Is this the most glamorous show ever made?
clothing was indubitable before the Second World War began, with more than 70 houses, including Dior and Cristóbal Balenciaga, already registered in the city. But the
was a much-needed reminder of what they had to offer. As the Sabines’ fictional investor Jules Trouvier (James Cosmo) surmises, the industry had to “remind women that Paris is where it begins and where it ends”.
It worked: having been on tour in cities across Europe and the US for a year by the time Dior’s New Look arrived, the appetite for French fashion had been whet. Yet while American journalists praised Paris’s of married life; even Pope John Paul II was a fan.
Such was the on-screen chemistry between Powers and Wagner that I say I’m surprised they never got together in real life. “There was never a chance of romance between us because we were always involved with other people,” she says. “But Bob and I worked together under rather extraordinary circumstances.”
Two weeks after Powers’ lover, Holden, died, Wagner’s wife Natalie Wood was killed suddenly in a drowning accident. She and Wagner, she says, “held each other together, we held each other up, we had to carry on – so it cemented the relationship in an unusual way. He’s a lovely man; thank God he’s still with us.”
Stefanie had first met the charismatic Holden when she was 32 and he 56; he was already a legendary drinker then. The two had separated, but were still friends when Powers, driving to a location, heard on the car radio that, at 63, he had been found dead in his apartment return to glory, things were frostier in Britain: corsetry had been banned unless medically necessary and the fabric restrictions introduced during the war were still in place, making floor-skimming garments a nearunthinkable luxury.
British omitted Dior from its pages and reactions to those who wore such finery were decidedly adverse: “People shout at you from vans”, Nancy Mitford wrote of wearing haute couture in Paris. A Maison Dior photoshoot saw its models attacked by stallholders angry at their wilful extravagance during hard times
– an episode reimagined in “I think this was a moment when fashion really was political, when fashion mattered,” says Kate Croft, the show’s executive producer. “Post-war Europe was a very difficult, ambiguous time, and yet in the midst of dreadful hardship and unrest, this industry rises phoenix-like out of the ashes. The dresses are a metaphor for transformation.” The concept of sloping shoulders, full busts and wide skirts was a major departure from masculine wartime fashions. “The New Look, and the designs it inspired, were intensely feminine,” Sebba adds. “Women after tripping over and gashing his head, lying there for four days before he was found. She later admitted: “I didn’t cope well at all. Bill’s death took a lot out of me.”
Powers has been married twice: for six years, from 1966 to 1972, to actor Gary Lockwood, and for six years, from 1993 to 1999, to Patrick De La Chenais, a French count. In 2000, at a benefit concert where she was singing, she met American businessman Thomas Carroll, the handsome global chief auditor at Prudential who – in Stefanie’s words – “looked like a movie star in his suit and tie”.
They were soon a couple, going sailing together, and he became a director of her William Holden Wildlife Foundation. But in 2014 it was reported that, after 14 years together, Carroll had died at the age of 72. Powers won’t discuss this, other than to say: “No one knows the cards we are going to be dealt in life, all we can do is play the best hand we get – and look for the positive parts.”
She shrugs off any special credit for had been given the vote in France a year earlier and the post-war focus was on family, rather than sustaining a professional career.
“They were fighting to keep their jobs, but the impetus was on men getting back into work, and women going back to taking care of things at home.
“To see people playing into traditional ideas of femininity by wearing such extravagant clothing made the garments even more controversial.”
For Fab, Chattoune’s design partner, her toughness. “Everyone is resilient, everybody should get a medal at a certain point for surviving, because life is not easy for anybody. If you’ve lived enough years, it’s inevitable you will have gone through a lot of highs and lows.”
Powers has no children. But she’s hoping to become a godmother again to the new baby of “two dear friends” and she’s “very happy “that Bill Holden’s niece and one of his granddaughters have joined her on the board of his wildlife foundation.
She has no plans to retire and, hopefully, will be reunited on screen with Wagner, if a proposed Mexican crime drama, written and directed by Quentin recreating these “princess dresses” for the show was “intimidating, because it’s easy to make them clichéd. But I put myself in that period and imagined how I would design clothes if I lived then”.
The intricacies of the 1947 originals meant their recreations had to be just as exact: getting the structure of each gown right required numerous precise patterns to be cut; “enormous hems” and 1,200 individual pieces made for a “long, complicated process”.
Chattoune and Fab’s focus was on the “eight’” also known as the “Carolle’ – Dior’s trademark silhouette of exaggerated shoulders belying a waif-like waist, and ramping up the volume of each skirt by joining eight circles together, where they would usually have one. With many of the dresses requiring 50 metres of fabric instead of the customary two, Chattoune says “it’s like wearing 25 outfits at once and so the dresses are unbelievably heavy. Couture is not for everybody!”
“This is a Paris that most have seldom seen dramatised,” explains the show’s creator, Oliver Goldstick. “Not the Paris of Gene Kelly dancing along a sparkling Seine, but a haunted Paris, still trembling with distrust and anxiety,”
Now, through gowns just as devastating as the storyline’s unfolding drama, we will. Tarantino’s father Tony, raises the finances to go into production. A Broadway musical in which she sings and dances is “looming in the background. It was called
now retitled and we did it in Chicago for eight weeks last year”. Powers, who keeps a home in London, has considerable form on the UK stage, having taken over from Elaine Paige in a revival of and also starring in the musical
But I’m looking forward to that throaty drawl of hers playing to her strengths as Helene Hanff ’s outwardly tough New York broad.
“Why, thank you. I guess it’s typecasting…” she concedes with a wry smile.