience. When Australia was colonized, the notion of an ornamental woman – a woman of wit, pleasure, society – was a luxury the white colonizers couldn't afford. Women were brought to Australia as convicts and later servants. In 1800, while Napoleon's Josephine was running up dressmakers' bills and planting roses at Malmaison, and Germaine de Staël was juggling husband and lover and hosting the most influential salon
in Paris, white Australian women, like the horses, and the cattle, were working and struggling just to survive.

And here's something else, something curious. Sydney today is one of the world capitals of transvestism, of men dressing extravagantly, glamorously, theatrically – and yes, monstrously – as women. My apartment complex is one of the key preparation sites for Sydney's gay and lesbian Mardi Gras: it's quite something to observe fifteen men in wigs and pink tutus posing for photographers at the end of your swimming pool. And the only Australian I know who really understands the power of makeup is a six-foot-three tranny with a skin problem. Kylie Minogue once said, witty as hell, that she thought of herself as a tall drag queen in a short woman's body. It's as if we Australian women missed our chance to be the decorative sex in Australia – and the men have mounted a takeover.

Shakespeare's women, wonderful creatures like Portia and Rosalind, dressed up as men to make men wiser, to teach them something. Like Portia revealing the quality of mercy. And this made me think in a different way about the Australian drag scene. And about Dame Edna Everage, Barry Humphries's grotesque and compelling alter-ego. And even about Patrick White, whose late work
The Twyborn Affair
is not just about transvestism, but a poetic exploration of the relationship between our external appearance and our internal identity. Perhaps it's not too far-fetched to wonder if Australian men dress as women to teach women something?

I quite enjoy my ruminating walk down Avenue Montaigne, but to me it's not really about the essence of French femininity. The fashionable women I see along the street are mostly foreigners. There is a slightly desperate look about their wobbling ankles. The really nice thing about
French style is that many French women aren't competing in the impossible and expensive race that is modern fashion. They tend to avoid the dramatic ups and downs of hemlines, the ins and outs of pant widths, the fads for stilettos or acid green or torn sleeves or corset belts.

I am too timid to enter Mr Dior's shop, and the truth is I don't particularly want to, though I am glad to know it's there. I'm rather like Gertrude Stein, who, judging by the photos, wore a tent for twenty years, but still admired fashion as an art form.
Fashion
, she said,
is the real thing in abstraction
.

The French also understand that clothes aren't everything. Josephine Baker arrived in Paris from the poorest southern region of the U.S., via bit parts in vaudeville on Broadway. She came to Paris armed only with her magnificent ebony body, a comic genius and the very good advice of the French waiters she met in New York:
Be chic and make them laugh!
they counselled the young performer.

Josephine Baker made her entry right here at 15 Avenue Montaigne, the theater of the Comédie des Champs-Élysées. She was a minor player in a novelty show called
La Revue Nègre
in 1925. She appeared on stage entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs. Her body, her comical gestures, her beauty were sublime. The crowd went berserk and she became instantly famous.