Fashion’s original sharp-tongued talent
If you think Karl Lagerfeld gives spikily good quote, make room on your bookshelves for a new biography of Charles James, the mid-20th-century British-born maestro of American ball gowns and tailoring.
Here he is on that legendary seer of fashion, one-time editor of US Vogue and Harper’s
Bazaar (although not at the same time) and special consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “I don’t know anyone less informed than Mrs Vreeland. She is one of the parlor maids of fashion.”
He’s not too keen on Cecil Beaton either, even though the latter had supported him through thick and very thin, pouring ice water on his supposed affair with Greta Garbo. He was positively putrid about Halston, his former protégé, whom he dismissed as “a middle-of-the-road man who would be better as a buyer in the store or a stylist… the word plagiarism is correct”.
Jealous? Of course. By the time Halston’s career was in full bloom, James’s was in steep decline.
The son of a British Army officer, he can’t have found it easy to follow his vocation. But by the age of 19 he’d opened his first millinery store in Chicago. By the Forties, he’d moved to New York, designed collections for Elizabeth Arden and opened his own house. In 1954 he
married Nancy Lee Gregory, a Kansas heiress. His success was sealed.
His speciality was what today we’d call Red Carpet Dressing – scene-stealers, albeit chic ones. He knew what he was doing. Christian Dior called him “the greatest talent of my generation”. Cristóbal Balenciaga said he was “the only dressmaker who has raised [fashion] from an applied art to a pure art form”. The Daniel Day-lewis character in
Phantom Thread is said to be loosely based on him. The Met, whose special consultant he was so scathing about, dedicated its summer exhibition to him in 2014. Plans were hatched to revive his label… by one Harvey Weinstein.
As happened often to grand couturiers back then, there wasn’t much of a nest-egg for James to fall back on when his star declined. He eked out the end of his life in much reduced circumstances in the Chelsea Hotel, where one visitor recalled that “the combined smell of Sputnik – Charlie’s old beagle – and the powder used to kill off the cockroaches, were so strong that as soon as I got there, I needed to run”. An intriguing tale, well told.
Charles James: Portrait of an Unreasonable Man by Michèle Gerber Klein is published by Rizzoli, £28.95