A dalliance with art deco dresses
Museum of Vancouver exhibit highlights exquisite artifacts of prewar fashion
Imagine time- travelling back to Depression- era Vancouver just as rum runner and millionaire George Reifel opens the Commodore Cabaret, now the Commodore Ballroom, for the first time. It is the biggest nightclub in Vancouver, and its art deco design and sprung dance floor have been the talk of the town for weeks. The December 1930 grand opening features an 11- piece orchestra and sumptuous full- course dinner for a sold- out crowd of 1,500 people. You are one of them. What will you wear? With the economy in a tailspin, you can’t afford a new dress so you pull out one you bought two years before. It’s a flapper dress embellished with thousands of shiny black sequins and glass beads machine- stitched onto silk mesh. It is classic art deco style — very fancy surface on a simple shape. The beaded fringe hem draws attention to your legs as you dance and the beadwork presses against your frame, hinting at the beauty beneath. It’s a bit short for the year, but it still feels stylish.
Now this dress is part of a 60- item exhibit of art deco fashion spanning the 1920s and ’ 30s. Curated by fashion historians Ivan Sayers and Claus Jahnke, it opens this Thursday at the Museum of Vancouver. And were it in better shape, you could easily wear the dress to the Commodore or an art gallery opening today. Many of the other exquisite dresses. with labels such as Chanel, Lanvin, Vionnet, Patou and Schiaparelli, would fit with red carpet styles of this season.
It could be that everything in fashion comes around again. Or it could be pop culture’s influence — 1929- based period film The Artist just won best picture, and a remake of The Great Gatsby comes out later this year — but art deco styles, be they bead work or geometric designs, are showing up everywhere. Even the backdrop for the Academy Awards was in the genre.
The term art deco dates back to an exhibition in Paris in 1925, Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, that showcased the avant- garde creations of architects and designers. But the concepts of the silhouette had been developing since the end of the First World War and were characterized by a streamlined classicism, geometric and symmetric
In the 1920s, the figure is invisible and decoration and emphasis tends to be focused on the surface. IVAN SAYERS FASHION HISTORIAN
compositions, and a sleek machine- age look.
The design matched the era well. “The economy was improving steadily [ in the 1920s], but there was also the memory of the war so you get this live- for- the- moment sensibility,” says Sayers.
“In Canada, women got the right to vote in this era,” he adds. “These are women with a political voice. Their body wasn’t their value. That is why the body disappears. It is the absolute reaction to prewar style with tight corsets and skirts that dragged and all those things that objectified women.
“They were liberated — politically and physically liberated.”
Spanning the two decades, the pieces in the exhibit show how the fashions changed as the economy collapsed. Bare arms, flat fronts and calf lengths of the early ’ 20s, gave way to shorter, fancier flapper styles as the prosperous decade progressed.
“In the 1920s, the figure is invisible and decoration and emphasis tends to be focused on the surface,” says Sayers. “Wonderful fabrics, fabulous surface decoration, fabrics that glitter, beading that glitters, soft fabrics, so when movement happens, the physical becomes obvious, you get a sense of the body hidden by the fabric and that becomes part of the allure.
“In the ’ 30s, it is the opposite,” he says. “Socially, whenever there is no money, moral conservatism strengthens.” So while the ’ 20s were scandalized by hems showing women’s calves, in the ’ 30s hems drop again and waistlines return to the natural waist. “The body reappears, but it is still about geometry,” says Sayers. By the late ’ 30s, skirts were full again.
Fashions in Germany and Austria were equally vital at that time, although the 1920s were not as prosperous there. Berlin had many design houses owned by Jewish- German families, including the house of Herrmann Gerson, says Jahnke. Gerson was the most exclusive fashion house in Berlin at the time, with royal warrants to design for seven or eight royal families of Europe.
But by 1938 they had all been taken over by so- called “Aryan” German families or forced to close. Then Berlin was bombed, destroying most of the design houses, including Gerson’s. Pieces from that era are extremely rare. But two pieces are included in this exhibit.
One is an exquisitely tailored black silk- velvet coat with Russian squirrel collar and cuffs. It has an asymmetrical loose panel at the back which flutters when you walk, giving the coat kinetic motion.
The other piece is a wool coat with monkey fur on the pockets. It was owned by a Bavarian actress named Mara de la Barre who later moved to the U. S. and married a Polish count.
Other fine pieces include a Molyneux camel- hued coat, a white beaded dress that was donated by the philanthropic Koerner family and could have been worn by the matriarch, Thea, who was an actress and model in Vienna before moving to Vancouver, and, in honour of the opening of King Tut’s tomb in 1922, a dress adorned with embroidered images of Egyptian icons. There is also a 1933 two- piece suit worn by a Pennsylvanian woman to meet Albert Einstein, an amazing coat by Elsa Schiaparelli with Aladdin lamp buttons, and a leather clutch made in the shape of a Volkswagen Beetle.