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The house dressing
Five centuries of fashion goons how at Chatsworth
It’s one thing for a bride to toss away her bouquet, but her wedding gown? Unheard of. Yet stella tennant, emblematic model of the 1990s, muse to helmut Lang and alexander Mcqueen, scotti sh castle - dweller and granddaughter of the late deborah Mitford, dowager duchess of devonshire, hadn’t seen the minidress Lang designed for her 1999 wedding since sometime around the big day itself, and presumed it had been thrown away.
then a team testing display ideas for wedding gowns at Chatsworth, the devonshires’ estate, found a wisp of a thing balled up in the tissue paper protecting a boxed gown belonging to tennant’s mother. the fact that the paper bore helmut Lang’s logo provided a clue. so did the garment’s appearance: ‘It looked
like a vest with chiffon attached to it,’ says Laura Burlington, Countess of Burlington and daughter-in-law of the current Duchess of Devonshire, who lives at Chatsworth, ‘which was a very good sign. I called Stella and she was moved almost to tears, she was so excited. It’s lovely to have it back.’
Burlington, a former model turned fashion editor, consultant and chatelaine of Lismore Castle in Ireland, perches on the edge of a sofa in the 12th Duke and Duchess’s private library. Sitting beside her is Hamish Bowles, the international editor-at-large for American Vogue and her co-curator for House Style: Five Centuries of Fashion at Chatsworth, an exhibition that opens later this month. Outside, the frosted topiary and oculus-round reflecting pool guide the eye west over the River Derwent, a view the late Dowager, ‘Debo’ to her friends, classed as‘ in comparable’ .Inside, warmed by the tea and home-made cake as much as by the extra-long sleeves on her Holland & Holland wool jumper (designed by Tennant: ‘It’s really brilliant – we’re flying the flag for it’), Burlington delights in the artefacts included in the show – not only the wedding dress, but also the 11th Duke’s loveworn John Lobb slippers and the annotated
Vogue magazines of Adele Astaire (sister and first dance partner of Fred, and later Lady Charles Cavendish, wife of the second son of the 9th Duke of Devonshire). ‘The diversity of what we’ve found is rather extraordinary,’ she says.
The house was built in the 16 th century, with Bess of Hard wick, who married well( four times) and was canny enough to remain the second- richest woman in England (after Queen Elizabeth I), as its first inhabitant. Its timeline alights on Georgia na, the 18th-century duchess, whose penchant for towering wigs led to a revolution in hairstyles (and precipitated at least one chandelier-singed updo). It then skips to her son, the ‘Bachelor Duke’ William Cavendish, who expanded the gardens, and on to Louise, the Double Duchess (she married the 8 th Duke after the death of her first husband, the Duke of Manchester ). There’ s a touch of allAmerican glamour via Asta ire, who cartwheeled across the room the first time she met the matriarchs, and Kathleen ‘Kick ’ Kennedy, Jack ’s younger sister – she married the Marquess of Harting ton, heir apparent to the 10th Duke of Devonshire, and would have been du chess if not for his death in
They met when she modelled for Bowles and her ‘rather snug’ corset precipitated a swoon
active service only four months after their wedding. And there’ sDebo, always Debo. The youngest Mitford sister and 11th Duchess befriended Cecil Beaton a nd Lucia n Freud, favoured Parisian couture and sturdy agricultural- fair wear, and collected Elvis merchandise and handbags shaped like rubber chickens. ‘You do get such a vivid sense of personality from their clothes,’ Bowles says.
House Style had its origins not in couture, but a christening gown. Burlington wanted to find one for her son, now aged six, and had an inkling that Chatsworth’s textile storage rooms might be a good place to start. ‘My mother-in-law and I used to go on these little exploratory trips because she didn’t know the house terribly well at that point,’ Burlington says. When they opened the relevant box, not one, but 15 gowns tumbled out. ‘I thought, there must be lots of interesting clothes here – I wondered what else there might be.’
Burlington, who is married to William, Earl of Burlington, emailed Bowles, a friend from their early careers. (They met when Burlington modelled for Bowles in Harpers & Queen, and her ‘rather snug’ Vivienne Westwood corset precipitated a fashionable swoon – ‘this complete keeling-over,’ Bowles recalls. ‘He was incredibly kind about it, just came and made me sweet tea,’ Burlington adds. ‘I’ve been fond of him since.’) ‘I thought that if I asked someone like Hamish, then that would give me licence to have a good rummage.’
For Bowles, the request presented a portal to realise childhood dreams. As a fashion-absorbed child in London, he made weekend visits to the costume court at the Victoria & Albert Museum to take in the history. ‘I would be transfixed by these clothes, imagining the lives that would have been led in them,’ he says. He ‘devoured’ Mary Lovell’s Bess of Hardwick, Amanda Foreman’s
Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (later adapted into a film starr ingKe ira Knight ley)and‘obviou sly a whole library’s worth of Mitfordiana’.
‘So I knew about some of the more colourful and charismatic characters who have been such a rich part of the tapestry of this house and its history. Basically Laura had me at, “Would you like to come to Chatsworth for a weekend?”’
But where to begin sifting through 450- odd years of clothes? Burlington drafted family members to rifle through lofts and storerooms. Amanda Cavendish, the current Duchess, contributed 1970 s‘neo- medieval hip pie-deluxe’ dresses (Bowles’s description). Tennant sent a truck. Early in her career, she modelled in exchange for clothes, so her castle contained a trove of 1990s fashion. She has one-off Alexander Mcqueen samples that ‘even the house of Mcque end idn’ tk now were still extant,’ Bowles says.
Then there was the house itself. Chatsworth has 297 rooms; even allowing for the public rooms and private quarters, there are scores of areas (airing cupboards, cold-storage rooms) the family has no reason to visit. Everything existed in triplicate, at least. There wasn’t one footman’s state livery, there were dozens, all immaculate. The same goes for Debo’s white-collared-andcuffed Turn bull& Asser shirts and the 11th Duke’s cream silk pyjamas. ‘It’s a very powerful house, aesthetically,’ says Bowles – an understatement, given that you can come across five Freud paintings casually tucked into an alcove. ‘It’s impossible not to have an emotional, visceral response to this house and its history. That’s helped guide the curation.’
With creative direction from exhibition designers Patrick Kinmonth and Antonio Monfreda, Burlington and Bowles divided their bounty into groupings. Besides the wedding gowns, exhibits explore The Georgiana Effect, Coronation Dress and The Devonshire House Ball. For Entertaining at Chatsworth, they summoned exceptional couture pieces from Jean Philippe Worth and Chr ist ia n Dior (a ba llgown Bowles believes Debo wore for dinner with the Queen in spring 1953). There were ample options to choose from, given that as recently as the time of the 11th Duke, every dinner – even quiet meals for two – was a black-tie event. ‘Actually, I imag- ine the only exceptions were when they wore white tie,’ Bowles clarifies.
Burlington recalls wearing evening gowns every night on her early visits. ‘Well, a relaxed form of it, somehow – it was just what you did,’ she says. She did make one wardrobe miscalculation during her first visit, when she and William As recently as the time of the 11th Duke, even quiet dinners for two were black-tie events were still just friends. ‘My bedroom was quite a long way off and it was chilly in there. I came to dinner in a thermal vest and a velvet dress, and I really thought I was going to faint in the middle of dinner. I’ve never been hotter in my life.’
Nightly formal dinners meant that when the inhabitants of Chatsworth wanted to raise the bar, the bar went stratospheric. One such occasion was The Devonshire House Ball of 1897. Hosted by the 8th Duke at Devonshire House on Piccadilly, it was one of the most elaborate revels around Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Some 700 guests – kings, queens, lords, ladies and assorted ambitious American heiresses – convened in elaborate fancy-dress costumes, designed by the couture and theatrical costume houses of London, Paris and New York, that invoked grand ancestors or mythological figures.
Louise Cavendish, 8th Duchess of
Devonshire, attended as Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. Along with her lavish gown, she wore a gold feathered headdress with strands of pearls that looped around ears and neck. The headdress has disappeared, but CW Sell ors Fine Jewellery recreated it for the exhibition based on a photograph from the event, hundreds of which were compiled into an album presented to attendees at the time. Bowles, a dedicated collector of couture, acquired one of these albums and used it to track down costumes that haven’t been in the same ballroom since July 2, 1897. ‘Everything in the album is in black and white. So to discover the clothes which are worn in them, which are often these astonishingly vivid colours – it gives you such a different sense of what the visual overload and experience of it all must have been,’ he says.
Bowles revels in finding resonances across artistic disciplines. A vignette in the house’ s main library groups together important first editions with Hussein Chalayan’s paper dress from autumn/winter 1995, an autumn/
winter 2014 dress by Christopher Kane that evokes the idea of flicking through a book’s pages, and a headpiece that Stephen Jones designed to Stella Tennant’s poetic brief: ‘A hat to wear while stomping the moors, reading Robert Burns poetry.’
He also connected rare illustrations from 17 th-century naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian to Debo’s collection of bejewelled insect brooches, used to dramatic effect in her evening wear. ‘She used to come down in t he evening with them crawling all down one sleeve,’ Burlington says. ‘She had amazing eyes and amazing jewels. It was quite an intoxicating combination.’
Among those intoxicated was Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele, who designed a gown with dozens of embroidered insects à la Debo for the exhibition (Gucci is the principal sponsor of House Style and its recent resort campaign was shot at Chatsworth).
The exhibition promises more tongue-in-cheek delights as well. Some 15 of the 11 th Duke’s embroidered slogan jumpers, bearing his aphorisms such as ‘Never marry a Mitford’ appear. So does along-sleeved T-shirt with a trompe-l’oeil print of a man’s evening dress with medals, a lighthearted entry from the wardrobe of Adele Astaire.
There’ s also space for a Marks& Spencer cardigan or two. For while society contemporary Mona Bismarck may have commissioned Cristóbal Balenciaga to design her gardening shorts, Debo acquired her kilts, tweeds and cardigans from hardier sources. ‘I buy most of my clothes at agricultural shows,’ she wrote. ‘After agricultural shows, Marks & Spencer is the place to go shopping, and then Paris. Nothing in between seems to be much good.’ A selection of these garments and other Cavendish outdoor-wear will be on view in the Sabine Room. Though, this being Debo, her Givenchy haute-couture pleated coat also appears. Because, as Burlington suggests, ‘I’m not sure she had nearly as much M&S as she liked to say.’ House Style, 25 March to 22 October, at Chatsworth, chatsworth.org