There was Chanel, and Balenciaga, too, and the young Christian Dior-who would later credit James as the mind, or at least the inspiration, behind his postwar “New Look.” James was also interested in art, especially in surrealism, and he admired (and knew) Tchelitchew, Dalí, and Bérard, among others.īy 1940, James was settled-or as settled as he would ever be-in New York, attempting to make fashion American at the same time that George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein were setting out to make ballet American, and Aaron Copland and other composers were defining a new native sound. He even lived across the hall from Cocteau, and they worked together on fabric designs. Success followed on success: New York, London, Paris. He worked with Beaton at Vogue in New York, and in Paris in the early 1930s he met Paul Poiret, the doyen of French fashion, whose own work was suffused with the sumptuous orientalism and theatricality of the Ballets Russes. ![]() ![]() He had an eye for style and line, and as his clientele grew he expanded into dress and fashion design. He would personally cut, steam, and mold them on women’s heads. His next business venture was his own: hats. The rest he picked up as he went along, beginning with the millinery trade. In search perhaps of some stability, and at his father’s behest, James resentfully tried and spectacularly failed to work in business: at Con Ed in Chicago in 1924, he could be found hawking batik-dyed silk beach wraps to his bemused co-workers instead of performing his desk duties. A short stint in an architectural unit was more to his liking: structural engineering, physics, and spatial design-concepts that applied to bodies as much as to buildings appealed to him. Surprisingly, this mini-apprenticeship constituted the only formal training he had in art. At Harrow in 1919 he met Cecil Beaton and Evelyn Waugh, and became one of the “Bright Young People” whom Waugh would later describe in Vile Bodies, dissolute, rebellious, and in some way lost to a brutal world war they were too young to fight. The constant round of parties, the obsession with dressing and cross-dressing, cosmetics, alcohol, casual sex, and a self-dramatizing and uncontrolled lifestyle testified to an almost giddy emptiness inside. And now James has been revived and called upon to elevate fashion once and for all to the level of fine art.īut first James had to endure the intellectually and sexually intense-and socially cruel- world of the English boarding school. The message conveyed in all this, however, goes further still. The Met seems to be telling us-showing us-that we should view not just James, but dress and fashion more generally, as high art. This is not a new argument, of course, but in spite of past scholarly and curatorial efforts, it has never decisively taken hold. And for many of us now, the idea will not be an easy one to swallow: today’s world of haute couture seems to perpetuate the worst excesses of our time, with its unnaturally thin (and starving) models, outrageous prices, exploitative work practices, and obsession with money and vanity and fame. James would seem the perfect antidote, and in many ways he is: a great designer who was never a celebrity (few outside the field of fashion have ever heard of him), an inveterate craftsman who was also a genuinely imaginative artist-a sculptor of satin and silk willing to sacrifice everything including profits for the perfect seam-who died impoverished and defeated by the tidal wave of popular commercialism that swept American fashion and art into the 1960s. ![]() Is the fashion designer Charles James a major twentieth-century artist? James’s ball gowns, coats, dresses, and hats, along with his sketches, fragments of writings, and pronouncements on art, were all lavishly on display at the new Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this summer, and they are being treated with the kind of seriousness and acclaim given to Rodin or Rothko or any other major figure in the history of art. The Met, capitalizing on the contemporary fascination with fashion and celebrity, and following on its blockbuster Alexander McQueen exhibit in 2011, has pulled out the stops for Charles James: there was an opulent, celebrity-filled opening (Michelle Obama cut the ribbon) and the museum’s annual evening gala also honored James, with the requisite red- carpet spectacle of extravagant dresses with le tout New York in attendance. The reviews of the exhibition have been sensational, and the catalogue is a glamorous and uncritical homage to James.
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