Writing for Fashion: A Lesson from 1955

Since fashion has relentless rhythms writing about it in an original and entertaining way can be a tiring business. So here's a lesson from Italian journalist Irene Brin.

Rather than describing in detail the four cotton dresses appearing in a fashion feature for an issue of Italian weekly La Settimana Incom Illustrata (dated July 1955), she went off a tangent to describe the grand lifestyle of Misia Godebska Natanson Edwards Sert.

Better known as a patron whose influence spanned the disciplines of art, music, literature, dance and theatre, Misia was also an arbiter of taste and fashion and a dangerously divisive presence who loved briging together her friends just to set them against each other at a later date. Misia was therefore the sort of woman who would have abhorred wearing practical and functional dresses like the ones Irene Brin was supposed to describe.

In the article, entitled "Practical Dresses", Brin stated that Misia would have never been seen in her life in a simple dress as she favoured decadently luxurious ensembles. Yet, while summarising Misia's life (and opening her piece with an anecdote from the First World War when Misia turned delivery vans from Parisian couturiers into ambulances and started a convoy to bring aid to the front with an unlikely team of volunteers that included Cocteau and Iribe…), Brin also celebrates the simple dresses pictured in the pages of the magazine, reminding her readers that a woman in a functional design is worth more than Misia covered in diamonds.

Here's the entire article (from our own archives and translated from Italian into English) that accompanied these pictures of functional dresses. The magazine only featured pictures in black and white, but the dresses were characterised by bright shades (the first one in this post was green; the second was characterised by gray and orange stripes on a white background; the third featured a gray grid on a white background and the fourth one was yellow and was accessorised with a green belt). Enjoy this lesson in fashion writing from 1955:

"During the First World War," wrote in her memories Misia Godebska Natanson Edwards Sert, "I put together fourteen ambulances for the wounded and got the great couturiers to turn over their idle cars and delivery vans. Paul Poiret was so helpful that he even designed for Jean Cocteau who was accompanying us, a volunteer male nurse uniform. We were a peculiar brigade of people."

We don't harbour any doubts about it. So much so that the nurse's uniforms for Misia were probably even more extraordinary and worth of being portrayed like her grand gala gowns by Renoir, or described like her country wardrobe by Stephane Mallarmé. Adorable as a teenager, charming as a grown up woman, and then spent in her final years in a tearful, mourning and decadent luxury Misia was the last woman who opposed to the advent of the practical dresses, no matter if they were nurse's or military uniforms or robes-chemises.

Misia was half Belgian, half Russian, a strange mix of malice and romanticism, greed and sacrifice, she liked the fat foods from the Flanders and the big fat tears of Muscovite novels. She added to these dichotomies further contrasts, so pleasant that they were narrated in the Revue Blanche, portrayed in Lautrec's posters, mentioned with doting envy by Vuillard who stated about her: "La raison et la santé dont vous avez, Misia une si belle part…" Perhaps she was a genuinely reasonable woman in her apparent unreasonableness.

Misia often recounted in her old age that she had run away from her family's house to carry out a lonely existence in England, giving piano lessons. Her wedding to Thadée Natanson, and the two other weddings to Edwards and Sert were strangely symmetrical affairs: a magazine publisher, a newspaper magnate and millionaire and then a mundane painter. Different forms of art, wealth and glory followed one after the other in Misia's life, bringing her feathers, diamonds, flowers and tears, as it would happen in the best allegorical stories. She however reigned over Paris, as mysteriously as the vieilles fées, who are a little bit ridiculous, very absurd, and extravagantly pompous, amassing debts, credits, lies and truths, creating with them their own labyrinth and their own cenotaph.

Here we present four dresses Misia would have never accepted to wear, as loyal as she was till her last breath to the wide brimmed hats and the sable furs. Between 1900 and 1950 Misia preserved her style intact: we can only hope that contemporary women will make identical miracles with very different weapons of style, strongly favouring nylon, cotton, and crease-resistant, long-lasting and resilient fabrics.

Contemporary women will have to remember that it was easier to dazzle a man wearing a kilogram of diamonds (Edwards would keep his precious stones in drawers) or with a Spanish mantilla (Sert would order them directly from Seville) than by wearing a simple and functional dress. Yet, at the same time, a memorable young woman in a cotton dress is certainly worth more than Misia in a memorable dress with a gold train trailing behind her.