Evans, Caroline

The Enchanted Spectacle
271
Fashion Theory, Volume 5, Issue 3, pp.271310

Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
2001 Berg. Printed in the United Kingdom.
IMAGE
AVAILABLE
ON
HARDCOPY
Caroline Evans
Caroline Evans is Reader in

Fashion Studies at Central
Saint Martins College of Art
and Design, London.
The Enchanted
Spectacle
Fashion shifts overall appearance into the order of theatricality, seduction
and enchanted spectacle. (Lipovetsky 1994: 26)
The fashion show has played a key role in the development of the modern
fashion industry. From approximately 1900, fashion shows began to be
staged in couture houses and department stores and as charity fund-raising
events in Britain, France and the USA. As the theatricalisation of fashion
marketing par excellence (Kaplan and Stowell 1994: 117) the fashion
show also has a relationship to art, theater and film; to consumerism;
and to the commodification and eroticization of the female form in mass
culture; in short, to the wider formations of gender, image, desire and
272
Caroline Evans
commerce in the twentieth century. This article maps the bare bones of
the fashion shows first hundred years; it is an introductory and still only
partially researched history, the first stage of a larger and more ambitious
work in progress. Elsewhere I scrutinize the fashion model in relation to
a range of concepts: modernity, commodity fetishism, the uncanny and
trauma (Evans 2002, forthcoming). Whereas that article frames the
historical origins of the fashion model theoretically, the present one
situates the fashion show historically, by reference to more empirical
material.
Both articles proceed from the assumption that there is a complex
relationship to be unraveled between the fashion show and capitalist
spectacle. That, in turn, has a relationship to the spectacle of women from
the late nineteenth century to the present. Guy Debord described the
society of the spectacle as one in which image effaces reality; and this
could be a paradigm of how the fashion show has operated in the past to
disguise its commercial origins and goals (Debord 1994: para 1). The rise
of the model, and the fashion show, are directly linked to the rise of mass
production in the wake of industrialization; living mannequins were first
used in the nineteenth century, and they began to model in fashion shows
at the beginning of the twentieth. When the haute couture houses began
to show their clothes on live models, these figures were mirrored by the
dummies of the department store windows. The clothes they displayed
were bought by middle- and upper-class women. As active consumers of
luxury goods, these women can be construed as subjects of the society of
the spectacle; yet, when they turned themselves into a vision by donning
their purchases they became, simultaneously, its object and image too.
Their iconic status as metropolitan women of fashion also had a class
dimension, thrown into relief by the parallel image of their workingclass counterparts: waitresses, shop assistants, seamstresses, laundresses,
milliners, hairdressers. The salaries of nineteenth-century working women
in Paris were so meager that many were driven to augment them through
prostitution (Wilson 1991: 4950). To Walter Benjamin the prostitute
was a pivotal emblem of modernity because she was, in his phrase, both
seller and wares in one (Buck Morss 1991: 184).
Such images of spectacular women are linked to a confusion between,
on the one hand, the fetishism of the commodity and, on the other, the
commodification of sexuality in the form of the increasing visibility of
women as spectacle in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century
(Bailey 1990; Solomon-Godeau 1996; Evans 2002). Ed Lilley has argued
that in the Paris of the 1860s the eroticism of the nude in art began to be
displaced on to the fashionably dressed figure owing to the vast strides
being made by consumerism, making body and dress indistinguishable.
The nudenever value-free anywaywas revealed in the modern world
as neither an attribute of classical goddesses nor a time-honored refuge
of the ideal in art, but as a commodity to be purchased . . . other, fresher
objects were for sale, whether from a couturier like Worth or from a
273
department store like the Bon March (Lilley 2001: 75). Something of
this paradox also typified the fashion mannequin in the same period,
where an ambiguity arose as to what, exactly, was for sale: the dress, or
the woman modeling it.
This legacy continues in the present: despite the first and second waves
of feminism, the social meanings of womens engagement with fashion
and beauty continue to be contested. From Worths mannequins of the
1850s to todays models, the ambiguous image of woman as spectacle
has haunted the fashion show. Yet to understand the fashion show solely
as a symptom of the objectification of women is to miss its complexity,
for the fluid and theatrical space of the catwalk simultaneously permits
the modeling of gendered identity as a cultural construct. Rhonda Garelick
has traced the idea of the dandy from his nineteenth-century historical
origins into the present day, arguing that the figure of the dandy merges
with the fin-de-sicle figure of the woman on stage and emerges as the
twentieth-century icon: Jackie Onassis, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson
and the artist formerly known as Prince (Garelick 1998). To this list I
would add the fashion model and her spectacular appearance on the
catwalk, a space of artifice that offers a particularly modern platform
for the performance of gender as image and idea. And it is this transition
of the principles of dandyism, displaced on to women in the modern
period, that, I believe, also underwrites the evolution of the runway show.
Origins
The English dressmaker Lady Duff Gordon, or Lucile as her establishment was called, claimed to have started the first mannequin parades,
taking them with huge success from London to New York and Paris in
the first two decades of the twentieth century. However she was far from
the first to use live mannequins to display her designs. While many dressmakers relied on wax or wooden dummies to display their goods, many
more, even in the nineteenth century, had a young woman available to
put on a dress for a client. In the mid-nineteenth century the Parisian
mercer Gagelin employed house mannequins to walk around the premises
modeling shawls. In 1847, Charles Frederick Worth was appointed at
Gagelin to do the sales talk as the house mannequins paraded before a
clientele that included countesses and duchesses. Working closely with
the mannequin Marie Vernet, his future wife, Worth was able both to
study the effects of clothing worn in movement and to develop his sales
pitch. When the couple opened their maison de couture in 1858, they
imported the mannequin parade from the mercers to the couturiers. For
the first eleven years, Marie was the chief house mannequin and vendeuse
at Maison Worth. She also trained the other mannequins, and Maison
Worths innovation was to have several house mannequins who were
always available to put on a dress for the inspection of a client.1 However,
274
Caroline Evans
although Worth showed two collections a year, there were no fixed dates
for collections as there are now, and no organized fashion shows.
As well as employing house mannequins, Worth also sent Marie outside
the privacy of the salon to wear his creations at the racecourse at
Longchamp and in the Bois de Boulogne, both fashionable parading
grounds for dress. There, unlike the mannequins in the salon, she would
mix socially with Maison Worths clientele. Later Paquin too sent her
models to the Longchamp races. Alice Ivimys A Womans Guide to Paris
described the race track in 1909: you will find all the leaders of fashion
displaying the latest creations . . . the most striking and audacious gowns
are worn by mannequins or dressmakers models who are paid to be
stared at (cited in Steele 1998: 170). In 1908 Poiret accompanied three
of his mannequins in identical Hellenistic gowns to the races where their
dresses, side-split to the knee to reveal colored stockings, caused outraged
comment in the press. In 1911 he launched his pantaloon gowns to similar
outrage at the Auteuil Race Track, where again he escorted his mannequins. In 1912 when Chanel opened her first shop in the fashionable
seaside town of Deauville, she promoted her designs by sending her
cousin Antoinette and her aunt Adrienne out and about in them. The
idea of employing women who wore their clothes well to go out into some
fashionable milieu was a promotional tactic that preceded the development of the more formal fashion show. It continued throughout the
twentieth century in the convention whereby designers gave free clothing
to leaders of fashion (Mrs Reginald Fellowes, for example, wore Chanel
in the 1920s and Schiaparelli in the 1930s) and the custom persists today,
as when film stars wear designers dresses for film premires.
Another precedent was the fashion-play of the London stage,
especially the new genre of musical comedy that developed from the 1890s
up to 1914 (Rappaport 2000: Chapter 6). These plays were, in essence,
dramatized fashion plates in which leading ladies effectively modeled
couture gowns (Kaplan and Stowell 1994). The dress-designer Lucile had
designed for the theater, and her first mannequin parades owed more to
theater than to the traditions of the dressmakers salon, as her autobiography makes clear: Slowly the idea of a mannequin parade, which
would be as entertaining to watch as a play, took shape in my mind.
I would have glorious, Goddess-like girls, who would walk to and
fro dressed in my models, displaying them to the best advantage to an
audience of admiring women (Gordon 1932: 68). Her first parades took
place at 17 Hanover Square, where the mannequins descended the Adam
staircase under a ceiling emblazoned with Angelica Kaufmanns paintings.
Lucile moved to these premises in 1897 and decorated them in the style
of a domestic residence rather than a Parisian couture house (Kaplan and
Stowell 1994). In 1901 she moved to 23 Hanover Square, where she had
a small, raised stage and recess built and fitted with curtains of chiffon,
a fabric much used in her dresses too. For her first collection, Gowns of
Emotion, she sent out invitations on dainty little cards, keeping the
275
illusion that I was inviting my friends to some afternoon party rather than
to a place of business (1994: 689). Her first parade was attended by
Princess Alice, Ellen Terry, Lily Langtree, the Duchess of Westminster and
Margot Asquith.
Contrary to her assertion, Luciles parades, like Poirets in Paris, were
intended for male as well as female viewers, the former lured by the
prospect of inspecting flesh as well as fabric (Kaplan and Stowell 1994:
119). Luciles coup was to commodify sensuality through her gowns and
their presentation. Lucile replaced the conventional dressmakers habit
of numbering the gowns by giving them suggestive names such as Love
in a Mist and The Captain With Whiskers, which she would call out
as the mannequin appeared. There was a precedent for this in corsetry
advertisements, which, from the 1890s, commonly gave the corsets names
that alluded to beauty, charm and romance. Luciles goddesses were
drawn largely from working-class London suburbs, trained in carriage
and deportment, and given stage names such as Gamela, Hebe or Dolores,
before they were deemed fit to promenade on the chiffon-curtained stage
in the showroom, accompanied by music and dramatic flashes of light.2
They were widely admired by the British press, who used them to proclaim
a new kind of English glamor (Kaplan and Stowell 1994). Trained to strike
dramatic poses, during the parades they barely smiled and never spoke,
their working-class origins as ambiguously veiled as the beautiful bodies
they paraded to an audience of middle- and upper-class men and women.
These were the innovations that Lucile subsequently took to New York
and Paris (Figure 1).
The first shows were mere walkabouts, while an orchestra played and
tea was served to the clientele. Soon, however, they had simple texts and
scenarios written by Luciles sister, the popular novelist Elinor Glyn. The
most elaborate was The Seven Ages of Woman in 1909, which traced
in seven acts from birth to death the dress-cycle of a society dame. The
seven ages were: The School Girl, The Debutante, The Fiance, The Bride,
The Wife, The Hostess and The Dowager. The Hostess was the most
daring, with four scenes and three tableaux designed to appeal to the
married woman who entertained, was entertained, and who could indulge
in the luxury of a lover (Etherington-Smith and Pilcher 1986: 90). The
names and order of the gowns also constituted a very clear subtext of
sexual pleasure and fulfilment: The Desire of the Eyes, Persuasive Delight,
Visible Harmony, A Frenzied Hour, Salut dAmour, Afterwards and
Contentment.
The hothouse effect of Luciles parades was commented on in 1904 in
a newspaper column by the novelist Marie Corelli, who complained of
the remarkably offensive way in which male viewers were invited to
stare and smile. Kaplan and Stowell, who cite this passage in full, argue
that Luciles shows articulated a fraught relationship between clothes,
consumption and the objectification of women, in which women of the
period were condemned to a life of buying and being bought (Kaplan
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Caroline Evans
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY
277
and Stowell 1994: 6). De Marley comments that, in the nineteenth century,
male observers at Maison Worth such as Count Primoli and Edmond
de Goncourt were intrigued by the thought of the svelte-bodied models,
and suggests that the model girl was beginning to replace the seamstress
and the shopgirl in the imagination of the predatory male as the sort of
girl who was ripe for seduction but not for marriage (de Marly 1980:
140). Poiret, too, in his autobiography, refers to more than one duke
whose fancy was taken by his mannequins in the early twentieth century
(Poiret 1931: 146). As the fashion show became theatricalized by Lucile
and Poiret, the gaze that was solicited shifted from an exclusively female
form of consumption to a male gaze that rested, judging from contemporary accounts, as much on the mannequin as on her dress. Tellingly,
Lucile used the word model to mean both the gown and the mannequin,
thus eliding the difference between the two, commodifying the flesh in
the same breath as the fabric.3
The Early Mannequin Parades
Figure 1
Dinarzade in a gown by Lucile,
c.1916. The mannequins
stance and demeanor are
typical of Luciles
presentations; in the
background can be seen the
raised stage and curtains that
she introduced to her
showrooms. Dinarzade was a
Texan mannequin called Lillian
Farley whom Lucile recruited in
New York in 1915. In 1924
Dinarzade was one of six New
York mannequins chosen by
audition to go to Paris to
model for Jean Patou.
Photograph: Joel Feder.
Courtesy of Central Saint
Martins College of Art and
Design, London.
In 1910 Lucile opened a branch in New York, taking with her for the
opening parade four of her London mannequins, Gamela, Corisande,
Florence and Phyllis. There she built a stage replicating the London one.
Mauve invitation cards were sent out, an orchestra played, little cakes
were devoured and, once again, Lucile, in her own words, turned the
serious business of buying clothes into a social occasion (Gordon 1932:
136). In 1911, the year that Paul Poiret presented his oriental collection,
Lucile opened a branch in Paris where her English mannequins striking
height (often around six feet) and dramatic modeling style made them
notorious. Dolores and Hebe in particular were the first mannequins to
become famous since Marie Worth. Luciles first Parisian presentation
capitalized on the tango craze by replicating a th dansant in which
her mannequins tangoed while an orchestra played and the clients took
tea. There were many such other tango teas, which gave couturiers the
opportunity to present their models in motion as the mannequins moved
to the music, a performance derided by many contemporaries but that,
nowadays, forms an integral part of the fashion show (Steele 1998: 228).
Lucile claimed that she was responsible for the first mannequin parades
in Paris at the beginning of the century, when the Parisian couture houses
had living models but no parades (Gordon 1932: 67), but in fact this
was not so.4 Organized fashion shows began to be presented between
1908 and 1910 at a fixed time in the afternoon in the great fashion houses,
where they were popular and well-attended (Figure 2). By this period a
number of mannequins would be employed by a typical Parisian maison
de couture (Figure 3). All the major houses, including Worth, Paquin
and Doucet, had mannequin parades; but their presentations were more
sober than Luciles, reflecting the social status of their clientele. Most
278
Figure 2
Paquins at five oclock by
Henri Gervex, c.1910.
Design, London.
Caroline Evans
mannequins were trained to walk sedately, although Poiret described the

gyrations of his tall, blonde house mannequin Andre as being like an
anemone expanding in the sea under the influence of a genial current
(Poiret 1931: 146). At the beginning of the century house mannequins
wore a high-necked and long-sleeved black satin or crpe-de-chine maillot
under their couture models. In Paris, Madeleine Vionnet claimed to have
dispensed with it in mannequin parades at Doucet as early as 1907 (Bertin
1956: 172), and Lucile made a similar claim for her London presentations
(Gordon 1932: 68). Marguerite Shoobert, a mannequin at the London
dressmaker Kate Reillys from 1906, remembered the maillot as a Vnecked, tight-fitting black satin dress worn over the corset and under the
Figure 3
House mannequins in a Paris
maison de couture, c.1910. By
this date the mannequins no
longer wore the long-sleeved
and high-necked black satin or
crpe maillot underneath the
models. Courtesy of Central
and Design, London.
279
dress, which was briefly replaced by a flesh-coloured stockinette garment

before, in 1907, the buyers suggested it be abandoned altogether (Taylor
1983: 107). Since the buyers made regular trips to Paris fashion salons it
is not unlikely that they would have seen mannequins modeling at Doucet,
as well as at various London establishments.5
Unlike the modern fashion show, which is a one-off performance lasting
no more than twenty minutes to half an hour, the first mannequin parades
were repeated every day over several weeks, and lasted much longer; Lucile
relates that her New York parades lasted three hours (Gordon 1932: 214),
and even in the 1950s most shows lasted an hour and a quarter or more.
In Paris, the first couture clients sat on chairs in the salon while the
couturier or vendeuse pointed out the features of the model. After 1909,
when Poiret moved to an eighteenth-century mansion on the avenue
dAntin (now avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt), his mannequins paraded
through three connected salons carpeted and curtained in redcurrant
color, decorated with huge mirrors and opening out on to a formal garden.
There they showed his designs from five to seven oclock every afternoon
to as many as eighty women per day: lissom as nymphs, [they] file past
in this living, colourful but wholly unpretentious scene (Poiret 1931:
113). A formal, curved staircase descended from the fitting rooms to the
first salon but for greater theatrical effect Poiret had the mannequins
appear unexpectedly through a small door in the first salon. Figure 4,
which shows one of Poirets mannequin parades in 1910 staged out of
doors in the formal garden of the house on the avenue dAntin, is one of
the earliest photographs of such a parade.6
Figure 4
Poirets mannequins in an
open-air parade in front of the
formal parterre of his premises
on the avenue dAntin. From
LIllustration 9 July 1910.
Design, London.
280
Caroline Evans
Although mannequin parades were held at fixed times in the afternoons, it was only after 1918, as more foreign buyers came to Paris, that
they began to get fixed dates. Before then, Poiret would, on request, send
his mannequins and dresses out to the homes of important clients such
as Baroness Henri de Rothschild; and in 1909, at the invitation of Margot
Asquith, wife of the Prime Minister, he took his mannequins to London
to model his dresses at a Downing Street tea, a parade that was castigated
by the Conservative press as An Exhibition at Gowning Street (quoted
in White 1973: 43). As well as sending mannequins out to important
clients homes, Parisian couture houses explored other types of venue
beyond their own salons as an opportunity to promote their work abroad.
In 1910 Poirets mannequins presented his second hobble skirt collection
in Berlin to another of his customers, Freudenberg, the owner of the most
important store in the city. That year, Paquin showed 20 mannequins at
the Brussels Exhibition, and in 1913 she showed her tango dresses on
mannequins at the Palace Theatre, London, in a tango tea very like
Luciles first Paris presentation two years earlier (Figure 5 shows a similar
tango tea in a different London theater). In the autumn of 1911 Poiret
undertook a six-week promotional tour of Europe with nine mannequins,
traveling to Frankfurt, Berlin, Potsdam, Warsaw, Moscow, St Petersberg,
Bucharest, Budapest and Vienna. The mannequins wore a traveling
uniform, a blue serge tailor-made and a comfortable cloak in reversible
beige plaid. On their heads they wore oilcloth hats with an embroidered
P. It was extremely chic (Poiret 1931: 117). The tour secretary went ahead
by rail with the dresses, while the mannequins traveled in two automobiles. At Warsaw the dresses were stopped by the Russian customs,
where Poiret tried to prove that it was not a question of merchandise
but of costumes intended to be shown as a spectacle (Poiret 1931: 117).
Like Luciles, Poirets presentations veiled the commercial nature of the
transaction in theatrical illusion. Yet in reality the tour was a promotional
and a sales trip; it was followed by licensing deals for copies. To accompany his lectures, Poiret took with him a promotional film showing a
mannequin parade.
In 1913 Poiret devised a promotional tour of the USA for himself and
his wife Denise, the artistic director of the House. This time he planned
to show the models on American mannequins whom he intended to train.
Again, he took his film of a mannequin parade to illustrate his lectures
in various American cities, only to have it immediately impounded by
the New York customs on grounds of obscenity. Paquin followed Poiret
in sending four mannequins on a US tour, tickets for which were priced
at $3, rising to $5 because they were so popular. In 1914 the first charity
fashion show in New York took place under the sponsorship of Vogue,
masterminded by its formidable editor, Edna Woolman Chase. A newspaper advertisement for mannequins was placed, for although trained
mannequins were by now an integral part of the French couture they were
to be found at only a very few of the private dressmakers in New York.
Figure 5
Tango Tea at the Queens
Theatre, London, 1913. The
seats of the stalls were
removed so that the clientele
could take tea while on stage
an orchestra accompanied a
tango demonstration followed
by a dress parade of all the
latest fashions. In Paquin and
Luciles presentations, the
mannequins tangoed while the
clients took tea. Drawing by F.
Matania. Courtesy of Central
and Design, London.
281
An enormous number of untrained waitresses, typists and charwomen

(and a few trained mannequins) responded; those selected were rehearsed
by the Vogue staff. Each society lady in the audience
delightedly applauded her own dressmaker, heart and hand, and
each had a rather protective feeling towards the Estelle, or Mary,
or Rose, who wore the dresses of the establishment she patronised
most, and Rose, Mary and Estelle, as they saw the faces of the
women before whom they were accustomed to exhibit gowns,
smiled a delighted recognition (Vogue 1914, cited in Seebohm 1982:
96).
282
Caroline Evans
The Fashion Ftes aim was to promote American designers rather than
French, the proceeds to go to European war relief. In return, Vogue
sponsored a French Fashion Fte in New York in November 1915. The
French couture houses stipulated that their fashions should be presented
in a kind of play with a simple plot involving a bride, her mother and her
trousseau. From their inception, fashion shows relied on narrative and
drama; in another war charity Fashion Fte the ballerina Lydia Lopokova
lay concealed in a huge garden urn before emerging to dance in wisps of
chiffon. In another, probably Luciles, the mannequins Dolores and Hebe
drifted in and out of misty blue and green drapery (Chase 1954: 107,
113). These descriptions recall the dance performances from the 1890s
in Paris of the American Loie Fuller, whose talent lay not in her face or
figure, nor in her dance ability, but in her manipulation of fabric. Fuller
had her own pavilion in the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition, its art
nouveau curves modeled on her swirling fabrics. Rhonda Garelick
describes her as an illusion-producing machine adept at the careful
choreography of veils, a moving sculpture in fabric (Garelick 1998: 101).
In her Lys du Nil dance she manipulated a costume of 500 yards of white
silk that was extended ten feet beyond her body by means of batons sewn
into the fabric. Another contemporary dancer, famed for her classical
dress, bare feet and lack of undergarments, was Isadora Duncan, who
performed in Paris in 1907, the year that Madeleine Vionnet claimed
to have presented the house mannequins at Doucet in bare feet and
uncorseted (Bertin 1956: 172). While I have yet to find clear evidence of
influence either way, it is worth noting that these new types of dancespectacle coincided with the development of the fashion show.
Luciles Paris parades had attracted audiences of eight hundred. In New
York her audiences swelled to two to three thousand. In 1916 she staged
her own charity fashion show, hiring a theater to put on a two-and-ahalf hour performance that dramatized the story of a Parisian mannequin
in war-torn France, a true story recounted to her by her sister Elinor
Glyn. Entitled Fleurettes Dream, it opened with a vision of the refugee
Fleurette asleep on a pile of dirty sacking while she dreamt of her former
life in Paris:
I showed Fleurette, a glorified Fleurette, in my latest creations,
having petit djeuner; going for a walk with her friend Dolores;
choosing new dresses at a grande couturires; going to a dance;
giving a party at her own house . . . and so on. The final scene
showed the poor little girl back in her cellar, waking to realities,
while the enemy shells screamed overhead (Gordon 1932: 234).
As with Vogue parades, proceeds went to European war relief. The cast
was recruited from Luciles house mannequins (Phyllis starred as the
protagonist Fleurette), who had been given acting coaching and who
received a standing ovation. Although this was not a show intended
283
primarily to sell Luciles models, it can hardly have failed to promote them.
The play subsequently toured the USA as a vaudeville review, playing
18 towns in six months, for which Lucile was forced to cut her usual
show length from three hours to half an hour, showing 68 dresses in
28 minutes (Gordon 1932: 239). It is tempting to draw a parallel here
with the accelerated speed and syncopated rhythms of modernity (Kern
1983; Lhamon 1990). However, this breakneck pace was not to become
common in the fashion show until the 1960s after it had been pioneered
by Mary Quant.
The impresario Florenz Ziegfeld bought the opening scene of Fleurettes Dream and reworked it for the Ziegfeld Follies, starring Dolores
(Kathleen Rose) who had been discovered by Lucile while working as an
errand girl in her London salon. Pygmalion-like, she groomed and trained
her. Ziegfeld re-created this discovery in a number called Ladies of
Fashion, An Episode in Chiffon. It included nine mannequins with
Dolores as Empress of Fashion, the Discourager of Hesitancy. Over
the years Lucile, who also designed for the Ziegfeld Follies from 1915 to
1920, lost several mannequins to the Follies. They were renowned for
their regal manner and unsmiling hauteur. Although trained by Lucile,
their look became the trademark of Ziegfelds Glorified Girls (Carter
1974: 60). Thus show business borrowed from fashion the idea of the
showgirl, who was there simply to look beautiful and wear lovely
clothes, as opposed to the chorus girl who was there to sing and dance
(Gordon 1932: 216). The showgirl was most popular during the war
years; afterwards the figure gradually disappeared from review.
In 1904, not long after Luciles first mannequin parades in London,
the London department store Peter Robinson held a much-discussed
mannequin parade, in which about 30 mannequins mingled with clients,
and with each other, in the costume rooms of the store. Press coverage
compared the tenor of the event to that of society gatherings like Ascot
(Kaplan and Stowell 1994: 119). Unlike Luciles exclusive parades for
her more aristocratic and monied clients, this and subsequent department
store shows did not draw on the repertoire of theatrical display, but,
instead, recreated the ambience of exclusive social occasions. The press
comparison to Ascot suggests, perhaps, the aspirational element of
the parade for the department stores more middle-class clientele. And
the mannequins performance of strolling to and fro in the enclosed
performance space nicely echoed the department store perambulations
of the nineteenth-century flneuse. In 1909 Harrods in London hosted
its first mannequin parade in a specially constructed Theatre of Dress,
presented first to invited clients and then to the public at large. In 1910
the Illustrated London News featured a picture of a mannequin parade
at Wanamakers department store in Philadelphia. The photograph shows
raked seating in straight lines round three sides of a raised, rectangular
runway on which the mannequins strolled between potted plants and
classical caryatids.7 The American parade was evidently interesting
284
Caroline Evans
enough to be reported in London, and the image reminds us how quick,

then as now, the middle-market stores were to take ideas from more
exclusive or expensive houses. The Philadelphia stores fashion parade
preceded Vogues first Fashion Fte in New York by four years and
indicates a different, more popular market than Vogues couture-led
interests and French connections. American Vogues policy was only to
cover what the editor considered to be centers of fashion: New York,
London andthe epicenterParis (Chase 1954). Throughout the first
half of the twentieth-century major department stores in many cities were
to feature modeling parades, often in the restaurant, where daily fashion
shows at lunch and teatime were ubiquitous until well into the 1950s
and 1960s. Even trade shows and ideal home exhibitions featured
mannequin parades. As fashion shows became more and more common
in department stores model agencies opened to accommodate them.8 In
the hot English summer of 1932, the London department store Selfridges
staged a hugely popular Holiday Beach Parade on the stores Oxford Street
roof. Figure 6 shows bathing beauties modeling beachwear and beach
sandals at a fashion show organized by the shoe-shop chain prominent
Figure 6
Bathing beauties modeling the
latest costumes and beach
sandals at a Lilley & Skinner
fashion show at the Holborn
Restaurant, London, 22 June
1934. Hulton Getty Picture
Library.
285
on Oxford Street, Lilley & Skinner, in 1934. Selfridges was just one of
many fashion promotions; in the 1930s the stars of the Selfridges
department store fashion shows were the models Dawn and Gloria who
worked there until 1936, when they left to set up a modeling school
together.9
In 1911 Poiret was the first couturier to use a film of a mannequin
parade to promote his fashions. Throughout Europe and the United
States, film rapidly became a medium through which knowledge of lite
fashion was disseminated to a mass audience. From 1910 British newsreel
companies such as Path and Gaumont included footage of Paris fashions
on their newsreels, and in 1911 Path produced a series of short films on
forthcoming fashions. In 1911 Liberty in London participated in a film
of mannequins parading. In 1913 the film Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette
played at the Scala Theatre, London, and at several provincial theaters.
It showed the latest fashions from London and Paris, including a tango
dress, modeled by actresses and society ladies in natural, outdoor settings.
Although Poirets fashion film was seized by the New York customs in
1913, there is surviving film of a different American fashion tour in 1915,
featuring American and French designers, including Worth and Paquin
(Leese 1976: 10). These films, like the department store parades, brought
the image of haute couture to a wider audience through the very process
of promulgating its mystique and aura of exclusivity. Just as Lucile had
used theater as a way of soliciting her female audiences identification
with the mannequin, so the cinema invited a specific identification from
the female spectator, harnessing an elaborate relay of gazes on- and offscreen for commercial fashion promotion (Herzog 1990: 144, 159). From
the early 1930s onwards, a number of Hollywood womens films
featured fashion shows within their narratives, as both Charlotte Herzog
and Jeanine Bassinger have identified (Herzog 1990: 13459; Bassinger
1993: 11923).
Paris Couture as Spectacle

Caroline Seebohm argues that, through the medium of Vogues charity
fashion show in 1914, the First World War finally dethroned the French
couture from its long dominion over the world of fashion. The dynastic
succession of the great Paris houses endured . . . but their absolute
hegemony was challenged (Seebohm 1982: 101). However, the perceived
tension between American and French fashion was largely in the sphere
of haute couture rather than tailor-made or mass-produced fashion. It
continued in the 1920s, when Jean Patou projected the difference between
American and French fashion on to the image of the mannequin herself
by contrasting the rounded French Venus and the slender American
Diana (Chase 1954: 163). In 1924, to woo American buyers to Paris,
Patou, who was adept at manipulating the press, had the idea of showing
286
Figure 7
The slender American Diana
replaces the rounded French
Venus: Jean Patou and his
American mannequins en route
for Paris, 1924. One of them is
Lillian Farley, also shown in
Figure 1. Courtesy of Central
and Design, London.
Caroline Evans
his clothes on American mannequins. Accordingly, he advertised in the

New York papers for girls who were smart, slender, with well-shaped
feet and ankles and refined of manner (Chase 1954: 164). Patou traveled
personally to New York for the mannequin audition, where the selection
was made by jury in the offices of Vogue. There were five hundred
applicants; eventually six were chosen to return to Paris as house mannequins for the house of Patou (Figure 7). One was Dinarzade, or Lillian
Farley, an American who had first modeled for Lucile in 1915. She recalled
modeling in Patous first Paris parade to feature the American mannequins
in 1924:
As I went through the door to show my first dress, I had the
impression of stepping into a perfumed, silk-lined jewel casket, the
atmosphere was so strongly charged. The men in their correct black
tailcoats with the sleek, pomaded hair; the women in gorgeous
evening dresses, plastered with jewels. It was hot, so hot, and the
air was stifling with the mixed odours of perfumes and cigarettes.
It was nearly one oclock when the collection was over . . . twenty
of us had shown five hundred models. The next afternoon was the
opening for the American buyers. They came in droves. There was
a totally different feeling from the party-like atmosphere which had
prevailed the previous evening. These men and women were there
on business. The European buyers came the next day and the salons
sounded like the Tower of Babel (Lillian Farley quoted in Chase
1954: 166).
Her recollection reminds us that, behind the enchanted spectacle, this
was business. Part of the mystique of couture is that the client feels she is
287
the unique purchaser of a model. The luxurious and phantasmagorical

dreamworld of the mannequin parade fostered this illusion, but could
also be put to use in the hard-headed business of international sales to
department store buyers and agents.
By the mid-1920s Patou employed a total of 32 mannequins, six of
them American, to model the 450 dresses shown at each collection. He
claimed that the American mannequins longer, leggier physiques were
more appropriate to sell to his American clients; but the success of his
promotional gambit was, perhaps, due more to the fanfare attached to
their recruitment in New York and the fact that Patou had bothered to
travel so far to recruit the right girls for his shows. For the opening night
of the American mannequins debut, Patou sent the entire castFrench
and American alikeout in single file wearing only the thin cotton
peignoirs worn between fittings, a tactic that caused laughter and
applause. This parade of 20 identically dressed mannequins is a trope
commonly used in the rhetoric of the modern fashion show. The visual
shock tactic is often deployed in the contemporary dfile, the parade of
all the models down the runway at the end of the show (Figure 8). Fashion,
supposedly about individuality, is actually about uniformity, and designers
like Miyake have fruitfully exploited this contradiction to dramatic ends.
The body that is produced is a disciplined, streamlined and modernist
body, in which the outer discipline of the corset has given way to the inner
disciplines of diet and exercise. In the 1920s both Chanel and Patou
designed for a body that conformed with the modernist aesthetic, which
was functional and anti-decorative; this body was, and continues to be,
produced, through diet and exercise, very much along the lines of
Fordist production (Wollen 1993: 36, 44). Patous serial image of the
modernist body in his 1924 presentation was to find an echo in the
Tiller Girls in Berlin in the 1920s and then the Rockettes in New Yorks
Radio City Music Hall in the 1930s. In Hollywood the visual trope was
expanded in the abstract patterns made by the repetition of female bodies
in the films of Busby Berkeley. Figure 6, which shows a London chain
store presentation of bathing belles in 1934, is a typical image of its period,
fusing the chorus-girl line-up and the modernist mannequin parade
against a suitably modernist architectural setting.
The serial repetition of the model on the catwalk borrows from the
language of modernist aesthetics expounded by le Corbusier, who in LArt
dcoratif daujourdhui, published in Paris in 1925, extolled the beauties
of the mass-produced, functionalist object, as opposed to the fussy detail
and over-decoration of the highly crafted one-off (Le Corbusier 1987:
95). In fashion, the modernist body-object is reproduced in the figure
of the mannequin; yet the mannequin is, paradoxically, styled as an
individual when she is spectacularly presented in the fashion show, a
presentation that mirrors the bespoke nature of haute couture. There
are, as we have seen, close similarities between the show girl and the
mannequin. In Paris, Arletty modeled for Poiret before she became an
288
Caroline Evans
289
actress. In Britain, Vera Ashby gave up her career as a show girl to model
under the name of Sumurun, first for Lucile and then for Captain
Molyneux as his principal mannequin in Paris in the 1920s. She described
her appearance in the finale of a charity fashion show, the annual Bal
des petits lits blancs, where mannequins from the top couture houses were
dressed by famous couturiers (Figure 9). Sumurun had pride of place and
entered last:
I wore an exotic costume, in golds and rich oriental colours,
encrusted with jewels. There was another large jewel in my turban.
These little jewels had little electric lightbulbs in the centre connected to a battery which was concealed on me. I was preceded by
two little black boys who scattered rose petals for me to walk on.
At a certain point the lights were lowered, and I pressed the batterylight. All the jewels on my turban and my costume lit up, and there
was such excitement among the aristocracy and the famous, that
they rushed forward to gather up the rose petals strewn before me
(Cited in Castle 1977: 21).
Figure 8
Issey Miyake, Spring/Summer
1999 finale. Courtesy of The
Fashion Group International.
And in 1923, the year that Tutankhamuns tomb was discovered

in Egypt, Sumurun modeled the final outfit for a Molyneux show at
Olympia in London: a Pharaohs robe in shimmering gold. Thus the model
embodies a contradiction, which is resolved in her spectacular show
presentation: she is at once unique and serially reproducible. She can, in
this respect, be taken as a paradigm of fashion itself, which, in the modern
period, ranges from mass-production to production of the one-off.
More research is needed to establish whether there is a difference in the
presentation and modeling style of the department store and the couture
house. The accounts of the most striking shows that I have discovered so
far tend to be of haute couture shows, and these focus on the individual
model rather than her serial image, perhaps because couture has always
been at pains to conceal its links with commerce and licensing and to
foreground its status as a producer of unique, one-off creations. If this
were so, one could argue that the model imitates the commodity form
of the branch of fashion she models, thus emphasizing, yet again, the
ambiguous commodification of the model herself in the show.
In the case of a designer like the Paris-based Schiaparelli, the cult of
individuality and distinction could be displaced from the individual
mannequin on to the entire presentation, the designers wit, especially
where that designer was also a woman well known for her outr appearances in her own designs, from lamb chop hats to telephone handbags.
Schiaparelli was the first designer to do collections with themes, producing
ten between August 1936 and October 1939, each launched with a spectacular parade involving music, lighting, dance, stunts and jokes. There
do not appear to be any photographs of these shows, only first-hand
accounts, from which it emerges that the Circus collection of February
290
Caroline Evans
291
1938 was particularly riotous and swaggering (White 1986: 166). It

was held in her showroom at 21 Place Vendme. Performers skipped
up and down the seventeenth-century staircase, jumped on and off the
vendeuses desks and then in and out of the window overlooking the
column in the square outside by means of a ladder propped against the
Louis XIV faade. The Commedia dellarte show of 1939, her last before
war was declared, opened with the music of Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Pergolesi
and Cimarosa and went on to use Commedia characters (a Harlequin, a
Columbine, and a Pedrolino, or Pierrot), wandering troupers, troubadours, minstrels and a troupe of comediennes. In 1952 Schiaparelli
commissioned a film company to transform the courtyard in front of her
own home into a fairytale showroom with mannequins who swayed to
the samba played by Brazilian musicians; in the windows of the house,
looking down on the courtyard, stood life-size Chinese animals dressed
in ball gowns.
After the war, when Christian Dior opened in Paris in 1947 with his
corolle line (the New Look) the modeling style was, like the clothes,
extravagant and theatrical, in marked contrast to the austerity of wartime
fashion. Bettina Ballard, the editor of Vogue, described the first show:
I was conscious of an electric tension that I had never before felt in
the couture. Suddenly all the confusion subsided, everyone was
seated, and there was a moment of hush that made my skin prickle.
The first girl came out, stepping fast, switching with a provocative
swinging movement, whirling in the close-packed room, knocking
over ashtrays with the strong flair of her pleated skirt and bringing
everyone to the edges of their seats. After a few more costumes had
passed, all at the same exciting tempo, the audience knew that Dior
had created a new look . . . We were witness to a revolution in
fashion and to a revolution in showing fashions as well (Bettina
Ballard, quoted in Keenan 1977: 118).
Figure 9
Vera Ashby, or Sumurun,
modeling in the 1920s for
Captain Molyneux at the
annual charity fashion show in
Paris, the Bal des petits lits
blancs. The lights on her
headpiece lit up and the two
small boys preceded her
scattering rose petals in her
path. Courtesy of Central Saint
Design, London.
This revolution in showing fashions depended entirely on the speed and

style of the mannequins presentation, rather than on the theatrical misen-scnes that had typified the fashion shows of the early twentieth
century. Figure 10 shows Diors style of presentation in 1955, as well
as the audiences engagement with it. The crammed audience and the
seating plan, with influential journalists in the front rows, was by now
an established protocol, and illustrates the key role played by American
magazines such as Vogue and Harpers Bazaar in the promotion of French
fashion.
There did, of course, continue to be spectacular shows in the post-war
period, Pierre Balmains in particular. When Balmain was still at Lelongs,
which he left in 1946, he once had the model Praline enter the showroom
on a bicycle. At the House of Balmain she became his chief mannequin,
and she came with us on all our tours. I had her emerge in evening dress
292
Caroline Evans
from a hat-box that four Negro porters carried into the Waldorf-Astoria
in New York (Balmain 1964: 151). The runway image of a Western
goddess attended by native men is a persistent orientalist fantasy,
harking back to Poirets fashions of 1911 and to Captain Molyneuxs
presentations of the 1920s, when the turbanned Sumurun was preceded
by two little black boys scattering rose petals. In 1948 a fashion parade
of leading French couturiers was held under the Eiffel Tower, where Praline
modeled for Balmain on the back of a pink elephant. Balmains 1951
SpringSummer show launched his jolie Madame style with a model in a
mauve outfit with matching turban and a mauve poodle with a diamond
collar. The presentation caused a small furore, drawing wild applause,
some disapproval, and a complaint from the French Society for the Protection of Animals. However, in general, after 1947 it was the imprimatur
of a particular model that marked the style and presentation of a couture
house as, increasingly, the Paris collections were dominated by the iconic
status of the house mannequins.
293
Piranhas in Furs
Figure 10
A model at the Dior show in
Paris, August 1955. Seated in
the center of the front row are
Marie Louise Bousquet, Paris
Editor of Harpers Bazaar and
Carmel Snow, Editor in Chief of
Harpers Bazaar. In the second
row sits Alexander Liberman,
the art director of American
Vogue. Hulton Getty Picture
Library.
The 1950s was the decade in which the cabine developed its own
mythology. Figuratively the cabine refers to all the models, generally a
maximum of fourteen to eighteen, who worked for one couturier. The
cabine (literally, a studio) had its own codes of humor, language and
tradition, and its own ranking of seniority as to where each woman sat
at her own place in the long, corridor-like room in front of a table with
a mirror above it. Mannequins moved between couturiers, but tended
to model principally for one, and hence became associated with that
particular style of presentation. Bettina modeled for Jacques Fath,
Capucine for Givenchy, Praline for Lelong and then Balmain after he
opened in 1946, Bronwen Pugh for Balmain, and Hiroko Matsumoto
for Pierre Cardin. Although each house had its own style of model, the
models also had to represent the range of the customers physical types.
What united them was the house modeling style. Even in the 1970s the
couture mannequins working for Yves Saint Laurent (who had himself
worked at Dior in the 1950s) always used the recognizable Dior walk,
with slightly slanted back and hunched shoulders (Helvin 1985: 84).
In the 1950s, by contrast to the theatrical swagger of Diors presentations,
Chanels aristocratic models were especially trained to walk like her, with
their hips forward and hands in pockets. The famous Chanel pose
recreated the designer in the mannequins stance: one foot forward, flat
belly, head held high, chin up and one hand in the pocket of her skirt
(Liaut 1996: 168).
In nearly every house the mannequins demeanor was unsmiling, glacial
and immobile; they appeared detached from the proceedings, though Liaut
asserts that behind the scenes many of these models were women of the
world exercising a dazzling and sometimes cruel witlike piranhas in
furs (Liaut 1996: 128). The phrase captures something of their chilly
hauteur. At Balenciaga the mannequins stance was described by one
witness as arrogant and ungracious (Bertin 1956: 228). Picture Post in
1957 captioned a photograph of Pierre Balmains top model, Bronwen
Pugh, who was renowned for never smiling, Bronwen Takes Paris by
Scorn (Figure 11). Clearly the Welsh model had a striking catwalk
presence and Balmain always used her when he wanted to turn a show
into a happening. The photographer Richard Dormer recalled Pughs
highly effective . . . angular bones, emphasised look and exaggerated
walk and stance (cited in Castle 1977: 78).10 Eugenia Shepherd described
seeing her for the first time: Balmain still has that husky Welsh
mannequin who drags a coat down a runway as if she had just killed it
and were taking it home to her mate she wrote in the New York Herald
Tribune (Castle 1977: 78). For a 14 July gala, an enormous jewel casket
lined with white satin was carried in, and the lid was lifted to reveal
Bronwen Pugh, seated motionless and impassive, clad, like the lining of
the case, entirely in white satin. Only a hint of an ironic smile . . .
294
Caroline Evans
Figure 11
Bronwen Takes Paris by
Scorn wrote Picture Post of
this image of Bronwen Pugh
modeling for Balmain in Paris
in March 1957. Photograph:
Haywood Magee. Hulton Getty
Picture Library.
295
suggested a trace of life (Liaut 1996: 147). Her very simple, tight-fitting
dress was covered in diamonds borrowed from the jewelers Van Cleef
and Arpels: rivires, bracelets, earrings and brooches. She was flanked
on one side by a mannequin similarly dressed in blue, covered with
sapphires, and on the other by a mannequin in red, studded with rubies.
Balmain described how she rose angular and distinguished, then froze
into a statue between her two colleagues, making a living tricolour. The
band struck up the national anthem, and through the high bay windows,
the golden rain of fireworks reflected upon the blas diner the atmosphere
of the Apocalypse (Balmain 1964: 149).
Yet the average show was more sedate. In the 1950s and the first half
of the 1960s Parisian couture shows were usually presented in the
couturiers salon, or some other space decorated in ancien rgime style.
Sometimes Balmain, for example, took rooms in the Hotel Georges V.
All the staff tended to wear black. Guests sat on spindly gilt chairs and
were given little plates of canaps and champagne. There was no music,
only the aural drama of rustle and footsteps as the vendeuse called out
the name or number of the garment as it was modeled, first in French
and then in English, except at Balenciaga, where silence prevailed and
the mannequins simply carried a card with the models number in their
gloved hands. A little raised platform, or runway, which might be either
T-shaped or semicircular, might be built in to the salon as a permanent
feature, perhaps with a curtain, or the mannequin might simply walk
between rows of chairs arranged in the carpeted salon. There was a strict
order of presentation; the final wedding dress today is a remnant of this
protocol. Models did not jump or sashay, but glided very slowly, turned
round delicately, held the pose and then left at a slow and majestic pace
(Liaut 1996: 120). The pattern was similar in London establishments such
as Norman Hartnells. Generally they were sedate affairs, and the drama
of Schiaparellis shows in the 1930s, or Diors and Balmains in the 1940s
and 1950s, was exceptional. On the first day of the season, there were
two or three shows for the customers; after that there was only one show
daily, every afternoon at 3 oclock. The shows lasted an hour and a quarter
for 60-odd creations. The models also modeled privately for customers
who returned later to see the clothes more closely.11 By the time the
collections were several weeks old most of the regular customers had seen
the clothes, and there were few spectators left in the great, white, mirrorlined salons.
The 1960s and the Origins of Todays Shows

In the 1950s models projected a certain aloof arrogance, a kind of static
personality, that was to change completely in the 1960s. The presentation
of Courrgess space-age collection marked a turning-point. The fashion
journalist Brigid Keenan wrote:
296
Caroline Evans
297
In January 1964, the journalists filing into the Courrges salon in

Paris were astonished to find themselves in a stark modern room
with white vinyl walls and white boxes to sit on. Loud beat music
was playing and when the show started, giant girls with closecropped hair, freckles, suntans and wide, white grins came pounding
out wearing skirts inches above the knees and flat white boots.
Courrges was launching his space-age clothes and he was
shrewd enough to know that it would be useless to show such
revolutionary ideas unless you did it on a new kind of girl in a new
kind of salon (Keenan 1977: 1267).
Figure 12
Mary Quant (center) with two
models wearing her Viva Viva
collection at a fashion show in
Milan, March 1967. Hulton
Getty Picture Library.
In London, this break with precedent happened earlier, owing to the

innovations of the young Mary Quant, who opened her first shop, Bazaar,
in 1955. Her first fashion show took place on a promotional tour for
British fashion, in the Palace Hotel in St Moritz. She realized that unless
she dramatized her presentation her simple styles would be lost among
the more ornate ones being shown. Accordingly she made an impromptu
decision to show her collection to jazz music, and rapidly rehearsed
the models so that they opened the show in the staid ballroom of the
hotel by kicking, dancing, running and jumping, to produce an electric
atmosphere. Quant repeated the idea in her first London press show,
where she used photographic rather than runway models because of how
they moved. Quants rapid-fire presentation had the models running down
the stairs to hot jazz, a wind machine trained on their skirts to increase
the impression of speed and movement. By her own account, she showed
40 garments in 14 minutes (Quant 1966: 95). A further innovation was
styling, as it is nowadays called. Quant styled Norfolk jackets trimmed
with fox collars by sending the models out holding a shotgun or a dead
pheasant (one model swung the thawing pheasant round her head so
energetically that blood began to spurt all over the newly painted walls).
Models in party dresses held glasses of champagne or clutched copies of
Marx and Engels to look dreamily intellectual (Quant 1966: 95).
Quants speed and style of showing was pronounced revolutionary
by Clare Rendelsham, then at British Vogue and subsequently manager
of the Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche boutique in London. It was next
shown in Paris, to international journalists and buyers, who received it
in stunned silence, at the Htel de Crillon. This time Quant showed 60
dresses in 15 minutes, again using photographic models for their ability
to hold a graphic pose. Quant continued to use these distinctive elements
to define her shows, both in Europe and in the USA (Figure 12). She never
pre-planned her shows meticulously but, instead, relied on the inspiration
of the moment for her theatrical effects. At the Crillon she mobilized the
eleven-year-old daughter of a friend to open the show:
This she did, wearing a shiny mock-crocodile batwing top over
black tights, her long fair hair hanging over her shoulders. She
looked wild as she ran down the catwalk with the other girls, like
298
Caroline Evans
greyhounds, pounding on behind. There were none of the mincing

up and down, stop and start, stylized movements of the usual
fashion model. These girls were all primarily photographic models
so that when they stopped in their tracks, they automatically took
up the sort of arrogant positions you see in the fashion pages of
the glossies (Quant 1966: 128).
Later in the 1960s Ossie Clark showed collections on his houseboat
moored on the Thames. The guests sat on Turkish carpets on the floor as
Amanda Lear and Patti Boyd modeled, stopping periodically to share a
joint with guests on the floor. In Paris, Paco Rabanne had electronic music
and, Harriet Quick claims, exotic models stoned on marijuana (Quick
1997: 98). However, the changes inaugurated by Quant and developed
by many other designers in the 1960s owed less to changes in the wider
culture, although their themes might reflect those changes, than they did
to enormous changes in the fashion industry itself. The origins of todays
spectacular fashion shows lie in the 1960s, and are directly connected to
the rise of designer ready-to-wear, and its expansion to include menswear.
In 1959 Pierre Cardin showed his first ready-to-wear collection for women
at the Paris department store Printemps, thus breaking with the strict rules
of couture. Implicitly recognizing the role of the spectacle in fashion
shows, he said I established the TNP [National Popular Theatre] of
couture (cited in Lipovetsky 1994: 92). In 1960 Cardin presented his
first haute couture menswear collection in the Htel de Crillon. The
collection featured an entirely new silhouette for men, with lapel-less
and collarless corduroy suits buttoned all the way up over starched
white shirts and narrow ties. The models wore sunglasses and had their
hair slicked back. Gauging correctly that their reaction would be more
enthusiastic than the fashion journalists, Cardin arranged for 200
Sorbonne students to be strategically dotted throughout the audience.
In 1961 he presented his first ready-to-wear mens collection in Paris,
modelled by university students because the professional male model did
not then exist (Morais 1991: 93). In the mid-1960s he staged his first
New York ready-to-wear menswear show in the department store Bonwit
Teller with a collection that was considered novel and shocking to his
American audience. Richard Morais suggests that the show was heavily
laced with a smouldering, homo-erotic virility and Gloria Emerson in
the New York Times wrote: some of the models came out smoking, with
a hunted look in their eyes. They all had lots of courage and good legs.
Everyone knew about their legs because they also wore silk bathrobes
and very abbreviated bathing trunks (Morais 1991: 104). Some of the
clothes drew laughter; they were extremely fitted, so tight as to impede
movement, with wide lapels and narrow arms in shiny fabrics and vibrant
colors, worn with wide ties and leather boots.
In 1966 Yves Saint Laurent created his first ready-to-wear collection
for women, and later that year opened his first Rive Gauche boutique.
299
In this period the ready-to-wear show joined the fashion calendar, taking
place two weeks after the couture shows in March and October. With
the decline of haute couture and its tradition of gentle and discreet shows
designed to flatter the customer into believing that they were for her and
her alone, the fashion show was reborn, Phoenix-like, in the 1960s as
spectacle. The ready-to-wear show became a one-off event for press and
buyers rather than a daily presentation to private customers. However,
although their function changed, the couture shows continued. Throughout the 1950s the majority of Paris couturiers had negotiated licensing
deals as the couture side of their business became less secure; in the 1960s,
under further threat from the ready-to-wear, much of the couture side of
the business became a loss-leader, generating the publicity and prestige
necessary for the licensing deals, perfumes and cosmetics that brought
the profits in. Thus the couture fashion show became, in reality, a marketing rather than a sales tool, which generated an image of luxury and
exclusivity. In the 1970s every couturier had his cabine of models, and
would hire in half a dozen extras for the shows. Marie Helvin modeled
haute couture for Yves Saint Laurent for five years in the 1970s, and
remembers the pleasures of haute couture modeling as being about contact
with hand-made, one-off clothes. It required the knack of wearing the
clothes rather than photogenic beauty or the showgirl instinct (Helvin
1985: 84).
Helvin was referring to the split nature of the modeling profession.
In the magazines of the early twentieth century, actresses and society
women tended to be used as photographic models, rather than the trained
mannequins who wore the clothes in the couture houses. Even when there
came to be professional photographic models, the distinction between
photographic and runway modeling continued, with a few exceptions
such as Bettina in the 1950s. Indeed, the iconic models of the 1960s, such
as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, made their mark as photographic models.
The distinction began to disappear in the 1970s. The American model
Jerry Hall made an explicit link between catwalk performance and fashion
as representation: runway modellings great training for high fashion
because theres so much attitude in it (Hall 1985: 138). Reminiscent
of Quants photographic models who froze into haughty poses on the
runway, Hall practiced her poses in front of the mirror and looked at
books showing the human shape doing something interesting and
then practiced making her body like a movement or a line (Hall 1985:
47). Runway modeling taught Hall to compose her own image as a
graphic representation, translating a real-life performance into a stylized
image.
These show-stopping modeling techniques were, in the 1970s, reserved
for the ready-to-wear. Helvin described how the social geography of the
catwalk changed in this period; in the 1960s the ready-to-wear show
was distinctly downmarket, particularly in Britain (Helvin 1985: 87);
but all that changed in the 1970s, when live fashion turned into show
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Caroline Evans
business and the showgirl (that is, the model) became a star. The new
models in demand were the ones with personality who were able to bring
the press in and also to sell the clothes to the buyers. Charles Castle
describes how, in the 1950s, models slithered along the catwalk, at most
pulling on or off a glove; but in the 1960s and 1970s they started to act
and dance as pop music was played through the stereo speakers, and
choreographers and show directors were employed to stage the shows
(Castle 1977: 45). Models began to be chosen for their sense of humor,
their ability to bubble over and clown; or, alternatively, to be dramatic.
They needed energy and verve, and the ability to act the part (Helvin
1985: 88). Their pay went rocketing, and the top models could command
$1,000 for an hour show in Milan, a little more for one in Paris.
The Japanese designer Kenzo brought the new form of show to Paris,
first as a fringe cultural event, and then in 1973 as a mainstream fashion
show entitled Cover Girls. He made the show almost four times bigger
than the traditional salon show, and substituted a round stage for a
runway, a light show for white film lights and, like Quant before him,
photographic models for catwalk models. Cover Girls was Jerry Halls
first show in Paris. Helvin too modeled in it, and describes how the models
were asked to improvise: Kenzo has always loved exuberance and
he stipulated only that we should enjoy ourselves and look happy. The
girls went wild, clowning and somersaulting, doing the rhumba and
dancing the can-can, showering each other with feather-like confetti,
waving sparklers and baring their breasts like the girls on rue Saint Denis
(Helvin 1985: 87). Interestingly, the models themselves approximated
their behavior to that of the chorus girls and prostitutes whose history
paralleled their own. Helvin notes that Kenzo was drawing on spectacle
as it had been used in Japanese fashion for many years, but adapted it
from choreographed to improvised movements, and showed in Paris not
Tokyo. (In the 1970s Issey Miyake had organized a show for 12,000 in
Tokyo.) Kenzos show was immensely well received by its audience; one
of its strengths was that for the first time ready-to-wear had its own form
of show, a popular fashion statement, rather than mimicking the haute
couture show, in which it inevitably came out as a poor relation. After
this show the rules were broken in Paris and the fashion show became
theater on a huge scale, a spectacle of lighting and sound as much as of
clothes and models, a form of spectacle that was also reflected in the
developing club scene at the time. In the 1970s in New York the widely
reported antics of the rich and famous at Studio 54 ran tandem to the
Paris fashion shows of Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana.
The American shows in this period were never as spectacular, and the
audience sat closer to the catwalk, sipping coffee. Helvin described the
French and Italian show timetables as pandemonium compared to those
of New York: European shows look superb front-of-house, but backstage they are a madhouse of naked women, dresses and make-up artists,
with the designer on the point of collapsing from nerves (Helvin 1985:
301
89). Jerry Hall compared the backstage at Paris shows in this period to
showgirls and vaudeville (Hall 1985: 48). She arrived in Paris in 1973,
and recalled it as a period when fashion shows were becoming more like
entertainment, no longer just for buyers. Hall adapted for the runway
the dance routines she had tried out in clubs the previous night. She
claimed she learnt her runway techniques by watching black girls move
and turn: The black girls used to walk like magic and drive everyone
wild . . . A lot of people who werent involved with fashion would try to
crash it because it was so exciting. It was a black thing, definitely . . .
plus the music was mostly black (Hall 1985: 44, 47). In the 1950s Pierre
Cardin had recruited the Japanese model Hiroko, and one of Diors
models was half-Chinese. In the 1960s Paco Rabanne used black models
on the runway; but non-European models were nevertheless cast as an
exotic foil to the white mainstream (indeed, were frankly categorized as
exotic within the industry), as if the exoticism of Luciles and Poirets
early twentieth-century orientalist fantasies became displaced from dress
and presentation on to the model herself.
In 1984 Thierry Mugler staged a ready-to-wear show as an enormous
spectacle, produced by a rock impresario, with a cast of 50 and an
audience of 6,000 (Figure 13). Breaking with the protocol whereby only
invited guests attend, Mugler opened the show to the public by offering
half the tickets for sale on the open market. This was the first time the
general public was ever present at a live Paris show and marked the
beginning of the fashion show as mass entertainment. Muglers shows of
the 1980s and 1990s were comparable to Cecil B. de Mille productions,
with light displays, epic soundtracks, and models on six-inch stilettos in
rhinestone corsets. Claude Montanas, too, continued to be flamboyant,
using dry ice and B-movie imagery. Shows became more and more like
rock concerts as fashion designers increasingly used promoters and
producers to stage their shows. The models showgirl image was revived
and brought up to date in the late twentieth century by Gianni Versaces
promotion, in the early 1990s, of the supermodels. In March 1991 he
sent Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista and Cindy
Crawford down the runway together, miming to George Michaels
Freedom (all four had starred in the video).
It is in this tradition, of spectacle, excess and showmanship, that one
can locate the London shows of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen
in the 1990s, and their respective shows in Paris for Dior and Givenchy.
McQueens models walked on water (apparently), and were drenched by
golden showers (Figure 14) or smeared in blood and dirt. Gallianos
narratives were loosely based on a series of spectacular women from the
late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. For each show he created
a fictional character around whom the narrative edifice was built. Each
model in any one show had only one outfitthere were no quick changes
hereand was encouraged really to play the part. These shows moved
into the realm of pure entertainment. Generally the collection had been
302
Caroline Evans
Figure 13
Thierry Mugler, autumn/winter 1984.
The photograph shows the huge scale
of the show, the size of the venue and
the unusual shape of the especially
constructed runway. Photograph Niall
McInerney.
Figure 14
Alexander McQueen, spring/summer
1998. This show was called untitled
as the sponsors, American Express,
had objected to McQueens title
Golden Showers. Art directed by
Simon Costin, the show featured two
spectacular coups de thtre: a
transparent catwalk that flooded from
below with black ink, followed by a
sudden downpour of water from
above, lit with yellow light, that
drenched the models as they walked.
Here McQueen takes his bow from the
catwalk while the models parade
around it. Photograph Niall McInerney.
303
sold beforehand, and the show thus became a kind of showcase of the
designers mind. The aura that Walter Benjamin ascribed to the artwork
had become detached from the goods and associated with the designers
vision.
A parallel development among more conceptual designers was to
distinguish their practice by making analogies with fine art through their
shows. In 1971 Miyake had showed for the first time in New York, and
he continued to show there twice a year through the following decades.
His shows were like happenings, and borrowed more from fine art than
fashion. He also pioneered the use of unusual show spaces, such as a
swimming-pool (New York 1988) and a disused metro station (Paris
1989). At Porte des Lilas, on the outskirts of Paris, press and buyers were
crushed on to one platform while the models paraded on the other. At
the end of the show a subway train came into the station and took the
models away, leaving a septet playing on the platform. In the 1980s and
1990s a number of other designers also situated their shows in a fine art
context; in Paris in the 1990s the Belgian Martin Margiela pioneered the
use of derelict urban spaces, including theaters, supermarkets, car-parks,
warehouses and wastelands. He sent his models to move anonymously
through crowded city streets accompanied by Margiela staff in white
warehouse overalls that mimicked the white overalls of earlier couturiers
304
Caroline Evans
like Givenchy. He showed his clothes on dummies and on giant puppets,

and had them carried in on hangers by white-coated assistants. In London,
Hussein Chalayan designed his shows like architectural installations, with
avant-garde musicians or male-voice choirs.
Walking Identity
In the last thirty to forty years of the century, the image of the model on
the runway became increasingly graphic, starting from Quants use of
photographic models on the runway. More than creative innovation, this
trend was due to the altered role of the image as a promotional and
marketing tool from the 1960s on. In 1966 Pierre Cardin resigned from
the French guild that controlled haute couture, the Chambre syndicale
de la couture franaise, because of its 30-day embargo on publishing
photographs of the new collections. This restriction benefited magazines
like Vogue; but Cardin, with his world-wide licensing deals, needed the
instant publicity of newspaper coverage to promote his designs as far
afield as Japan and Argentina. And whereas sketching was forbidden and
photography rigorously controlled in the 1950s couture show, by the
1970s fashion illustrators were producing runway sketches from the
ready-to-wear collections for the newspapers; from the 1980s runway
photographers work began to appear widely in magazines and newspapers. From the mid-1980s the twice-yearly ready-to-wear collections
began to be broadcast through satellite and television stations world-wide.
In 1996, when Hubert de Givenchy presented his last couture show, he
said to the press, You make couture for the woman not for the magazine
(Videofashion News, SpringSummer 1996). Like Balenciaga before him,
Givenchy lamented the changes in modern fashion, in his case the new
prominence of media and image in haute couture, which had had such a
profound influence on the presentation of fashion on the catwalk.
This graphic, or photographic, quality of the runway show grew out
of a commercial emphasis on the image in fashion promotion and marketing from the 1960s onwards. In the late twentieth century, the relationship
between image and identity began to be explored in other areas of cultural
production, spanning popular culture, personal politics, and academic
theory, from pop art and pop music in the 1960s, to identity politics and
critical theory in the 1980s and 1990s. I would argue that the fashion
show can be understood both in the context of commerce, and in the
context of the late-twentieth-century concern with image and identity.
For our identities and identifications are framed and given shape by the
context of commercial relations, and fashion is a modern paradigm that
brings together commerce, culture and identity in a particularly (post)modern formation on the runway.
The earliest fashion show audiences had a dclass quality to their social
mix, replicating that of the models on stage. Lucile claimed that her first
305
mannequin parade in Paris in 1911 was attended by eight hundred people,

including famous actresses, more famous courtesans, women of title,
women of fashion, with a good sprinkling of equally famous men, artists,
men of letters and diplomats (Gordon 1932: 187). Then, as now, fashion
shows were social events, generating the same excitement as the opening
of a new play, often having to be repeated three times a day to accommodate the crowds. In the mid-1930s Schiaparellis shows were open,
not by invitation only. They were very popular, and people went to be
stimulated, entertained and scandalized (White 1986: 164). The staircase would be packed with artists, writers, architects and musicians;
after the war they were joined by women pilots, soldiers and sailors, air
hostesses, decorators, teachers and art students (White 1986: 161). Marie
Helvin described the typical fashion show audience of the 1970s: an
extraordinary selection of artists and bankers, entrepreneurs and journalists, society women and buyers of every currency and nationality, always
crawl out of the woodwork for collections week. There is also every type
of fashion caricature on display, from style litists to fashion victims . . .
(Helvin 1985: 90). It is an unlikely comparison, but these three quotations
bring to mind Marxs description of the dclass lumpenproletariat in
the Eighteenth Brumaire:
Alongside decayed rous with dubious means of subsistence and
of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of
the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged
jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni,
pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers,
porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers,
beggarsin short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown
hither and thither, which the French term la bohme . . . the
lumpenproletariat . . . [is] this scum, offal, refuse of all classes (Marx
1954: 68).
This group is the opposite of the fashion crowd, for the fashion audience
is one of privilege rather than abject poverty; yet the descriptions tally
as each others opposites in their lively heterogeneity, and in the way
that the individuals described fall between the cracks of social class and
stratification.
Social fluidity has been associated with metropolitan fashion since the
eighteenth century, if not before, and the fluidity that has characterized
the fashion audience since 1900 reflects the fluidity of fashion itself in
this period. The amorality and lack of class consciousness that Marx
ascribed to the nineteenth-century lumpenproletariat is also a characteristic of the twentieth-century fashion crowd. The flux of the crowd
(a key trope of literary modernism in the writings of Baudelaire and
Benjamin) can be identified in the heterogeneity of the fashion audience;
and, I would argue, it was further played out in the 1990s in the form of
306
Caroline Evans
a renewed interest in the idea of identity as fluid and mobile. In this

context, the fashion show in the late 1990s, while continuing to function
commercially as spectacle in an increasingly visualized global market,
could, at the same time, be understood as a form of theatricalization of
social reality and of the self. For example, David LaChapelles photograph
Catwalk Curtain Call (LaChapelle 1999: 121) fused fact, fiction and camp
irony in its imaginative creation of a fashion crowd that interspersed real
figures from the fashion world, such as Stephen Meisel, Anna Wintour
and Anna Piaggi, with a fictional audience that screamed hysterically and
pelted the models with long-stemmed red roses.12 If the early twentieth
century saw the fashion show evolve out of commercial theater, the close
of the century saw commercial fashion evolving into an approximation
of what the academic Judith Butler has termed performativity (Butler
1990). The fashion show, with its emphasis on novelty and spectacle,
became a switching station for postmodern identities.
In the fields of popular culture and art, Madonnas continual recreation
of her image from the late 1980s and Cindy Shermans recycling of her
own image in her Untitled Film Stills and later work from the 1980s
and 1990s were comparable examples of the contemporary concern with
image and identity. This form of aestheticism can be traced back to the
nineteenth-century figure of the dandy. In What is Enlightenment?
Foucault identified Baudelaires dandy in particular as the man who
makes of his body, his behaviour, his feelings and passions, his very
existence, a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man
who goes off to discover himself . . . he is the man who tries to invent
himself (Rabinow 1984: 412). And Rosalind Williams wrote that
dandyism is part of the aesthetic that the small details of fashion reveal
the innermost principles of modern thought: the assumption that such
details can carry a weight of significance (Williams 1982: 117). According to this definition, the late twentieth century could be identified as a
dandyish moment. The theoretical interest in identity as a construct
converts, in its cultural formations, into a number of mutant forms:
the fashion show, or the media cult of celebrity, are simply different
articulations of the aestheticization of the self. At the beginning of this
article I referred to Rhonda Garelicks argument that the nineteenthcentury practice of dandyism could be tracked through the fin-de-sicle
woman to the contemporary cult of personality, and I would myself chase
it even further, on to the catwalk. Garelick comments on the structural
similarities between dandyism and fashion itself, citing Habermass identification of the dandys kinship with fashion: he is the expert on the
fleeting pleasures of the moment (Garelick 1998: 59). And it is on the
contemporary catwalk, just as much as in the posturing of our stars and
celebrities, that the performance of identity through superficial detail and
spectacular gesture finds its apotheosis.
307
Notes
1. Paul Poirets autobiography is the source for the erroneous claim, made
in many fashion books, that Worth was the first to use live mannequins
(Poiret 1931: 145). Diana de Marly argues that Worth merely increased
the number of house mannequins used by many Parisian dressmakers,
and draws attention to the mercer Gagelins mannequin parades (de
Marly 1980: 1034).
2. The renaming of mannequins when they entered a couture house
recalls the nineteenth-century practice in France of renaming prostitutes with a single name such as Blondinette when they joined a
maison close or regulated brothel (Evans 2002). As late as the 1950s,
Balmains chief mannequin Praline was renamed in a mock christening
ceremony in the salon of the couture house.
3. The novelist Edith Saunders wrote in 1865 that at the house of Worth
attractive young girls were much in evidence, the models of the
establishment, many of whom were English (cited in Castle 1977:
11). Her use of the word model in 1865 to refer to the living woman
rather than the gown is an early, and unusual, example of this usage.
The ambiguity was to become, and still is, a defining characteristic of
the model. Herzog expressly comments on the difficulty in seeing the
model and her clothes as separate in her discussion of fashion shows
in Hollywood films of the 1930s (Herzog 1990: 137).
4. Lucile gives no date in her autobiography, and this statement cannot
be relied on, especially given her laxity with dates elsewhere in the
book. Certainly by the time she opened her Paris branch in 1911
several Parisian houses had already initiated their mannequin parades.
5. The black satin maillot is shown in a photograph reproduced in Kirke
1998: 90, and the actress Musidora appears to be wearing a version
of the maillot, a black silk body stocking attributed to Poiret, at a Dada
performance in Paris in 1920, in a photograph reproduced in Green
1993: 88.
6. There are also photographs of Luciles parades in the gardens of her
showrooms in 1910 and 1913 reproduced in Etherington-Smith and
Pilcher 1986 and Gordon 1932.
7. It is reproduced in Quick 1997: 26.
8. In 1923 the first model agency was opened in New York by an outof-work actor to supply department stores like Henri Bendel and
Bergdorf Goodman that had regular fashion shows. The Ford Model
Agency opened in 1946 in the USA. In London the first model agency,
Lucie Claytons, opened in 1928; it handled show and photographic
models, but also ran charm courses and taught debutantes to curtsy
well into the 1960s. In Paris model agencies were a later development,
perhaps because the couture houses had their own models, and
the first agency was opened there in 1959 by the ex-model Jean
Dawnay.
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Caroline Evans
9. This paragraph reflects the fact that my preliminary research has been
done in London, and so all the examples are English; I anticipate
that future research in Paris and American cities will yield more
information on department store mannequin parades in France and
the USA.
10. Dormer considered that the features that made Bronwen Pugh a good
catwalk model were the same features, described in this passage, that
made her unsuited to photographic modeling. In the 1950s show
mannequins were deemed unphotogenic and the press photographers
usually photographed the clothes on photographic models after
the shows (though a few models such as Bettina did both kinds of
modeling).
11. That Lucie Claytons London model agency doubled as an influential
charm school in this period is no accident. There is a clear link
between modeling in shows and the schooling of female appearance:
like eighteenth-century dance manuals, fashion shows taught women
posture and demeanor. Just as 1930s films with fashion shows taught
women how to look and act like mannequins (Herzog 1990: 150),
so the demure presentation of most 1950s shows provided an
etiquette of feminine respectability in a period when upper-class
young women still did the season by attending coming-out balls
and being presented at court.
12. With thanks to Molly Grad at Central Saint Martins who brought
this image to my attention by writing so perceptively about it in her
BA thesis, 2001.
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The Enchanted Spectacle

Fashion Theory, Volume 5, Issue 3, pp.271310

Caroline Evans is Reader in

The Enchanted Spectacle

The Enchanted Spectacle

IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY

The Enchanted Spectacle

The Early Mannequin Parades

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mannequins were trained to walk sedately, although Poiret described the

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The Enchanted Spectacle

dress, which was briefly replaced by a flesh-coloured stockinette garment

IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY

The Enchanted Spectacle

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An enormous number of untrained waitresses, typists and charwomen

The Enchanted Spectacle

enough to be reported in London, and the image reminds us how quick,

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The Enchanted Spectacle

Paris Couture as Spectacle

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his clothes on American mannequins. Accordingly, he advertised in the

The Enchanted Spectacle

the unique purchaser of a model. The luxurious and phantasmagorical

IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY

The Enchanted Spectacle

And in 1923, the year that Tutankhamuns tomb was discovered

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The Enchanted Spectacle

1938 was particularly riotous and swaggering (White 1986: 166). It

This revolution in showing fashions depended entirely on the speed and

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The Enchanted Spectacle

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The Enchanted Spectacle

The 1960s and the Origins of Todays Shows

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The Enchanted Spectacle

In January 1964, the journalists filing into the Courrges salon in

In London, this break with precedent happened earlier, owing to the

greyhounds, pounding on behind. There were none of the mincing

The Enchanted Spectacle

The Enchanted Spectacle

IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY

The Enchanted Spectacle

IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY

like Givenchy. He showed his clothes on dummies and on giant puppets,

The Enchanted Spectacle

mannequin parade in Paris in 1911 was attended by eight hundred people,

a renewed interest in the idea of identity as fluid and mobile. In this

The Enchanted Spectacle

The Enchanted Spectacle

Etherington-Smith, Meredith and Jeremy Pilcher. 1986. The IT Girls.

Quant, Mary. 1966. Quant by Quant. London: Cassell.

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