Want to Understand Fashion? Start With This Little Encyclopedia

How were the bob, the corset, the high heel and the lipstick invented, and what charming stories lie behind them? How did the outdoor picnic and the masquerade ball come into fashion? This book sets out to answer such questions.

About the Author

Jessica Kerwin Jenkins is a magazine editor and columnist. She began her career in New York and has worked as an editor at the European edition of W and at Women's Wear Daily. She now writes a column for Vogue.

Her years at W took her almost everywhere in Europe — Madrid to Copenhagen, Athens to Venice — and that is what gave her a deep interest in classical fashion culture.

Introduction

This book began with the jewelry box I kept in grade school. The box was made in the shape of a birdcage, with a toy canary swinging on a perch behind brass bars. In the narrow drawer at the bottom I kept a prism that threw out a rainbow whenever light hit it. There were also two Mexican pesos, an acorn cap of improbable size, a tiny seashell, the case of my father's old Timex, and a sample vial of Jean Patou's Joy — all of them treasures I had hoarded.

The English word exquisite comes from the Latin verb exquīrere, to search out, to seek. By the Oxford English Dictionary's account, the word carries the sense of "delicacy," of "carefully selected," of something fine enough to "excite intense delight or admiration."

For years I wrote for glossy fashion magazines, always trying to lend a designer's lore an air of elegant romance, to stir up a heady sense of beauty, to drape a brand-new label in an ancient pedigree, or to dust off some classical notion so that it might shine again. Turning yourself into a figure of glamour is, in truth, as easy as swiping a credit card — that is, if you can afford it. But in real life, in my own life, I could not afford even the showy little trinkets I wrote about. I was simply Holly Golightly with her nose pressed to the shop window.

Those years taught me to appreciate every kind of beauty, and to respect every kind of beauty, and they gave me plenty of time to think about what refinement really means. Writing this book, by contrast, is a way of celebrating how many of life's finest things cost almost nothing. Learning that the plain-looking Bartlett pear has a royal lineage, or that the top hat has a history of its own, can make you feel rich; working out the history of the Japanese kimono, or of confetti, can make your world feel wide and marvelous.

The world's earliest encyclopedias — Pliny the Elder's (23–79) 37-volume Naturalis Historia, compiled in the first century, for one — paid tribute to the wonders of nature: the strange beasts and birds of Africa and Asia, gems and jewels of surpassing beauty, rare and extraordinary flowers. Writers of the Renaissance likewise put together hefty volumes gathering up foreign curiosities and customs — the cabinets of curiosities that noblemen liked to toy with, for instance, where mysterious artworks, religious relics, baffling clockwork, chest upon chest of oddments and the occasional unicorn's horn all stood side by side. Antiquities turned into objects of refined pleasure: that is the lamp that has guided my own searching.

This little encyclopedia of mine follows the footprints of those who came before — the paths broad and far-reaching, the imagination unbridled, with perhaps a touch more mischief added. And like theirs, it is purely a private enthusiasm. The word "encyclopedia" suggests that the whole of public knowledge has been distilled into it. The entries in this book come straight out of the files I keep on my desk, a bulging stack of clippings snipped on impulse and notes scribbled at random. Photocopied articles, quotations, curious illustrations — all of them shells picked up by chance, each of which struck a spark in me or raised a cry of "delight or admiration." In my head I call this collection "Why I Am So Attached to This." And by "this" I mean this planet of ours. When things are not going well, leafing through that great stack of paper on my desk lets me slip away into a dreamlike land of easy living, and my mood goes where it takes me.

The things I prize in this book are as slight as mayflies, nothing like the high fashion and grand dinners I write about for a living — and yet they light up another world, secret and subtle, giving off a strange glow of their own, intoxicating in a way no luxury good could match. Faced with more serious-minded people, I often find myself having to defend these pointless little playthings. But this book really is a tribute to pointlessness — and, to say it once more, I do not mean the empty consumption of showing off. Fussing over some pointless little thing: isn't that exactly the act of doing something pretty to no purpose? And when it comes to reasons for doing things, isn't no reason at all the best reason of all? I firmly believe this is the essence of life.

Every step of the way I have picked up one more marvelous, delicate, faintly glowing bit of pointlessness and set it down in my notebook, where it can kindle my daydreams and raise a delight beyond measure — and none of it has anything to do with the extravagant, hollow posturing of the latest trend. These small pointless things, carefully gathered, are treasures worth giving myself over to.

Flight

At six in the morning, the main road from Paris to Marseille was choked with carriages. It was a September morning in 1783, and in the courtyard of the château the flames were roaring. Black smoke drifted up into a flying machine, which kept heaving and straining as if impatient to rise, its sky-blue ground mostly covered over with golden scrollwork. This machine — what we now call a hot-air balloon — was swelling slowly, waking from its limp, collapsed state.

King Louis XVI of France and Queen Marie Antoinette (1755–1793) stood beside the balloon, attending the occasion in person. Crowds pressed along the streets, heads tipped back at the sky. A good number of people had climbed onto the nearby rooftops. At every window of the château, onlookers leaned out to watch. Attendants put three passengers into the basket slung beneath the great balloon — a duck, a sheep and a rooster, the first balloon pilots in history. The balloon rose at last, wobbled through the air for eight minutes, and fell into a wood. A rescue party leapt onto their horses and galloped to the spot. The three travelers had taken a hard knock but were unhurt; when they were presented to the king, His Majesty was so pleased that he ordered all three killed for that evening's dinner.

The balloon was invented by a pair of bold French brothers, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740–1810) and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier (1745–1799). By Joseph's own account, the idea came to him while he watched his wife's petticoat, hung to dry near the fire, billow and flap. A month after that maiden ascent, a human being rode the new invention into the ocean of the sky for the first time: Pilâtre de Rozier (1754–1785), twenty-six years old and afraid of nothing, took a Montgolfier balloon up to 80 feet — though a rope still held it to the ground.

At that point no one had actually broken loose to sail through the sky unrestrained. The king had ruled that only convicted prisoners could go up free of a tether, in exchange for a pardon. But de Rozier used his connections at court to press his case, and convinced Louis XVI that balloon flight was perfectly safe. And so de Rozier and his aristocratic companion the Marquis d'Arlandes (1742–1809) climbed into their machine in front of Louis XVI, in the Bois de Boulogne.

As the balloon went up, the crowd held its breath; not a sound. "It startled me," the marquis wrote, "that the crowd watching us rise should be so quiet — nobody dared move at all." The marquis was plainly not cut out to be a pilot. "I was still staring, transfixed, not yet back to my senses, when I heard Monsieur de Rozier shouting at me — 'You're not doing anything! The balloon hasn't risen an inch!'" Only then did the two of them grab their rakes, feed straw into the flames and send hot air up into the balloon, which began to climb again. But only for a moment, because the marquis stopped once more to look down at the splendid Seine below. "Keep looking at the river like that and you'll be in it before long!" de Rozier shouted. "More fire! More fire, my friend!" The balloon sank toward the rooftops of a Paris neighborhood and came close to striking the bell tower of Saint-Sulpice.

One of Benjamin Franklin's friends, a more suspicious sort, thought a balloon like this was of no use at all. But Franklin, who had watched the ascent in the Bois de Boulogne with his own eyes that day, snapped back: "Of what use is a newborn baby?" In truth there was no question of steering the thing; it was simply charming. Balloon fever caught at once and spread like wildfire. "At present we think of nothing but flying into the sky," someone wrote at the time. "The balloon has taken over everyone's mind."

Eleven days later a crowd of up to four hundred thousand gathered to watch the French physicist Jacques Charles (1746–1823) and his assistant Noël Robert rise from the square at the Tuileries. The two men stood in a boat-shaped wicker basket hung beneath a fast, hydrogen-powered balloon, drifting over open country, waving flags and shouting down at the astonished crowds below. Charles wrote: "We shouted, 'Long live the king!' And the people below answered, 'Good fellows, aren't you frightened? Doesn't it make you dizzy? How marvelous! Heaven keep you! Farewell, brothers!'" The two pilots came down two hours later, 27 miles on, having dropped a blanket onto the dome of a church along the way — for fun.

To Charles, the luck of flying into the sky was the greatest pleasure there was. "We really are heaven's favorites!" he said to Robert. "I don't care what happens on the ground. The sky is my world now."

Black

Black: the color of mourning beyond any age, the color of understated elegance, and the color of revolt as well. Religious reformers of the 17th century dressed in black head to toe; so did the revolutionaries of the 1960s. In the 17th century, European aristocrats copied the strict Catholic decorum of the Spanish court and refilled their wardrobes with plain, all-black dress. Dutch merchants and English Puritans held to the same solemn restraint, every one of them, and never wavered. Protestants held that lively, brilliant colors defied God, and that anyone dressed that way was "nothing but a bag of wind blown up tight, painted in every color, puffed full of pride and envy."

Centuries later, the Victorians prized austerity and self-denial, and black became the defining color again. The foremost example was, of course, Britain's Queen Victoria (1819–1901). The queen went into mourning at 42, the year her husband Prince Albert (1819–1861) died, and from then until her own death she never took the black off. "When a woman is in deep mourning for the dead, and some stranger happens to pass by in high spirits, mourning dress is her fortress," an etiquette expert explained on the queen's behalf in 1884. "Mourning dress is a high wall, a small room to hide in." With the queen setting the example, a proper Victorian widow naturally went black from head to foot from the moment her husband died, and stayed that way for two and a half years. Black clothes, black gloves, black jewelry — jet, a gem cut out of coal — little black caps trimmed with crepe, black veils. Even petticoats got a black ribbon. Writing paper was edged in black. Some women had black beds. A widow was generally expected to keep to herself, so that the bereaved would not blunder into a party and kill everyone else's pleasure outright.

By the 1860s, though, mourning dress had begun to follow fashion, and black stepped onto the stage with an edge it had never had before. The French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1848–1923) even kept an ebony coffin in her bedroom and would lie in it to "get into character." She also liked to perform in long black velvet gowns. Theda Bara (1885–1955), the silent screen's first vamp, likewise dressed all in black to play the woman who ruins men, setting off a wave of imitation among the dangerous, dissolute women of film noir. With all these predecessors pressing forward one after another, Coco Chanel (1883–1971) had a fine stage on which to bring out the little black dress in the 1920s — a classic that has lasted to this day.

But for sheer shock, no one wore black better than the Black Panthers of the 1960s. Glossy black short skirts and over-the-knee boots, Afros teased half the height of the sky: this was "black is beautiful" at full strength. Kathleen Cleaver married Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998), founder of the Black Panther Party, a year after she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. "Back then we weren't running around yelling, 'Look how cool we are!'" she recalled. "That was not in our heads at all." Cleaver's coolness was a matter of necessity: her clothes came to almost nothing — one black dress, one black jacket, one black skirt.

As a string of strongly styled films came out — Cleopatra Jones (1973), Shaft (1971), Superfly (1972) — the Black Panthers' rebel image turned into a fashion in its own right, almost drowning out the party's politics. But by then the genuine revolutionaries had already gone on ahead. Eldridge Cleaver was shot dead by California police. Glossy black and defiantly unconventional, the Panthers' dress made easy target practice, didn't it? "Everyone got the order to switch to ordinary clothes," Cleaver said. "We didn't want to bring the police down on us just for standing out. So we stopped dressing that way."