The draconian couture designer who came unstitched
Oscar contender ‘Phantom Thread’ was inspired by tyrannical British couturier Charles James. Kate Finnigan reports
The fashion industry inspires a particular kind of creative tyranny. Such is the subject of Paul Thomas Anderson’s atmospheric, creepy, wickedly sharp film Phantom Thread, which last week picked up six Oscar nominations, for Anderson and British stars Daniel Day-lewis and Lesley Manville, among others
The film, set in postwar London, centres around Reynolds Woodcock, a draconian, ferociously focused haute couture designer (played by Daylewis), and the two main women in his life: his sister, Cyril (Manville), and Alma (Vicky Krieps), a waitress who becomes his muse. Day-lewis drew on many formidable fashion personalities for the role, but the inspiration is said to have been the most uncompromising of them all – Charles James, the English fashion designer.
So who was James, the man who became known as America’s first couturier but whose career ended in ignominy in 1958? He was once described by Hardy Amies as “the Pythagoras of fashion; the Michelangelo of fashion; the Einstein of fashion; and a man who made Caligula seem as open and kind as a Sunday school teacher”.
James was an intriguing obsessive. Openly gay, despite marrying the heiress, Nancy Gregory, in 1954, he could be as exacting in his relationships as he was in his art. In the film, Woodcock’s ice-cold put-downs and fastidiousness are quite delicious. Anderson’s film acknowledges James’s boundary-pushing designs.
At the height of his career, he was celebrated for his innovative, sculptural and ambitiously engineered clothes that defied anything that had gone before. His friend, Christian Dior, acknowledged that he owed his “new look” to James. He was also entirely self-taught: in an aside to Alma, Woodcock proudly confides he designed his mother’s wedding dress when he was 16.
James’s highly theatrical pieces were worn by actresses such as Marlene Dietrich, as well as the richest society ladies. He fully understood the transformational possibilities of fashion, the way a dress could turn its wearer into a piece of art, and Anderson captures this perfectly: Woodcock’s clients walk like living sculptures.
Born in 1906 into a wealthy family, James went through life rebelling against his upbringing’s restrictions, while feeling vehemently entitled to its privileges. Ralph, his father, was a lieutenant colonel in the British military, and eventually a wealthy businessman in America, but the family money came via Louise Brega, his mother, a Chicago socialite and heiress.
In the film, Woodcock is obsessed with his dead mother, constantly speaking to her. Yet for James it was his father who proved the defining figure in his life. Ralph was a quintessential Victorian patriarch. The filial relationship was fraught and, James later alleged, physically abusive. But it was to prove his biggest motivator. “I attempted the impossible, out of a compulsion to be involved in a business of which my father disapproved,” he said.
That business took him to New York where, as a European couturier, he found himself in huge demand throughout the Forties. Here, he turned out his most spectacular, cutting-edge garments. He was obsessed to the point of distraction, spending more than $20,000 trying to perfect a set-in sleeve. He worked through the night, sometimes locking his team in the studio. In Phantom Thread, we see them on deadline in the workshop above Woodcock’s sleeping head. And he never delivered on time. Diana Vreeland, the powerful editor of American Vogue, said: “James would rather work on a dress for a party than have the dress go to the party.” No love was lost between the two – he referred to her as “that faggot woman”.
Highly litigious, James sued clients, journalists and the Brooklyn Museum. He was cunning and spiteful, threatening to set loose a jar of moths at a furrier’s after they fired him for non-delivery, and releasing an infestation of cockroaches into the lobby of a hotel so that they wouldn’t be able to demand his rent.
The team of 20 who worked closely with him suffered for it. Pins had to be inserted at a 45-degree angle or hell would be raised. Phantom Thread captures much of this compulsive attention to detail: Woodcock obsesses over the tilt of a hat, the swirl of a dress. The film also deviates from the facts of James’s life, however. Woodcock tells Alma that he can’t get married because “he was never meant to marry. I’m a confirmed bachelor. I’m incurable.” Yet he goes on to marry Alma. No explanation is given for his initial reluctance.
James, on the other hand, caused a stir when he married Nancy Gregory, since he had been having an open affair with Keith Cuerdon, Nancy’s first husband. And while Woodcock works in London, sleeping in claustrophobic proximity to his studio, James would scuttle between Chicago, London and Paris, where he built up a clientele of aristocrats, European royalty, actresses and members of the Bloomsbury set – Virginia Woolf once described a James dress as “diabolical, and geometrically perfect”.
“Embittered” is how Cecil Beaton described James in his diaries, later saying: “His talent was marvellous; his wit bitter… He could be utterly wonderful and, then, with alacrity, kill everything by being objectionable… No one could cope with his temperament for long.” Whether James terminated a relationship with a lover on the basis that they were eating their toast too vigorously is a contested point.
A hopeless businessman, James was kept afloat by Nancy’s money, but in 1957 the American taxman caught up with him for non-payment of taxes, worth almost £500,000 today. The showroom was seized. Everything went up in smoke. It was the end of his marriage and his business.
In 1964, he moved to the Chelsea Hotel, where he remained until his death 14 years later. James died in hospital, aged 72. He had been suffering from bronchial pneumonia. When the ambulance attendants came to the Chelsea to collect him, he kept them waiting while he adjusted his appearance and then said: “It may not mean anything to you, but I am popularly regarded as the greatest couturier in the Western world.”
We might not remember him so well now, but Anderson’s film goes some way to honouring his titanic talent.