↧
Brian Sewell's Grand Tour (edited)
↧
Ocean Liners: Speed and Style, V&A
Reviewed by MELANIE MCDONAGH
Wednesday 31 January 2018 09:45
The one ocean liner most of us are able to identify is, alas, one that sank: the Titanic.
Still, despite that PR misfortune — or possibly because of it — the notion of ocean travel, especially by steamship, is still invested with irresistible glamour. The great ships were little worlds in themselves, with inutterable glamour and style at the top and more cramped class solidarity in steerage.
Think of the marine bit of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and then the episode in the film Brooklyn where our heroine is sick in a bucket, mid-Atlantic, in third class.
This exhibition at the V&A is the most comprehensive ever about international ocean liners. That, I know, doesn’t sound like much of a fun gig for those Londoners who know next to nothing about the sea, whose reflexive mode of transport is a plane and who think of cruises (the sad descendants of the liners) as floating prisons for the Saga generation (I know of one American whose solution to parental care is to stick his elderly father on one transatlantic cruise after another).
But stop it right there. Ocean liners — ships that actually ran to schedule rather than turning up at their destination as the weather allowed — were not just incidentally interesting: they were crucial for shipping more than 11 million emigrants from Europe to America from 1900 until the First World War; they were militarily important; considered vital for national prestige and maintaining empires; economically crucial for cities dependent on shipbuilding; and, just as important, as a way of promoting design in response to the constraints of space and motion. This exhibition has some 200 artefacts and finishes with a wooden panel from the first-class lounge of the Titanic, split where the ship broke in half and floating mournfully on water as it once did on the Atlantic.
It’s bookended by two ships: Brunel’s groundbreaking Great Eastern of 1859 (the Brits led the way on steamships), which transformed ocean travel, to the Queen Elizabeth II of 1969, which brought the era of great ocean-going passenger shipping to a close. Between these two vessels a whole transport culture is on display, from fabulous posters for the liners to contemporary film clips — such as Hitler on the Nazi steamship the Johannes Rey, or a moving chronicle of the strength and skill of Clyde shipbuilders.
Pride of place goes to interiors from great ships of the nations such as the Normandie. She was the showgirl of the French fleet, “a floating fragment of the country” and an exhibition space for French handiwork — including the fabulous Art Deco lacquer panels by Jean Dunand for the first-class smoking room, depicting streamlined youths at play. Requisitioned in the war by the Americans, the ship sank after too much water was used to douse a fire on board.
What was the appeal of ocean liners? They were a contained world: for the duration of your voyage you were in a limited space with a defined cast of characters, like Murder on the Orient Express without the homicide.
Or, as a spritely Cunard brochure of 1929, The New Art of Going Abroad, put it, “Life aboard ship is a little world between two worlds… a week of existence suddenly cast adrift.”
Jules Verne in his novel A Floating City, put it thus: “If the Great Eastern is not merely a nautical engine but rather a microcosm, and carries a small world with it, an observer will not be astonished to meet here, as on a large theatre, all the instincts, follies, and passions of human nature.” Which is why ocean liners were so good for film, from Buster Keaton to The Poseidon Adventure.
The shipping companies’ steely focus on wealthy travellers was directly influenced by the US government, which in 1921 imposed restrictions on the immigrants allowed to enter the US. At a stroke, the composition of passengers changed from a majority in steerage to a more even distribution of classes and the creation of the new “tourist” class.
An interesting picture of the cross- section of one ship shows the respective accommodation for the classes: third class was respectable if not showy. As for the fabulous promotional material on display here, it was directed at pleasure-seeking travellers for whom the journey was summed up by the Cunard motto of the Twenties: “Getting There is Half the Fun!”
For designers, liners were an obvious showcase. Many engaged with the challenges posed by limitations of space and motion. Le Corbusier was an enthusiast for the form (showing the upper classes could cope in a confined space) but for others it was an exhibition area: as with Doris Zinkeisen’s lively theatrical mural shown here for the famous Verandah Grill on the Queen Mary.
Restricted space meant the striking Madonna of the Atlantic altarpiece for the salon on the Queen Mary, used on Sunday by Catholics, could be covered by panels for secular use. There was a pretty Torah ark too.
The children were also looked after: there’s a charming mural here by Edward Ardizzone for the play area of the Canberra. Ceramics designers made services with an emphasis on solidity: plates with raised sides to prevent slopping and glasses with solid bases. There’s a beautiful cane bunk bed, with space-saving drawers that open as steps.
But oh, the clothes! For the occasions liners offered for display, from the entrance on board to the grand descent that first-class passengers made down the steps to dinner — brilliantly evoked here — the curators raided the V&A’s own dressing-up box and came up with some fabulous pieces, from Marlene Dietrich’s Dior suit, which she wore on the Queen Elizabeth, to a Lanvin Twenties dress belonging to the heiress Emilie Grigsby.
But, as with the Titanic, there were tragedies at sea. After the Titanic panel, the most poignant item on show is the tiara that Lady Marguerite Allan took on the Lusitania, which her maid rescued when the vessel was torpedoed. Her two daughters were lost.
Ocean Liners: Speed and Style is at the V&A, SW7 from Saturday until June 10; vam.ac.uk
 |
The luxury liner SS Normandie sits off the piers in New York in 1935. Photograph: Collection French Lines |
 |
A photograph of the RMS Titanic’s propellers as the ship sits in dry dock. The ship was sunk by an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912. Photograph: John Parrot/Getty Images |
 | |
Detail of riveters from the 1940s series Shipbuilding on the Clyde by Stanley Spencer. Photograph: Imperial War Museums |
Breezy and buoyant return to a more glamorous age - Ocean Liners: Speed and Style, V&A
Alastair Sooke, art critic
31 JANUARY 2018 • 12:01AM
If, like me, the idea of going on a cruise fills you with dread – the prospect of being tossed about at the whim of a wild and unforgiving sea is too much for my lily-livered, landlubber’s constitution – then the V&A’s latest exhibition, Ocean Liners: Speed and Style, will hold little appeal.
It would be a mistake, however, to rule it out. The first show ever devoted to the design of ocean liners, spanning a period from the 1840s to the 1960s, it is full of fascinating moments, and animated throughout by a breezy, buoyant spirit.
The latter is most evident in the design of the exhibition, itself, which plays upon a central conceit: that, as we navigate the show, we are “on board” a ship. To begin with, though, we remain on dry land, in a section called “Promotion” – after all, before embarking on a voyage, you need to buy a ticket.
Facing us, beside a spectacular promotional model of Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth, realised with extraordinary detail at 1:48 scale, is a wall of striking posters, designed to drum up trade for the shipping lines. At a stroke, we discover the great coup of public relations that transformed perceptions of the ocean liner.
To one side, a drab leaflet from around 1874 reproduces a forgettable wood engraving of a steamship, advertising a White Star line from Liverpool to New York. It is a reminder that, during the middle years of the 19th century, steamship travel was still seen as uncomfortable and dangerous. Mostly it was marketed, cheaply and perfunctorily, at third-class passengers to fill the steerage decks. This catered for millions of poor emigrants who left behind Europe for America. By the final quarter of the 19th century, though, the strategy of the shipping lines had changed, and fashionable graphic artists were being commissioned to lure a different sort of passenger, who preferred to travel first class. By the Twenties and Thirties, often described as the “golden age” of steamship travel, this PR transformation was complete, and the ocean liner was acknowledged as an emblem of sleek, glamorous modernity, on a par with the American skyscraper.
Following this introduction “ashore”, we walk across a gangplank, and make our way “aboard” the main body of the exhibition, where we are greeted by ship interiors from the early 20th century.
At this point, designers were still following the model of grand European hotels, and even palaces. Opulent doors and panelling, from about 1912, which once adorned the France, the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique’s largest ship, were designed explicitly to evoke sumptuous interiors at Versailles. There is also an ornate carved wooden panel, depicting two allegorical figures, which provided a decorative centrepiece for the 60ft-high grand staircase of the Olympic. (An identical carving on the Olympic’s ill-fated sister ship, the Titanic, was reproduced, with surprising fidelity, for James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar-winning movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.)
As well as inviting us to gawp at the grandeur of yesteryear, though, the curator, Ghislaine Wood, here emphasises one of the exhibition’s principal themes: that ocean liners were swiftly understood as vast, tangible expressions of statehood. They were, in the words of another scholar, “flagships of imperialism”. This was especially true during the run-up to the First World War, as European nations jostled to project power. It’s why this section is called “Politics of Style”.
The Versailles-like interior of the France offers an excellent case in point, as does an absurdly overblown allegorical mural expressing German maritime supremacy, designed for the first-class smoking room of the Kronprinz Wilhelm, which won the much-coveted Blue Riband for its speedy passage across the Atlantic.
Even after the war, though, ocean liners, which were of immense economic importance because constructing them created so many jobs, remained vessels of national pride. The archetypal example was the great French interwar liner, Normandie, the apogee of Art Deco maritime glamour, which entered service in 1935. Every aspect of her glittering décor was an expression of sophisticated French taste. One of the highlights of the V&A’s show is a soaring golden lacquer panel depicting lithe young men and women, like classical Greek athletes, engaged in sports, by the French artist Jean Dunand. It once graced Normandie’s smoking room. Meanwhile, a nearby display of décor from Cunard’s Queen Mary reveals a depressingly typical mid-century British ambivalence towards progressive design.
A dull painting from 1936, probably commissioned for Cunard’s offices in Liverpool, depicts the Queen Mary’s first-class dining room, which evoked the interior of an English country house.
Compared with the suave modernity of Normandie, it offers a staid vista of parochial disappointment: a wilderness of tough, grey beef and congealing gravy.
At least we can take pride in the commitment to modern design of the British Orient Line after the Second World War, when artists such as Edward Bawden were commissioned to produce designs for liners. By this point, however, following the rise of commercial aviation, ocean liners were already on the wane. Eventually, they would be replaced by a different sort of nautical beast, altogether: the top-heavy cruise ship.
Having outlined the development of ocean-liner design – one memorable moment concentrates on the evolution of the deckchair, and includes an example, with a ripped caned seat, recovered from the Titanic (a rare moment, you could say, when arranging deckchairs is the opposite of futile) – the exhibition plunges us into an “engine room”, packed with information about steam turbines, gyro stabilisers, and screw propellers, alongside Stanley Spencer’s mesmerising wartime painting of shipbuilders on the Clyde hammering red-hot rivets. A label informs us that the hull of the Queen Elizabeth required around 10 million of the things.
Then, we are up on deck, considering pool-side fashions, to a soundtrack of seagulls, before a dramatic projection simulates elegant passengers, dressed in satin and silk, wafting down the “grande descente” en route to dinner (ie making a very public entrance on a liner’s imposing staircase).
By now, we have been whisked away to a sort of luxurious fantasy land, an escapist dressing-up box filled with crocodile-leather Louis Vuitton vanity cases, and items of luggage owned by the Duke of Windsor (supposedly he and Wallis Simpson once boarded the SS United States with a hundred pieces). Yes, of course, there could be less rubbernecking at the extravagance of how the other half lived – even if one or two pieces of eye-popping bling, such as a Cartier diamond tiara from 1909, have terribly sad stories attached to them. The tiara belonged to a woman who survived the sinking of the Lusitania but lost two daughters during the catastrophe. It was rescued by one of her maids, but its exorbitant value must have felt like nothing compared with the priceless lives of her children.
I also wish that the final gallery, devoted to the impact of the ocean liner upon modern culture, as filtered through the imaginations of artists, architects, writers and filmmakers, was more extensive. After all, there are only so many pristine dinner services one can look at before the onset of ennui.
Still, Ocean Liners: Speed and Style is a surprisingly sophisticated exhibition. It will satisfy those who yearn, nostalgically, for the glamour of a lost age. At the same time, it will sate those with an appetite for serious analysis of modern design. Above all, though, it will provide a great deal of carefree fun, as it blithely imitates life on board these marvellous “floating palaces”. Bon voyage!
From Sat until June 17. Sponsored by Viking Cruises. Tickets: 0207 942 2000; vam.ac.uk
 |
Wooden panel fragment from an overdoor in the first-class lounge on Titanic, about 1911. © Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada |
 |
Empress of Britain colour lithograph poster for Canadian Pacific Railways, J.R. Tooby, 1920 – 31. Museum no. E.2215-1931. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London |
 |
Paquebot 'Paris', Charles Demuth, 1921 – 22, US. Gift of Ferdinand Howald. © Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio |
 |
Panel from The Rape of Europa for the first-class grand salon on board the Normandie, Jean Dupas, made by Jacques-Charles Champigneulle, 1934, France. © Miottel Museum, Berkeley, California. Image courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts |
 |
Luggage previously belonging to the Duke of Windsor, Maison Goyard, 1940s. © Miottel Museum, Berkeley, California |
 |
Diamond and pearl tiara previous previously owned by Lady Marguerite Allan and saved from the Lusitania, Cartier, 1909, France. Marian Gérard, Cartier Collection. © Cartier |
↧
↧
Daphne du Maurier - a woman ahead of her time
↧
Remembering ... Daphne du Maurier
Sex, jealousy and gender: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca 80 years on
Du Maurier’s bestselling novel reveals much about the author’s fluid sexuality – her ‘Venetian tendencies’ – and about being a boy stuck in the wrong body, writes Olivia Laing
Olivia Laing
Fri 23 Feb 2018 11.00 GMT Last modified on Sat 24 Feb 2018 00.10 GMT
In 1937, a young army wife sat at her typewriter in a rented house in Alexandria, Egypt. She wasn’t happy. Despite coming from an ebullient theatrical family, she was reclusive and agonisingly shy. The social demands that came with being married to the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards were far beyond her. It was too hot and she missed England bitterly, though not the small daughter and new baby she’d left behind.
At the age of 30, she had already published four novels and two biographies. Yet 15,000 words of her new book were torn up in the wastepaper basket, a “literary miscarriage”. She knew the title but not what would constitute the “crash! bang!” of its plot, just that there would be two wives, one dead, and the name: Rebecca.
Inchingly, Daphne du Maurier’s difficult novel came together. She wrote it in the first person, from the perspective of a young unnamed narrator, who meets the dashing, yet unhappy Max de Winter while working as a lady’s companion in a grand hotel in Monte Carlo. The girl is anxious, observant, dreamy, terribly romantic, a perennial fantasist whose fears and insecurities bloom out of control when she becomes mistress of the haunting Manderley.
Rebecca is a very strange book. It’s a melodrama, and by no means short on bangs and crashes. There are two sunken ships, a murder, a fire, a costume party and multiple complex betrayals, and yet it’s startling to realise how much of its drama never actually happens. The second Mrs de Winter might not excel at much, but she is among the great dreamers of English literature. Whole pages go by devoted to her imaginings and speculations. The effect is curiously unstable, not so much a story as a network of possibilities, in which the reader is rapidly entangled.
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir said, and there aren’t many darker illustrations of what this might mean and what it might cost than Rebecca. The narrator is raw as an egg, practically a schoolgirl, with her “lanky” hair and bitten nails, her inability to talk to servants or run a house. Rebecca, on the other hand, is finished: lacquered and exquisite as the priceless china cupid her clumsy replacement breaks. It was Rebecca who created Manderley, turning the lovely old house into the apotheosis of feminine talents and virtues.
Of course, this paragon of beauty and kindness turns out to be a malevolent fake. In the Du Maurier family slang a sexually attractive person was a “menace”, and Rebecca unites both the word’s meanings. She is an animal, a devil, a snake, “vicious, damnable, rotten through and through”. She’s destroyed because of her poisonous sexuality, what the Daily Mail might euphemistically call her “lifestyle”.
Amazingly, the reader is somehow manipulated or cajoled into believing her murder and its concealment are somehow necessary, even romantic; that being cuckolded is a far worse fate than a woman’s death. It’s a grim reworking of “Bluebeard”, in which the murderer is suddenly the victim, adorable despite his bloody hands.
But who is really punished, and for what? Rebecca has a disturbingly circular structure, a closed loop like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. It ends with Manderley in flames, but the first two chapters are also the conclusion. Husband and wife have been condemned to the hell of expatriation, in a hot, shadowless, unnamed country, staying like criminals in an anonymous hotel. It is apparent that they are revenants in a kind of afterlife, their only pleasure articles from old English magazines about fly fishing and cricket. The narrator attests to their hard-won happiness and freedom, while knowing it resides in a place accessible only by the uncertain routes of dream and memory, expelled from the Eden they never quite possessed.
¶
Du Maurier was under no illusions as to the bleakness of what she had written. “It’s a bit on the gloomy side,” she told her publisher, Victor Gollancz, adding nervously “the ending is a bit brief and a bit grim”. But her predictions of poor sales were inaccurate. Rebecca was a bestseller; 80 years on it still shifts around 4,000 copies a month.
What really startled her was that everyone seemed to think she’d written a romantic novel. She believed Rebecca was about jealousy, and that all the relationships in it – including the marriage between De Winter and his shy second wife – were dark and unsettling. (“I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool” hardly betokened love between equals.) The idea had emerged out of her own jealousy about the woman to whom her husband, Tommy “Boy” Browning, had briefly been engaged. She had looked at their love letters, and the big elegant “R” with which Jan Ricardo signed her name had made her painfully aware of her own shortcomings as a woman and a wife.
As a child, Du Maurier dressed in shorts and ties and spent most of her time pretending to be her alter ego, Eric Avon
It wasn’t just that Du Maurier was shy, or disliked telling servants what to do. Though she was beautiful, she had never wanted to participate in the masquerade of femininity. She didn’t want to be a mother (at least not of daughters) or wear dresses, though she painted her face even to go on her beloved rain-lashed walks. What she liked was to be “jam-along”, scruffy, perpetually in trousers, messing about in boats or living at large in her own head.
As Margaret Forster’s revelatory 1993 biography made clear, Du Maurier had been like that since childhood, always dreaming up other possibilities, never certain that people, or even time, were as stable as they seemed. She certainly wasn’t. From a very young age she was what she called a “half-breed”, female on the outside “with a boy’s mind and a boy’s heart”.
As a child, this didn’t pose problems, especially in a family of actors. She dressed in shorts and ties and spent most of her time pretending to be her alter ego, Eric Avon, the splendid, shining captain of cricket at Rugby. But as she reached adulthood, this boy self “was locked in a box”. Sometimes, when she was alone, she opened it up “and let the phantom, who was neither boy or girl but disembodied spirit, dance in the evening when there was no one to see”.
This hidden boy exploded into the light in 1947, when Du Maurier met and fell in love with Ellen Doubleday, the wife of her US publisher, and the addressee of the letter in which these revelations were made. Her feelings were not reciprocated, but they opened the gates for a later affair with Gertrude Lawrence, an actor with whom her father had also been involved.
Du Maurier’s sexuality is complicated to understand. The word transgender was not yet in common currency. She didn’t think her desire for women made her a lesbian and fought against her “Venetian tendencies”. (Heterosexual sex was known in the family, even more exotically, as “going to Cairo”.) Actually she felt she was a boy, very much in love, and stuck in the wrong body. At the same time – perhaps pragmatically, perhaps not – she was a woman committed to staying married to her husband.
She was by no means the only writer to feel herself two things at once. Many critics have caught a similar note in Ernest Hemingway, who often wrote about sex as a place in which genders could be temporarily and blissfully exchanged. Virginia Woolf, too, experienced herself as protean, slipping between sexes; her gender-shifting, time-distorting romp Orlando gave voice to her feelings for her lover Vita Sackville-West.
How much of Du Maurier’s sexuality is visible in Rebecca? The narrator repeatedly casts herself as an androgyne. She offers herself to Maxim as “your friend and your companion, a sort of boy”. The full heat of her desire is for Rebecca. She speculates about what her body might have looked like: her height and slenderness, the way she wore her coat slung lazily over her shoulders, the colour of her lipstick, her elusive scent, like the crushed petals of azaleas.
When her husband's affairs were exposed, she wrote how her life was entangled with the plot of her most famous book
She isn’t the only one obsessed with Rebecca’s absent body. Mrs Danvers serves as a much more obvious proxy for Venetian tendencies. In the novel’s most sexual scene, “Danny” forces the narrator to put her hand in Rebecca’s slipper and fondle her nightdress, while she murmurs an incantation to Rebecca’s hair, her underwear, how her clothes were torn from her body when she drowned.
No wonder Mrs Danvers’ was the face that launched a thousand drag acts. She was embodying closeted lesbian realness even before Judith Anderson catapulted her into the high camp stratosphere in the Hitchcock film. Mind you, Anderson is given a run for her money by the revelation that Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and declaiming throatily: “I am Mrs de Winter now.”
¶
It’s not unusual for a novel to contain traceable elements from its author’s life. What’s odd about Rebecca is that it seemed somehow predictive, too packed with things that belonged not just to Du Maurier’s past but to her future, as well.
The most noticeable is Manderley, “secretive and silent as it had always been … a jewel in the hollow of a hand”. Manderley was based on Menabilly, an abandoned house near Fowey in Cornwall, which had bewitched Du Maurier as a girl. Like Manderley, Menabilly was strangely elusive. After she returned from Egypt, she managed to lease it from the owner and remained based there for most of her life. She loved the house feverishly, calling it “my Mena”, even though it was freezing, rat-run and chunks of the old wing kept crashing off. But she never quite possessed it, and in 1967 she was expelled after years of legal battles. Though she could still walk its grounds, Mena was as lost to her as if it had been swallowed in a fire.
“What is past is also future,” she once observed. When, in 1957, her husband had a breakdown and was discovered to have been having two affairs concurrently, Du Maurier wrote a long letter to a friend, in which she speculated about how her own life had become entangled with the plot of her most famous book. Was her husband identifying her with Rebecca, she wondered, and her writing hut with the sinister cottage on the beach? Would he shoot her in a blind access of rage, and take her body out in Yggie, their beloved boat?
She was under a great deal of stress at the time, but the fantasy aligned with her feelings about the oddities of time, how it seemed to run simultaneously, so that the distant past sometimes came very close, or repeated in inexplicable ways. She explored this in novel after time-slip novel, from her 1931 debut The Loving Spirit to The House on the Strand (1969), in which a young man takes an experimental drug that allows him to view events taking place in his own house in the 14th century.
The haunted house on the Strand is rather like a Du Maurier book in its own right. Her novels are storehouses in which she deposited emotions, memories and fantasies. Their function was intensely personal, but also public. If you’ve read Rebecca you have no doubt wandered Manderley in your mind, passing through the tunnel of scarlet rhododendrons in the hope of tea and dripping crumpets by the library fire, entering vicariously into moods of love and terror.
Du Maurier was not the most intellectual of writers. What she did was build emotional landscapes that can be entered at will, in which difficult and untamable desires were given free rein. Maybe because of her relationship with gender, she was able to make worlds in which people and even houses are mysterious and mutable, not as they seem; haunted rooms in which disembodied spirits sometimes dance at absolute liberty •
The Lonely City by Olivia Laing is published by Canongate. Rebecca (80th anniversary edition) by Daphne du Maurier is published by Virago on 1 March.
" Set during the years between the "Rebecca" trial and the writing of Du Maurier's "My Cousin Rachel," including her relationship with her husband Frederick 'Boy' Browning, and her largely unrequited infatuation with American publishing tycoon's wife Ellen Doubleday and her involvement with the actress Gertrude Lawrence. The atmosphere is well-invoked, bringing the late '40s early '50s easily to life. What is most striking about the production is the frequent use of the Cornish coast. For those who have seen "Rebecca" or know anything of DuMaurier's background this will come as an added welcome."
Du Maurier's lesbian loves on film
Screenplay examines writer's infatuation with American publishing tycoon's wife and actress
Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
Sun 11 Feb 2007 11.45 GMT First published on Sun 11 Feb 2007 11.45 GMT
Daphne du Maurier's name has long been linked with the destructive story of one woman's obsession with another. Her novel Rebecca tells of the second Mrs de Winter's desperate struggle to break free of the shadow cast by her beautiful predecessor. To commemorate the centenary of the writer's birth this year, the BBC has turned to another story full of passionate intrigue between women: Du Maurier's own life.
Daphne, based on the controversial central chapters in Margaret Forster's 1993 authorised biography, is being filmed on location this month in London, Devon and Cornwall. It stars Geraldine Somerville in the role of Du Maurier, and Elizabeth McGovern and Janet McTeer as her two great romantic loves - the American publishing tycoon's wife Ellen Doubleday and the actress Gertrude Lawrence.
The screenplay has been adapted from Forster's book by Amy Jenkins, the creator of This Life, in her first attempt at period drama. It will chart du Maurier's deep and enduring love for her husband, Frederick 'Boy' Browning, but will also explain how her largely unrequited infatuations with Doubleday and Lawrence were reflected in her writing.
The 90-minute drama, to be shown on BBC2, focuses on what the BBC describes as the 'fraught' period of Du Maurier's life that followed the success of Rebecca and led up to the writing of My Cousin Rachel and her short story The Birds, famously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Jenkins has worked with both Forster and with the Du Maurier family to shape the script. 'Daphne du Maurier was not what you would expect,' she said. 'She was irreverent, reclusive, funny, and tortured during this period of her life. I always want to write about strong, interesting women and Daphne's story is both tragic and illuminating. You'll never read Rebecca in the same way again.'
Du Maurier first met the glamorous Doubleday, who was married to her own publisher, Nelson Doubleday, on a voyage to New York on the Queen Mary. The novelist was sailing out, accompanied by two of her three children, in order to appear in a trial which revolved around accusations that she had plagiarised sections of Rebecca
The unsuccessful case had been brought against her by the writer Edwina MacDonald, who claimed that the 1940 Hitchcock film of the book relied heavily on her own work, Blind Windows
At some point during Du Maurier's stay in the Doubledays' comfortable New York home, she fell in love with her hostess.
Private letters written between the two women reveal the intensity of their relationship and show how hard the novelist tried to understand her own sexual and emotional needs. Somewhat mysteriously, she habitually referred to her heterosexual encounters as 'Cairo' and to homosexual encounters as 'Venice'. The code is thought to relate to her feelings about the nature of the two cities.
Du Maurier wrote a play, September Tide, about her forbidden love for Ellen, 'the Rebecca of Barberrys', and its staging then led her straight into a life-changing and doomed second lesbian affair with Lawrence, the vivacious actress who had inspired Noel Coward.
'What is fascinating is the way her personal life informed her writing,' said Kim Thomas, the executive producer of Daphne. 'Once you know this story, it changes the way you read everything. I would say that in My Cousin Rachel, Rachel is Ellen.' The film, Thomas adds, will be a contemporary take on the story, but with a strong sense of the films of Du Maurier's own era. The lesbian love scenes, she suggests, will be more reminiscent of Noel Coward's Brief Encounter than Sarah Waters's more graphic Fingersmith
At the time of her book's publication, Forster acknowledged the complexity of Du Maurier's emotional life. 'I accept her word that she was a hybrid, with tendencies both ways,' Forster said. 'But she said she felt the pleasure was greater with Venice than Cairo because she felt more in control that way.'
Forster's book also dwelt on Du Maurier's difficult relationship with her father, the actor/manager Gerald du Maurier, who was candid about the fact that he wished she were a boy.
Christina Hardyment on a well-researched but grudging biography of Daphne du Maurier
CHRISTINA HARDYMENT Saturday 20 March 1993 00:02 GMT
The Independent Culture
THE OPENING lines of Margaret Forster's biography of the British queen of suspense, romance and place are certainly in keeping with their subject. 'Sheet-lightning split the sky over London on the evening of 12 May 1907 and thunder rumbled long into the night.' By the time Muriel du Maurier has given birth to a daughter at dawn we already know what shows were on in London that night, not least Brewster's Millions in which Daphne's father, matinee idol Gerald du Maurier, was acting as his wife toiled in labour.
Although the narrative reads like a breeze, this is the last of romantic 'weather' in the book, nor does that promising cultural backdrop persist. Inhibited, perhaps, by the slant of the many already published panegyrics on du Maurier, Forster shuns lavish evacuation of the Cornish countryside, and doesn't tell us much about her subject's mental bookshelves, her sure grasp of the craft of writing.
Instead she concentrates on lighting up the dark emotional shadows that lie at the core of all Daphne's best books. What interests her most, as we might expect from a novelist who has shown herself concerned above all else with the inter-negotiations of men and women, old and young, in the domestic sphere, is Daphne's place in the web of her family, her sexual relationships, and the influence of both these things on her work.
On this level the book is enthralling. Daphne emerges as a moody child, nervously conscious she wasn't the boy her father made no bones about wanting, but beautiful enough to make him more than a little in love with her. She evaded his affection skilfully enough by taking on a boyish role herself, but her first published story was a bitter tale of man the oppressor and woman the victim called And Now to God the Father.
She had, it seems, little comfort from her own mother, whom Forster sketches as jealous of her, already smarting from her husband's infidelities, and finding it easier to pet the older and younger sisters than this proudly, unconventional daughter who disappeared up a tree with a book whenever she possibly could.
After a crush on a French school mistress, a surrogate mother in effect, and a couple of defiant adolescent indiscretions (one old, one young), Daphne found a highly respectable Prince Charming in the shape of war hero Tommy Browning, who first entered her life when he motored across Fowey harbour in a white launch named Ygdrasil. Six months later they were married in a tiny Cornish church. The official canon has left it at that: a long and happy marriage divided between London and Menabilly, the romantic Cornish manor that Daphne confessed to loving as much as, if not more, than any person, three children and later grandchildren, worldwide fame and an impressive and varied list of novels, biographies and memoirs.
Forster digs deeper. Browning was nicknamed 'Boy', but he was 11 years older than his new wife, and from a background (Sandhurst, an Oxfordshire rectory and the Grenadier Guards) as different as could be from the Bohemian style of the Hampstead du Mauriers. Although he knew what he was in for - having come to Fowey in the first place curious to meet the feted young author of The Loving Spirit, he had no idea what kind of baggage-train of emotions his beautiful young bride was trailing behind her.
Nor did she grasp for some time that besides being tall, fair and handsome, an archangel of unimpeachable integrity who would exorcise her father's devil, 'Boy' was a stickler for discipline, immaculate dress and domestic order, and something of a nervous wreck after his traumatic experiences in the trenches. Pile on to that the discovery of a packet of love letters in her husband's desk from a former girlfriend who seemed far more confident of her sexuality than Daphne was at the time, and we begin to see where Rebecca came from.
Again and again in the course of this richly researched book, Forster adds an exciting new dimension to our reading of du Maurier's novels by revealing the degree to which Daphne's own experience, more or less heavily veiled, lay at the root of them. At times, though, she is unconvincing. She spends a good deal of time laying a trail of tomboyish tendencies towards her much-hyped theory that Daphne's preferred sexual identity was homosexual. But when the 'startling new evidence' we have all heard so much about emerges, the frank discussion of the respective pleasures of 'Venice' and 'Cairo', it is handled inconclusively.
The real interest of what seems to have been more experiment than fulfilment (two brief but intimate holidays with the actress Gertrude Lawrence in 1948, and a string of passionate letters to the woman who was in reality more of a mother figure than a lover, Ellen Doubleday) is surely not an indication of preference for mannishness, but the light it sheds on Daphne's capacity for empathising with both sexes, of her deep desire for passion and the sad fact that it was frustrated for so much of her life.
Both relationships are rather more satisfactorily set into Daphne's emotional landscape by the quite fascinating appendix, a long and brilliant analysis of the relationship between herself and her husband, complete with echoes from the past and re-echoes into the future, written by Daphne herself to a family friend in order to explain Tommy's breakdown in 1957. It shows that Daphne was well aware of the extent to which her romantic and macabre allegories were a means of working out her subconscious longings and terrors. She herself dismisses her 'obsessions - you can only call them that - for poor old Ellen D and Gertrude' as 'all part of a nervous breakdown going on inside myself', at a time of great strain, her appearance in court in New York to defend Rebecca against plagiarism. What quite evidently matters most to her is her relationship with Tommy, by then always nicknamed 'Moper', and with her children.
The appendix does more than this. By allowing Daphne to speak for herself at length, it also draws attention to the extent to which Forster has controlled her subject's utterance by quoting du Maurier's own exhilarating prose in phrases rather than paragraphs. To get an instant taste of what I mean, open any page of Oriel Malet's edition of the letters she received from Daphne over 40 years of friendship (Letters to Menabilly, Weidenfeld, pounds 18.99). It is a marvellous lucky dip of advice on writing, urgent reading enthusiasms, gossip about family and friends, and sheer intellectual exuberance.
Yet it seems that the democrat in Forster doesn't quite approve of this unwifely lady, with her nannies and her neglect of domestic niceties and spelling. 'Tommy was always what he seemed, Daphne never,' she writes. 'If Daphne had been prepared to sacrifice Menabilly, she could have made a home in or near London for both of them, so that their marriage would have had a better chance of flourishing once more.' She is even confident enough to declare: 'That (the trusts she provided for her children) might not necessarily be good for any of them never troubled her, though it troubled Tommy.'
All in all, Forster has succceeded, for good or for bad, in changing the image of one of the most passionate writers of the late 20th century, living in one of the most romantic houses in Britain, into that of a frustrated wife in corduroys struggling with crumbling plaster and rats. It is the portrait of a cavalier painted by a puritan.
↧
HARRY HALL HACKING JACKET OR ( KEEPER'S ) "RATCATCHER"
History and Heritage
The history of Harry Hall reveals humble beginnings in the 1800s, and an evolution into the advanced designs which are now being created in the 21st century. Harry Hall is a name which strikes a chord with every equestrian. Regardless of the era, the conclusions drawn are always the same: quality British clothing, steeped in heritage and history.
Harry Hall Heritage
The son of a tailor, Henry Hall, later known to friends as Harry, was born in in 1856 in the parish of East Grinstead, Sussex. He grew up to marry a local girl named Alice, where the two continued to reside in East Grinstead with their four sons and two daughters. Liz Prowting fondly reminisces about the time she spent around Hall as a child, due to the great friendship Hall held with her grandfather. She recalls him being a ‘kindly man who gave her first pair of jodhpurs’.
Hall began tailoring in the 1870s and in 1891 he founded Harry Hall Esq, Bootmaker and Tailor. The original clothing was a small collection of suits and dress suits, which were tailored to each individual’s needs and shape, but one of the key aspects to expanding the brand was the advertising which supported it. This prompted Hall to begin using the slogan, ‘Hall marked clothes are the best’. He had this printed on brass letter openers, barometers and button hooks which he distributed for free around England. Hall's talents as a publicist led to publically admired window displays, and the promotions offered appeared in the ‘Tailor and Cutter’ a highly respected publication. The editorial noted that ‘he made a special feature of riding outfits generally’ and ‘they were often the focus of the gentleman’s calendar throughout the summer months’. With such high praise for the store so early on, the foundations for a hugely successful brand were set.
The evolution of Harry Hall is clearly detailed in the advertorial pieces which were presented to the public. After being established for over 25 years, gentlemen’s suits and overcoats were the core pieces offered in the collection. Alongside breeches the brand firmly planted its roots in being the best ‘coat, breeches specialist and habit maker’ on the market. At the point the firm surpassed 35 years they were resolutely acknowledged as being a quality, trusted tailors. However, the progression of Harry Hall was beginning to pick up pace and the eventual diversification of the brand came in the form of sporting wear, including golf and riding clothes. Despite the continued availability of suits and dress suits, Harry Hall was moving in a new direction.
The development of Harry Hall as a brand with a primary focus on equestrian clothing came shortly after World War II. The original store was bombed during the blitz and this encouraged the opening of new stores on Oxford Street and initially one on Liverpool Street before moving to Cheapside close to St Pauls. This expansion provided the company with a much needed base, whilst still allowing for the opportunity to broaden the products to customer’s farther away.
The 1960s brought Harry Hall onto the international stage, with its feature in the iconic Sports Illustrated magazine. They noted that Harry Hall had hand tailored clothes for figures including, Pat Smythe, Anne Townsend, Raimondo D’Inzeo, Nelson Pessoa and the stables regiment at Buckingham palace. At this time the firm also made saddles to order and were said to offer one of the most varied selections of bits in England.
The word soon spread about the legendary Harry Hall name and a Mr Pearce was employed to send customers from much further away than London a detailed self-measurement form. Once this was returned he would tailor the suit to the exact measurements and have the suit with the customer within six weeks. At this time the tweed being used included Harris Tweed, Cheviot cloth and Yorkshire tweeds, with the biggest seller for over 30 years being the Herringbone jacket. This move to target customers from farther away, whilst still retaining the principles of high quality tailoring and materials, marked the start of a movement into providing clothing on a national scale.
The 21st century opens up a new beginning for Harry Hall, whilst the old values and heritage are ensconced into the very core designs; the modern edge is at the forefront of each piece of clothing. Safety becomes of paramount importance and the range expands into new realms of clothing and accessories crafted for both horse and rider. The overarching theme, however, the one which is engrained into each and every product remains the same, Hall marked clothes are the best.
My own Vintage HACKING JACKET OR ( KEEPER'S ) "RATCATCHER"
oktober 23, 1967
Tradition Is In At Harry Hall Ltd., Where Both Horse And Rider Get A Perfect Fit
Susan Blackburn / http://www.cnnsi.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1080451/index.htm
In the heart of swinging London , in the midst of crowds of miniskirted, kinky-booted girls, or "birds," right smack on Regent Street England England
The business was begun by Harry Hall, Esquire, Bootmaker and Tailor, in the 1870s. He advertised with the slogan, "Hall marked clothes are the best." The slogan appeared on brass letter openers, barometers and buttonhooks that were distributed free throughout England London Italy 's Raimondo D'Inzeo , Brazil 's Nelson Pessoa and Australia Buckingham Palace Hyde Park . A glance at the form will give you confidence in the exact fit of your coat, vest, breeches or boots. For example, you are asked to measure around your calf in six different places. Hacking jackets, made to order, start at $70, but the best readymade jackets in sizes 34 to 44 are available for about $40. The latter are made of handwoven Harris tweeds, Cheviot cloth, saxonies or Yorkshire tweeds and styled with slant side pockets, an outflap ticket pocket on the right and a nine-inch center vent. The biggest seller is a fawn-colored herringbone jacket, and it has been the biggest seller for 30 years. Carnaby Street
↧
↧
Jeeves will be away ... for a period of 10 days.
↧
Anderson & Sheppard "A Style is born".
RITE OF PASSAGE
Inside the new Anderson & Sheppard shop, at 32 Old Burlington Street, London.
Photograph BY CHRISTOPHER SIMON SYKES.
A Style Is Born
It is perhaps the finest bespoke tailor in Britain—which is to say in the world. With a clientele both established and au courant, Anderson & Sheppard enters its second century true to its radical founding ideal: The suit shouldn’t wear the man; the man should wear the suit.
By David Kamp in Vanity Fair November 2011
In March of 2005, Anderson & Sheppard, the standard-bearer of Savile Row—tailors to Fred Astaire, Noël Coward, Gary Cooper, and the Prince of Wales, not to mention sundry dukes, barons, maharajas, marchesi, industrialists, actors, composers, Rothschilds, Guinnesses, and Waughs—did something utterly at odds with its tradition-bound history: it moved.
And not only did it move. It moved off Savile Row, relocating from its corner spot at No. 30, where it had stood for 78 of its 99 years, to a smaller space a block west in Old Burlington Street.
The move caused some grumbling—as much within the firm as without. It will never be the same, the grumblers said. How can Anderson & Sheppard be Anderson & Sheppard if it isn’t in old No. 30, with its heavy double doors, its mahogany paneling, its herringbone floors, and its long tables in the front room piled high with bolts of cloth?
Yet it wasn’t long after this move that the Anderson & Sheppard staff came to a pleasant realization: the customers were still coming in. In fact, orders picked up at the new place, and walk-in traffic remained as brisk as ever. Steeped in lore as the old premises at No. 30 were, they turned out not to be what mattered. What mattered were the cutters, tailors, and salesmen with whom the customers had developed enduring relationships; the happily anticipatory experience, which time and age can never temper, of picking out fabrics and linings and buttons for the latest wardrobe upgrade; and, above all, the distinctive way an Anderson & Sheppard suit looks and feels—softly elegant, cut to show the wearer’s style rather than impose one on him.
The natural look. The sloped shoulder. The limp silhouette. The English drape. What to make of these curious phrases, all reliably used to describe the Anderson & Sheppard style? To the uninitiated, these words might suggest lightness and grace, but then again, they might suggest a strange clientele of invertebrates. Why the unrelenting emphasis on softness? To answer this question, it helps to know what the fledgling firm was rebelling against in its early decades.
Yes, rebelling. “Establishment” as Anderson & Sheppard is now thought to be, it was once the renegade of Savile Row. Its sign pointedly identified the firm as CIVIL TAILORS. For civilians, not the military—not the place to go for clothes that would cinch you up and make you stand at attention.
This was something of a radical stance in 1913, the year the young firm left its original space, in Sackville Street, and took its first address on Savile Row, at No. 13. At the foot of the Row, at No. 1, stood Hawkes & Co., military tailors of long standing. Just atop the Row, in Conduit Street, was J. Dege & Sons, uniformers of the cavalry. At Nos. 36–39 stood the firm credited as the first to establish Savile Row’s reputation as a bespoke mecca, Henry Poole & Co., which specialized not only in military tailoring but also in livery and court dress.
The work of these firms was every bit as skilled and accomplished as Anderson & Sheppard’s would be, but still very Victorian in its formality and stiffness. It was only when an innovative Dutch tailor named Frederick Scholte hung up a shingle at 7 Savile Row that the great softening began, and that men’s fashion plunged headlong into the 20th century.
Scholte is credited with creating the look that came to be known as the London cut or the English drape. He was also the mentor of Peter Gustaf Anderson, known as Per, the Swedish expatriate who, with Sidney Horatio Sheppard, a trouser cutter, would found Anderson & Sheppard. Scandalous as it might seem that the most definitively English of Savile Row cuts was in fact the work of a Dutchman and a Swede, it’s indisputable that the look’s foremost popularizer was as English as could be: the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, later still the Duke of Windsor.
The “drape” of a coat (to use the traditional Savile Row term for jacket) is the manner in which it hangs from the shoulders. A Scholte coat was roomy over the chest and shoulder blades, resulting in a conspicuous but graceful drape—the fabric not flawlessly smooth and fitted but gently descending from the collarbone in soft vertical ripples. The upper sleeves, too, were generous, allowing for a broad range of motion, but the armholes, cut high and small, held the coat in place, keeping its collar from separating from the wearer’s neck when he raised his arms. The shoulders remained unpadded, left to slope along the natural lines of the wearer.
As to how Anderson & Sheppard came to be the most celebrated and sought-after practitioner of the Scholte style, the records are scant and the details murky. Per Anderson went into business for himself way back in 1906, when the Prince of Wales was only 12 years old. It’s not clear whether the young Per Anderson learned the English drape from Scholte as a fully realized style way back at the turn of the century, nearly two decades before it became popular, or whether, more likely, the style evolved over an extended period of time, with the two men refining their own takes on the same basic idea. But what’s undoubtedly true is that by the 1920s the “soft look” was catching on—and that Anderson & Sheppard was reaping the benefits.
Scholte’s legendary obstinacy was actually a help to his former protégé’s firm. Whereas Scholte banned most show-business people, believing them to be undesirable riffraff, Anderson & Sheppard welcomed them. Ivor Novello and Noël Coward, the era’s prevailing British stage geniuses and social gadabouts, were early converts to the English drape as practiced by A&S, as was their American counterpart, Cole Porter. Fred Astaire struck up an enduring relationship, paying his first call in 1923.
The measure books—the broad leather-bound volumes in which customers’ measurements are recorded, along with their city and country addresses—from the late 20s and 30s capture the fizzy energy of a burgeoning phenomenon, of positive word of mouth spreading through the era’s transatlantic smart set. George Gershwin is listed as the reference for his brother Ira (in 1928, when they and Astaire returned to London to mount Funny Face), and likewise Richard Rodgers is listed as the reference for his songwriting partner Lorenz Hart.
Contrary to popular belief, a reference was not (and still isn’t) necessary to gain admittance to Anderson & Sheppard’s sacred fitting rooms. The reference was basically a courtesy, a way for the company to receive assurance from established customers that new customers could pay their bills. It was also a social exercise, a way for an established A&S “old boy” to welcome a friend to the club. So it was that the politically and socially prominent M.P. Sir Philip Sassoon vouched for his friend Charlie Chaplin, and that Noël Coward vouched for Laurence Olivier. In 1937, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. vouched for someone who became one of A&S’s most memorable clients: his then semi-clandestine lover, Marlene Dietrich. At Anderson & Sheppard, ladies were welcome—provided that they wore men’s suits, as Dietrich did. Today, the New York-based satirist and waistcoat enthusiast Fran Lebowitz, who was vouched for by the editor of this magazine, upholds the Dietrich tradition.
In 1927 the company moved from the modest quarters it had outgrown at 13 Savile Row to a spacious new home at No. 30, a multi-story neo-Georgian building. In the dandified years between the wars, some of Anderson & Sheppard’s more devoted and wealthy clients didn’t think twice about placing extravagantly huge orders. Douglas Fairbanks Sr., according to Norman Halsey, one of the firm’s former managing directors, “had a fetish for overcoats: we made him so many that we had to keep a large book with cloth cuttings so he did not duplicate them.” Then there were the Chopitea brothers of Peru, playboy sugar barons who ordered suits 50 at a time; one brother was said to keep a house in Lima just for his wardrobe.
But such exercises in overindulgence shouldn’t obscure the truth: it was style, not volume, that defined Anderson & Sheppard in the 1930s. No decade since has set as high a bar for men’s fashion, nor has there been another time in which popular taste was so closely aligned with good taste. As the men’s-wear expert Alan Flusser notes in his book Dressing the Man, “that elusive but convenient character, ‘the average man,’ was exposed to more visual ‘aids’ in the form of smartly attired public figures than he could shake a stick at.” In other words, the style arbiters had actual style. And among the leading arbiters were Anderson & Sheppard men: stars like Fred Astaire and Gary Cooper.
VIRTUOSOS
John Hitchcock, left, the head cutter and managing director, and David Walters, the trimmer.
BY CHRISTOPHER SIMON SYKES.
PATTERNS & SPECIALS
Left, each client’s measurements are fashioned into a template. Right, a selection of cloth woven exclusively for Anderson & Sheppard.
BY CHRISTOPHER SIMON SYKES.
REACTION TO A STYLE IS BORN
The reaction to the new book, Anderson & Sheppard: A Style is Born, has been fantastic. A lot of the customers that come in are aware of the book and have seen parts of it online, but they haven’t necessarily seen a hard copy. We’ve sold quite a few copies, and others have browsed through it and found inspiration in the photographs.
In fact several customers have commissioned things based on items they’ve seen in the book. Overcoats have been popular, as have the house tweeds that are displayed over a few double-page spreads.
Overall, everyone seems to be pleased it has come out well, that it has been so well written and produced a great piece to celebrate Anderson & Sheppard.
For anyone that isn’t aware of the book, it was curated by Vanity Fair editors Graydon Carter and Cullen Murphy and features photography by Jonathan Becker and Christopher Simon Sykes, as well as eight original watercolor paintings by illustrator Paul Cox. It also includes a history of Anderson & Sheppard by David Kamp, which runs through its founding, premises on Savile Row and the move to Old Burlington Street. It was released on October 27, costs £50 and is available in the shop now.
Posted by James on November 28, 2011 in Anderson & Sheppard "blog".
BARON GUY DE ROTHSCHILD
Banker. At Longchamp racecourse outside Paris, 1980.
BY MARTINE FRANK/MAGNUM PHOTOS.
SEBASTIAN GUINNESS
Gallery owner. County Dublin, Ireland, 2008.
BY JONATHAN BECKER.
MANOLO BLAHNIK
Designer. At Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 2008.
BY JONATHAN BECKER.
October 28, 2011
Cut From the Same Cloth
By ERIC WILSON in The New York Times.
When he was younger, and poorer, Jonathan Becker, the photographer whose wonderful portraits have appeared in Vanity Fair for three decades, had his suits custom made by an English tailor in Argentina who charged him about $60. While working on a book in London about 12 years ago, he decided to have them made at Anderson & Sheppard, the Savile Row tailor, on the recommendation of Graydon Carter and Fran Lebowitz.
As he tells the story:
“I had a couple of things made there, but then I started ordering suits the way I did in Argentina. They sent me the bill, and I couldn’t believe it. I put it in a drawer and, luckily, they didn’t bother you too much about bills, or at least they didn’t used to. Then the manager of the store called me a while later and said, ‘Mr. Becker, we have a problem.’ ”
“I said, ‘I know.’
“ ‘How could you know?’ he said. ‘We are having to move the shop, and we are looking for someone to document the old shop so we can recreate it.’
“I agreed to do it, and he asked, ‘How much do you think it would cost, Mr. Becker?’ And I looked at the bill, and told him that price, and he said, ‘Why, Mr. Becker, you’re as expensive as we are.’ ”
Mr. Becker’s photographs, along with those of Christopher Simon Sykes, form the backbone of “Anderson & Sheppard: A Style is Born,” a new book published by Quercus that traces the history and clientele of a century-old tailor that has catered to Fred Astaire, Gary Cooper, Bill Blass and the Prince of Wales. Its move, in 2005, to a smaller location on Old Burlington Street, was once seen as symbolic of the decline of Savile Row, and yet the store has had something of a renaissance. Kate Moss spotted a jacket in the window of Anderson & Sheppard and asked for one just like it (though it was actually cut for a six-year-old boy).
At a party at the Monkey Bar on Tuesday night, John Hitchcock, the managing director of Anderson & Sheppard, could barely finish a sentence before he was interrupted by another customer, whether Ray Kelly or Jean Pigozzi.
“Really, you only need one fashion designer, but you need a lot of tailors,” Mr. Hitchcock said. Younger people have become more interested in apprenticing, he said, after learning that Alexander McQueen had started his career at the shop, which called to mind that story about a young McQueen writing a naughty message in the lining of a jacket destined for Prince Charles.
“It was quite a good way of getting himself publicity,” Mr. Hitchcock said. “But it wasn’t true.”
Mr. Carter, who edited the book with Cullen Murphy, noted that the tradition of bespoke tailoring has been discovered by a new generation that is far more fashion obsessed than when he was in his 30s and bought a tweed jacket and a nailhead double-breasted suit at Anderson & Sheppard. “As you get older, good tailoring can correct a lot of ills,” he said. “It can take 10 pounds off.”
Is that so?
“Good tailoring, and Spanx,” he said.
↧
Phantom Thread / VIDEO: PHANTOM THREAD - Official Trailer [HD] - In Select Theaters Christmas
Phantom Thread review – Daniel Day-Lewis bows out in style with drama of delicious pleasure
5 / 5 stars
In his final film, Day-Lewis reunites with Paul Thomas Anderson to deliver a masterful performance as a society dressmaker beguiled by a young waitress
Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Thu 7 Dec 2017 17.00 GMT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 21.06 GMT
‘Carried off with superb elegance’ ... Vicky Krieps and Daniel Day Lewis in Phantom Thread.
A brilliant English couturier of the postwar age: fastidious and cantankerous, humourless and preposterous – and heterosexual, in that pre-Chatterley era when being a bachelor and fashion designer wasn’t automatically associated in the public mind with anything else. Daniel Day-Lewis gives us his cinema swansong in this new film from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. He is Reynolds Jeremiah Woodcock, celebrated dressmaker to the debutantes of Britain, but now under pressure from the New Look and influences from across the Channel. He treats us to a fine display of temper on the subject of that unforgivably meretricious word: chic.
Just when he is at his lowest, Woodcock falls in love with a shy, maladroit German waitress at the country hotel where he happens to be staying. This is Alma, played by Vicky Krieps. With his connoisseur’s eye, Woodcock sees in her a grace and beauty no one else had noticed, certainly not Alma herself. Dazzled, she comes to live with him as his assistant and model in the central London fashion house over which Woodcock rules with his sister and confidante Cyril, played with enigmatic reserve by Lesley Manville. But, as Woodcock becomes ever more impossible and controlling, submissive Alma must find new, more dysfunctional ways to re-establish her emotional mastery over him.
Day-Lewis gives a performance of almost ridiculously charismatic outrageousness, the sort only he could get away with. He is Hardy Amies and Norman Hartnell with a dash of Tony Armstrong-Jones – certainly Hartnell’s relationship with his sister and business partner Phyllis is evoked here. It’s a study in cult leadership to compare with Anderson’s The Master and a portrait of entrepreneurial loneliness to put alongside his appearance in Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
Woodcock is a preening exquisite, theatrical, highly strung, with a borderline bizarre speaking voice, sinuous and refined: an acquired style perhaps hinting at a humbler beginning than any he will admit to now. This Woodcock has the etiolated grace of a dancer, the misanthropy of an artist, and also the careless hauteur of the nobleman. It’s the kind of character Day-Lewis has played in other films – the one who nurses a politely unvoiced contempt for the lack of integrity he sees in everything and everyone around him, especially here the vulgar, moneyed women on whose patronage he is forced to rely.
He is the definition of a gentleman: someone who never gives offence accidentally. I couldn’t watch Day-Lewis without grinning all over my face at this creation. But he is not supposed to be funny or camp. Krieps matches this as best she can with an intelligent, subdued naturalism, just as she did playing Jenny Marx in Raoul Peck’s new film . Yet there is no question of who is in the spotlight.
Joseph Losey is an influence, particularly in the superb scene-setting created by production designer Mark Tildesley and Mark Bridges’s costumes. The other influence of course is Hitchcock, with Krieps in the Joan Fontaine role from Rebecca and Day-Lewis the patrician Max de Winter, as played by Olivier. Manville is a combination of Mrs Danvers and Rebecca herself. There are no sugar-rush jukebox 50s hits on the soundtrack to establish the sentimentality of the period, or, for that matter, newspaper hoardings about Suez or Profumo. We stick strictly to a generalised sense of time and place and an orchestral score by Jonny Greenwood with classical pieces.
It all creates a feeling of heightened reality, like a dream, particularly when a madly jealous Woodcock goes looking for Alma at a raucous New Year’s Eve party. But is it a nightmare or a swoon, a reverie?
There is such pure delicious pleasure in this film, in its strangeness, its vehemence, its flourishes of absurdity, carried off with superb elegance. And Woodcock’s sartorial creations have a surreal quality, decadent, like dishes at a Roman banquet. Can this really be Daniel Day-Lewis’s final performance? He’s said that it is, and he is not someone for speaking casually. We have to assume that this is goodbye. Maybe this is how onlookers felt at Nijinsky’s last public performance in 1917, which reputedly made Arthur Rubinstein burst into tears. It’s a wonderful high note for Day-Lewis to end on: I feel a mixture of euphoria and desperate sadness.
The men who dressed Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread
Unlike the movie stars, moguls, heads of state and literary giants that they dress, these men would have otherwise remained unknown
BY ALFRED TONG
Friday 2 February 2018
If there was an Oscar for Most Elegantly Tailored Suits, then the men who dressed Daniel Day-Lewis’s character in Phantom Thread would surely win. So take a bow front of house sales Martin Crawford, trouser cutter Oliver Spencer, and senior coat cutter Leon Powell of Anderson & Sheppard. The Savile Row house with a long and storied history of dressing Hollywood’s most elegant leading men, including Fred Astaire and Cary Grant, can now add three time Oscar winner, Daniel Day-Lewis to the list. For alongside costumer Mark Bridges and Day-Lewis himself, these are the geniuses responsible for the languid, softly tailored suits, coats and jackets which drape gently over the frame of the Phantom Thread couturier, Reynolds Woodcock.
Unlike the movie stars, moguls, heads of state and literary giants that they dress, these men would have otherwise remained unknown, as is the Savile Row way, which is discreet often to the point of total anonymity.
“The main concern for Mr Lewis (everyone is "Mr" on Savile Row), was that the suits were made from authentic period cloth,” says front of house sales, Martin Crawford, who acts as a kind of textile sommelier, advising costumer Mark Bridges and Daniel Day-Lewis on the kinds of cloth that would have been used during the 50s. “The main difference is that today cloths are a lot lighter for comfort, now that we have central heating and so on. For the blue herringbone coat, we used a 34 ounce cloth, which is almost double the weight of what we would normally use, and one of the heaviest that I have ever come across.” That coat is fast becoming one of the key looks in the film, with American customers already asking after it. The coat also acts as something of a tribute to Day-Lewis’s father Cecil, who was a client of the firm and had a similar one made for him.
The company created a total of 7 looks including 2 city suits, a dinner suit, a tweed jacket, and a tweed suit, all using materials sourced from British mills, as would have been the custom during the 50s, including Somerset’s Fox Flannel, which still supplies many of Savile Row’s top firms.
The other thing to get right, of course, was the cut and detailing of the clothes. “Today everything is very fitted, very stylised,” says trouser cutter Oliver Spencer.“ The garments back then would have been worn a lot looser and relaxed, more louche. So the trousers on the grey city suit would finish high on the waist (up to the belly button) with pleats and also much wider compared to today.”
“It was a group effort,” says Martin Crawford. “They would come in together and it was a case of giving options, narrowing it down, just as you would a normal client. In fact, lots of customers come in with their partners or stylists, and so it wasn’t so different with Mr Bridges and Mr Lewis. We treated them exactly the same as we would any other customer. Mr Lewis was very involved in the details suggesting different types of lapels and so on. And while the clothes are correct for the period it isn’t so different to what we do now.” Indeed, almost all of the looks in the film are available to order, right now.
Perhaps one of the reasons why Hollywood has always been so enamoured of Anderson and Sheppard is not only for the way the suits look but also the way they move on screen: “There’s a signature softness to what we do,” says senior coat cutter Leon Powell. ”Instead of looking wooden on the screen, there’s a natural flow and movement to our suits. We want you to look elegant and stylish, but also feel comfortable too.”
For the famously method actor, the visits to Anderson and Sheppard were a kind of method shopping, “Towards the end of the process he came in wearing the clothes we made for him. He even had the character’s name on the inside of the lapel on one side and his own name on the other,” says Leon Powell. “They asked for the clothes to be ready several weeks before shooting so that he could wear them in a bit, so that they didn’t look new. They talked about beating them up a bit. ”
“My favourite suits are ones that are a couple of years old and have softened into the body. They take on a life of their own when they softly drape to individual’s physique. It’s a lovely process to see. A suit always looks better when you’re relaxed and so you can see the persona of the person wearing it.”
Phantom Thread has picked up 6 Oscar nominations, including one for Best Costume, so perhaps the boys will be putting on their dinner suits in readiness for the red carpet? “Perhaps we’ll put them on when we go to the pub to celebrate,” says Martin Crawford. Well, they deserve it.
What do fashion insiders think of Phantom Thread?
The film paints a wistful picture of the rarified world inside Reynolds Woodcock’s 50s London townhouse atelier. Four industry experts give their verdicts on its authenticity, from the Belgian princesses to Daniel Day-Lewis’s pin-pricked fingers
Lauren Cochrane
Sat 3 Feb 2018 07.00 GMT
For fashion insiders, the star of Phantom Thread isn’t newcomer Vicky Krieps or Oscar contender Lesley Manville. Instead, it’s two people – Sue Clark and Joan Brown. Playing the women who run Reynolds Woodcock’s atelier in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1950s fashion tale, Clark and Brown are not budding actors but real-life seamstresses whose hands have touched countless couture gowns. Clark, 67, spent her working life as a fashion teacher, while Brown, 71, learned her trade at Savile Row tailor Hardy Amies and fashion house Worth. They are now volunteers at the V&A’s Clothworkers Centre archive, where they bring their expertise to the museum’s fashion collection. That’s where Anderson, on a visit to study the work of mid-century designers, found them, and cast them in his film.
It is details such as these that make Phantom Thread something of an exception for fashion, a world more accustomed to seeing itself on screen in an exaggerated form, in films from Funny Face to Zoolander.
Paul Thomas Anderson: ’You can tell a lot about a person by what they order for breakfast’
Anderson’s film is a study of Daniel Day-Lewis’s Woodcock – a mix of mid-century couturiers such as Amies, Charles James and Cristóbal Balenciaga, and the technique and craft that became the objects of their obsession.
Rather than take place in the more familiar environs of Paris, it is set in the postwar world of London couture. Woodcock is a control freak who lives among a coterie of women catering to his every creative whim. These include his sister, Cyril, played by Manville, and Krieps’s Alma, a waitress whom he turns into a muse for his creations.
While the rarified world of a Fitzrovia townhouse in inner London, Belgian princesses and white-coated seamstresses might date Phantom Thread, this scenario of a designer atelier, or versions of it, have arguably played out in fashion since the industry began, and remain familiar today. To discuss how much Phantom Thread chimes with fashion then and now, four insider names give their verdict:
Alistair O’Neill, professor of fashion history and theory, Central Saint Martins, London
Phantom Thread paints a largely authentic picture of London couture in the 50s. Day-Lewis handles a needle beautifully, his fingertips dry and splitting, punctured with pin-pricked blood spots. The house of Woodcock is set in a handsome townhouse on Fitzroy Square and its layout and many of the scenes played out in it are reminiscent of the house that Hardy Amies restored after the war at 14 Savile Row. It too has two sets of stairs, a larger one at the front for clients, and a smaller and concealed set at the back for staff. Its first-floor salon was also used for fashion shows and client fittings. There are fashion editorials published in British Vogue in the late 40s where Amies poses next to his model in a tuxedo like a handsome escort, and there is a fashion shoot scene in the film that is similar. The scene of Woodcock greeting a princess on the street as she arrives by chauffeur for her fitting makes me think of the 1952 photo of Amies and his seamstresses carrying Princess Elizabeth’s wardrobe down the steps of the house into a black cab set for Clarence House.
Like Woodcock, the French couturiers of the time were very superstitious. Coco Chanel was interested in numerology and Christian Dior used to pin lily of the valley into the linings of skirts prior to the fashion show, for luck.
The jewel tones of silk taffeta – amethyst, emerald and aquamarine – that much of Woodcock’s couture is made from are indebted to Cecil Beaton’s photograph of designs by Charles James taken in 1948. They are combined with lace detailing, which is a typical couture fabric, but the results are uneven. In the film, it works beautifully in the dress that makes use of an antique piece of Flemish (Brussels) lace, but less so in the dress Alma models with a lace apron at the skirt for the fashion show. This scene features Alma smiling as she walks, a detail that wouldn’t have been tolerated in a couture house at the time. The only emotion models were paid to show in the 50s was indifference, expressed with condescension and hauteur. In a recent obituary for Lady Astor, who worked as a fashion model in the period and was the muse of Pierre Balmain, journalist Katharine Whitehorn described her walk as “dirt-beneath-my-feet style of modelling”. The only other detail that feels off is the luminous quality of the film. Postwar London has never looked so bright.
The depiction of Reynolds is reminiscent of a number of designers from the period, such as Sir Hardy Amies.
Katie Grand, editor-in-chief of Love magazine
I thought it was really accurate, and there are so many parallels between how designers behave then and now. Within five minutes of watching the film, I thought: “It’s like being at work.” Creative people have unusual behaviours – they don’t want to talk to anyone before 12pm or they don’t talk to anyone after 6pm. Obsessive-compulsive is too harsh, but there are peculiarities. You get used to it and watching it in a film just made it more heightened.
I didn’t recognise Cyril as anyone specific, but it wouldn’t be unusual to have someone in a house who provides a lot of emotional support. You get accustomed to quirks – such as when Woodcock makes too much of the noise Alma makes eating her toast. I have seen Marc Jacobs eat chicken for lunch for more than 15 years. Mrs Prada always drinks tea and still water. But then, you learn the tastes in food and drink of anyone you spend a lot of time with. As for the muse relationship that Woodcock has with Alma, I have seen Jacobs work like that with the model Jamie Bouchet. He has collaborated with her for maybe 10 years, and he doesn’t like to see work in the raw form on anyone other than her.
All of the scenes that involve the fittings on Alma are very accurate – the standing around for hours, the fittings at 4am. Jamie is very patient. When something goes wrong, the atelier does have to work all through the night, as they do in the film when the wedding dress is torn. That’s the same as any creative arena though – I imagine it’s the same when you’re making an album.
The appointments with private clients, as seen in the film, felt real. I don’t think that process has changed all that much. I don’t know about London, but the couture houses in Paris now are similar to the atelier depicted in the film. When you work in a couture studio – such as Chanel or Dior – there are people with white coats. The atmosphere is super-respectful, everyone in those structures is very reverent to the designer, and there is an etiquette. I didn’t pay much attention to the clothes, but I was pleased to see that the structures underneath the clothes were correct. I was focused on that, rather than the silhouettes or fabrics.
Roksanda Ilincic, London fashion week designer
The mid-century is probably my favourite era. The volume, shape and line is so much what I am drawn to. It was also very interesting to watch a film about a designer. I am not so obsessive that I cannot have breakfast without silence, as Woodcock does, but I understand that to be creative you have to keep your thread of thought. When I’m designing, I’m usually in a room by myself. You see Woodcock collapse after the show, and it is true that you are emotionally and physically exhausted because this thing has been all you have thought about for such a long time. Even when you’re at home or with friends, you’re still thinking about it. When you first start working, it’s like work is the only thing that matters, as it is with Woodcock. It takes a long time for that obsession to go; for me it went after the birth of my daughter. I worked literally until I gave birth. Afterwards, I realised life needed to be a bit more balanced.
I identified with his attitude to his dresses; it’s as if they are alive. They are something so precious and dear to him, he can’t bear the idea of harm coming to them. I would never take a dress from a client, as he does, but you get so attached to your work. I have had dresses come back from photoshoots totally ruined and it’s heartbreaking.
I don’t have a particular muse, for me its more like a sisterhood of women. I can understand why one muse or woman, such as Alma, can epitomise everything, though. She’s not a drawing, she’s alive.
Woodcock has to appear at events and so do I. I wish being a designer was a bit less about being a public figure but spending time with my clients is important to me. They fall a little bit in love with the world you present as well as the dress. That time also really helps me understand their lifestyle and what they need.
My team don’t wear white coats in the studio, but they do have the same commitment to what they’re doing and they are almost proud to work hard, as they do in the film. Before every show you have some kind of disaster and we all work together to solve it. They are like a family. They have to be. I like the film’s idea of this beautiful house that is his whole world, there’s no need to leave the bubble. But, for me personally, I think it’s probably healthier to have a separate space.
Alexandra Shulman, ex-editor-in-chief, British Vogue
Fashion and fiction rarely make successful partners. There is something about the intangibility of what fashion is, alongside a widely held assumption that there is something inherently trivial, even fake about it, that means any fictional portrayal of the world veers to caricature. And this includes Phantom Thread. Daniel Day-Lewis’ character is a mashup of any number of designers.
Certainly the beautiful salon of his townhouse looked almost identical to the Amies’ Mayfair HQ I knew. And the intensity, dedication and near silent skills of the white-coated ladies – the petit mains – as they stitch and fit was identical to the scene in any famous couture house, whether London, Rome or Paris. The crisp character of Woodstock’s sister, Cyril, who runs his business and, in large part, his private life, was utterly convincing. It was a pitch-perfect depiction by Lesley Manville of the many people employed by some designers to enforce a protective ring that keeps away anybody or any information that might disturb their creativity.
But the general silliness of the plot, and the clunky cartoon-like behaviour that inhabits many episodes undermines so much of the real passion and industry that the film and Day-Lewis work hard to demonstrate. The combative relationship between Woodstock and his lover, Alma, struck me as unconvincing, while a scene where they snatch back a dress from a bulky, comatose Barbara Hutton-type is ridiculous and would have finished off his business. Luckily Day-Lewis’s physical beauty and his wonderful period wardrobe was some compensation for a tale I found simply unbelievable and peopled by characters that I had no sympathy for.
↧
Hubert de Givenchy obituary
Hubert de Givenchy obituary
Couturier to Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy
Veronica Horwell
Mon 12 Mar 2018 17.44 GMT Last modified on Mon 12 Mar 2018 17.45 GMT
Audrey Hepburn glides through the credits of the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s in a black dress that is in no way little. It’s a long, narrow sheath, though she can still amble down Fifth Avenue unimpeded. The dress is sleeveless – yet gloves cover her arms far above her elbows – and collarless, with a striking back strap revealing her shoulder blades. Several generations have worshipped images of Hepburn in that dress as defining sophistication.
This was the work of Hubert de Givenchy, who has died aged 91. His clothes for Hepburn made her feel secure. “I put them on and I feel protected,” she said. He helped her to downplay the trampiness of Holly Golightly, who trips into Sing Sing prison in Givenchy’s lampshade hat, and shops at Tiffany’s in his tailored coat. No wonder Jacqueline Kennedy commanded Givenchy to outfit her state visit to Paris that year.
Givenchy had been brought up to enjoy textiles, to regard them as treats. He was the younger son of the Marquis of Givenchy, who died when the boy was three, and Béatrice Badin; and the pet of his maternal grandmother, Margaret Badin, widow of the director of the Beauvais tapestry workshops. That was his happy memory of childhood, his grandmother rewarding him for good behaviour by opening cupboards filled with fabric treasures, or allowing him to rummage in trunks and bundles. “My mother and my cousins played customers, gathered about the sewing machine.” His mother backed his decision to be a fashion designer, provided he did it to the highest standards. She introduced him to couture houses and sent him to study in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
As a postwar teen he worked briefly for Jacques Fath, Robert Piguet and Lucien Lelong before joining Elsa Schiaparelli in 1947. She had confidence in him, despite his youth, and told him to use up 900 metres of prewar, surrealist-print silks cluttering her stockroom. He did what he always did thereafter: hung up the cloth until he understood its properties, and then cut separates from it, amusing enough to sell well despite the stuffs being so out of date. “Never work against the fabric, it has a life of its own,” he said.
Givenchy was 24 when he opened his own house with financial backing from his brother-in-law, Louis Fontaine, who owned the Prisunic chain stores. There was only money enough to pay his few workhands (many of whom then stayed with him for life). He showed his clothes on plastic mannequins to save model hire and, not being able to afford the silks of his competitors, made a collection with the cotton toile (shirting) traditionally used for couture prototypes. This, plus the simplicity of his lines, and his philosophy that a dress should defer to a woman’s shape, not she to it, positioned him closer to American sportswear than to Paris couture.
His heroes were the unique dressmaker Madame Grès, who left him her personal collection of 300 gowns, and Cristóbal Balenciaga, who redirected clients to Givenchy when he closed his own house – despite the fact that Balenciaga was baroque in spirit, while Givenchy was a neoclassicist.
Givenchy’s freshness and vivacity were just right for the new world of the Vespa scooter and the beach bag. And they attracted the ultimate customer in 1953. When he was told Mademoiselle Hepburn had made an appointment, he assumed that meant Katharine the great movie star. In walked Audrey, who had just made Roman Holiday, the definitive Vespa movie, aged 24 but looking a teen in T-shirt, ballet flats and no make-up. She thought he could supply the believable sophistication she needed for Sabrina (1954), the Billy Wilder film in which a below-stairs girl returns from Paris transformed. There wasn’t time to create to order, so she chose from what was available and stood through three-hour fittings in service of exactitude. Her boat-necked Cinderella gown won a deserved Oscar, but not for Givenchy: his work was credited to the studio designer Edith Head.
Hepburn was mortified by that, but the episode established the Givenchy-Hepburn relationship, which lasted to her death in 1993. He made her costumes for the musical Funny Face (1957) and the thriller Charade (1963). By How to Steal a Million (1966), the partnership had become an in-joke — when Hepburn’s character asks why she must be disguised as an aproned charlady during a robbery, she is told: “It’ll give Givenchy a night off.”
Yet the next year, the studio dressed Hepburn in ready-to-wear clothes, and not from Paris, for the comedy Two for the Road. The mood had changed, and the big money had gone. She demanded Givenchy should design her period costumes for Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, then withdrew from the project, and their only movie together after that was the made-for-television Love Among Thieves (1987).
Among Givenchy’s clients were also Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Leslie Caron, Maria Callas, Grace Kelly and the Duchess of Windsor – he stayed up all night to sew the black coat she wore to the Duke’s funeral. Although he never lacked wealthy customers, he was uncomfortable with the extravagant showmanship of couture from the mid-1970s: the “impossible, crazy clothes” that did not “think about the life of a woman”, and were careless, almost contemptuous, of textiles. He remained commercially astute, selling his perfumes to the Veuve Cliquot champagne brand in 1981, and the couture house in 1988 to the LVMH luxury conglomerate, which later acquired the perfumes, too.
Givenchy is applauded by his models after presenting his final High Fashion collection in 1995. Photograph: Reuters
Givenchy kept his patience, just, with LVMH’s head, Bernard Arnault, until his formal retirement in 1995, and thereafter spoke of Arnault’s designer appointments (including John Galliano and Alexander McQueen) with distant politeness. “C’est la vie,” he told commiserators. “Happily, for many years we had a wonderful time, beautiful fabric, beautiful people.”
He had long since set up an alternative life as an “amateur d’art”, buying from artists he had met, Miró, Picasso and the sculptor Diego Giacometti. His real passion, though, was for the very best French furniture of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and over the decades his Paris apartment became a miniature Versailles. But he sold his collection in 1993 – too museum-like – and lived mostly in Le Jonchet, his manor house near Tours, with its gardens edged by 36,000 box bushes and its white roses in memory of Hepburn.
Givenchy was awarded Paris couture’s Golden Thimbles in 1978 and 1982, and there were major exhibitions at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, in 1982, and the Musée de la Mode in Paris, in 1991.
He is survived by his partner, and fellow couturier, Philippe Venet.
• Hubert James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy, couturier, born 21 February 1927; died 10 March 2018
Hubert de Givenchy: an elegant master of devastating chic
He dressed Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy and forged a timeless style for a golden age
Jess Cartner-Morley
@JessC_M
Mon 12 Mar 2018 15.40 GMT Last modified on Mon 12 Mar 2018 22.00 GMT
The first and last time I met Hubert de Givenchy, who has died at the age of 91, was at the opening of his eponymous exhibition at the Calais Museum for Lace and Fashion in June. His elegant 6ft 6in frame was even more imposing for the stately pace at which he moved, supported by a wooden cane. He had an impressive head of snow-white hair, and wore a simple dark suit and tie with a white shirt.
Hubert de Givenchy, maker of style icons, dies aged 91
The reporters who had assembled for the opening asked reverent questions about the iconic dresses he made, but he was much more interested in talking about the women he made them for. He told a funny story about his first meeting with Miss Hepburn, and how taken aback he was to be presented with the pixie-like Audrey instead of the other, at that point more famous, Katharine. Givenchy recalled Audrey as “this very thin person with beautiful eyes, short hair, thick eyebrows, very tiny trousers, ballerina shoes and a little T-shirt. On her head was a straw gondolier’s hat with a red ribbon around it.” The two became close, collaborating on a wardrobe for the film Sabrina and every subsequent role.
The designer’s elegant tailoring and eye for a perfect line, combined with the unusually spare taste of Hepburn, created style magic. Together they forged a refined image of pared-to-the-bone glamour that still looks chic more than half a century later. “She was not like other movie stars, because she loved simplicity,” Givenchy once said. Black dresses, ballerina pumps, sunglasses and pearls still conjure up the image of Hepburn. That their partnership grew into “a great friendship”, as Givenchy said at the opening of the exhibition, is reflected in his appointment as the mediator of her will towards the end of her life.
Givenchy’s death comes as the house he founded enjoys a renewed lease of life under , the British designer appointed as its creative director last year. Many celebrated designers, including Alexander McQueen, have been at the helm in the years since Givenchy sold his company, but Waight Keller is the first to have met the founder in person. When she joined the house she paid homage to his “confident style”. Backstage after her fashion shows, Waight Keller often mentions the designer she calls “Hubert”.
He was the unrivalled master of the devastatingly chic, all-black look. One of the first telephone calls made by Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, after the death of her husband Edward, the Duke of Windsor, in 1972 was to the Givenchy atelier. Photographs of that black wool coat with cigaline veil, produced within one day in time for the duchess to travel to the funeral, were reproduced all over the world.
The iconography of first lady style owes a debt – largely unacknowledged – to the Givenchy atelier. At the Calais exhibition opening, the designer recalled being charmed by the beauty and youthful energy of Jackie Kennedy, whom he first met while her husband was running for president. For the first Kennedy official visit to France, Givenchy “made 10 or 15 pieces … but her secretary told me that we could not tell the press”, he remembered – the need for the first lady to be seen to support American fashion meant Givenchy’s contribution to Kennedy’s image was downplayed. After the trip, Kennedy wrote a card to Givenchy relaying a compliment given to her by Charles de Gaulle at an event at Versailles, for which she had worn a Givenchy gown: “Madame, this evening you look like a Parisienne.”
The French news magazine L’Express once described Givenchy as being “to fashion what Françoise Sagan was to literature and Bernard Buffet to painting: successful, glamorous, gorgeous, and very, very French”. His death breaks a link to a golden age of 20th-century elegance, in the clothes he created for Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy and their chic contemporaries.
↧
↧
JEEVES Short Trip to Lisbon wearing a BOOKSTER Hacking Jacket.
In these times of “travel light”, just carrying a small cabin suitcase, we often chose to pack just one jacket with one extra matching trousers. It is the several shirts, waistcoats and accessories which will make the difference to succeed in wearing various outfits.
To guarantee a solid, elegant, robust and dashing basis for my journey I took with me one BOOKSTER Hacking Jacket. This great piece of TWEED belongs to their ‘ready-to-wear’ collection.
The details and perfect finishing touches can be observed in the photographs, but I like to emphasize that BOOKSTER takes great care in the junctions, in considering matching checks, which guarantees a variated and harmonious TWEED ‘landscape’.
Great quality and comfort, timeless style and solidity, totally transcending “fashion”.
JEEVES
Model: Hacking Jacket
Cloth: Thistle Tweed
Cloth Weight: 550gms / 22oz
Weight Category: Medium Weight
Cloth Pattern: Check
Cloth Colour: Green Gold Mix with Purple/Wine Windowpane Over Check
Lining: Purple Viscose Twill Lining
Buttons: Dark Horn
Style: 3 Button Front
Lapel: Notch Lapel with Collar Tab Feature
Outside Pockets: 3 Extra Slant Flap Pockets and Welted Breast Bocket
Inside Pockets: 2 Inside Breast Pocket with Security Pocket Right, Pen Pocket and Card Pocket left
Cuff: 4 Button Real Cuff
Vents: Twin Vents
Trim: Purple Undrcollar
BOOKSTER
BOOKSTER TAILORING
Customer Service: +44 (0)113 887 8424
Email: info@bookster.co.uk
OUR STORY
Bookster was established by Peter and Michelle King in Herefordshire in 2007 and was borne out of selling vintage clothing in the 1970s which, over time, became renowned for specialising in Tweed.
This specialisation was due to a continued frustration that tweed clothing was only available in a limited number of small sizes. With a growing customer base of demand for Tweed garments (in a variety of shapes and sizes) they decided that the best way to serve their clients was to actually start making Tweed jackets in custom sizes.
Thus Bookster Tailoring was established to introduce The Bookster Original made to order Tweed Jacket. Popularity for the product rapidly grew and soon demand had seen the product range widen significantly, whilst maintaining the Bookster Tweed Jacket as its core focus.
In 2014 Bookster Tailoring was acquired by new owners, with a rich tailoring heritage stretching back over 100 years, and subsequently the company’s headquarters moving to Leeds, a famous heartland for tailoring and cloth production.
The acquisition has only strengthened Bookster’s client offering in terms of product range, customisation options, selection of cloth, fit, tailoring quality and customer service. Today Bookster, still specialising in Tweed, has a customer base of satisfied clients who appreciate the quintessentially British style of a Bookster garment, its’ premium quality and perfect fit.
MISSION, VISION & VALUES
Mission
Our mission is to help our clients embrace British tailoring style to create unique clothing of timeless elegance.
Vision
We want to become the world’s leading online tailoring service specialising in British cloths and styles.
Values
Be a pleasure to work with - Customers like you are at the heart of what we do and our future relies on your continued business. Our team of friendly, knowledgeable staff are always on hand to talk you through the choices. We can advise on every aspect of the style and cloth. You can even meet with us in Leeds or London for a full fitting and consultation. We want to make custom made clothing as easy and pleasurable as possible for you to order.
Be inspiring - We share your passion for clothing and can help you embrace your creativity. Our comprehensive choice of cloths, styles and cuts allow you to create your own style and express your personality. We constantly review our product range and continue to source the finest fabrics from around the world. We can even help you design your own cloth so your clothing can truly be unique.
Be excellent - To become the world’s leading online tailor, we have to continually build on our foundation of quality products and service excellence. We only use the finest fabrics and our product quality is guaranteed. We strive to maintain the same level of excellence throughout every area of our business.
Be exclusive - Bookster are often considered best in class when it comes to Tweed tailoring. We balance premium quality with value for money. Our prices may not be the lowest, but the quality, variety and experience we provide, combined with the customisation options we offer, make our clothing the best value. We understand the demands of the modern day and have established an online ordering system that does not compromise traditional tailoring heritage. The ability to order high quality, custom made garments and suits through our website sets us apart from the industry.
↧
Bobby from Boston / Bobby Garnett Vintage Store.
Bobby From Boston: A Documentary from Lea Winkler on Vimeo.
Bobby Garnett began collecting vintage clothing as a teenager, selling out of his home in Dorchester and later, out of his prep school dorm room in Maine. After establishing his reputation as a true lover and connoisseur of vintage, he went on to open Awo, a leather shop in 1969, Muddy River Trading Company in Brookline, MA in 1971, Uptown Strutters Ball in Provincetown in 1970, and in 1980, Strutters located in Boston’s North End, South End, and on Newbury Street.
Bobby From Boston has evolved from a personal collection, to a showroom, to an internationally recognized source of premium men's and women's vintage clothing.
The founder, Bobby Garnett passed away in 2016. His daughter Jessica, along with her faithful employees keeps Bobby’s legacy going strong. Every detail in the carefully curated space celebrates Bobby’s passion and the shop continues to be a primary resource for the movie industry as well as major fashion labels such as Ralph Lauren, Jcrew, Tom Ford, LL Bean, Abercrombie, and Tommy Hilfiger.
We hope too see you soon! Nothing made Bobby happier than waving to folks from his antique quilt-draped Mission style rocker, telling them the full story behind any piece of clothing and belting out the lyrics to the retro funk and soul music that always provided the perfect hunting soundtrack.
450 Harrison Avenue Suite 19
Boston, Massachusetts 02118
617- 423-9299
Bobby from Boston’s Legacy Continues
Bobby Garnett's daughter Jessica runs her late father's South End store.
by ABBY BIELAGUS · 1/17/2017, 9:53 a.m.
Many of us knew that he had been sick for a long time, but when news came of Bobby Garnett’s death, a collective gasp could be heard around the city.
Garnett was a beloved figure in this town, and not only because of the well-curated vintage clothing and accessories he brought to our shelves, but also because of his constant smile and endless ability to chat with strangers. Those whose regular weekend routine included visits to Garnett’s South End store, Bobby from Boston, wondered what would become of his extensive collection. Thankfully, on this front, we can now exhale, because Bobby’s daughter Jessica Garnett Carrion has agreed to carry on his legacy.
It wasn’t a decision that came easily. After all, she grew up being awoken morning after morning in the dark hours to scour flea markets with her dad.
“His whole life revolved around this business, so I wanted to do my own thing. At one time I wanted to be a chef! But working here and going to the shows and meeting people, it’s growing on me,” Carrion says.
Not that she’s a stranger to the world her father inhabited. She’s been working at the store since 1998, and before that she has memories “as a kid of always running around the stores on Newbury Street and in Allston.” Carrion even spent time in Montreal, when her father had a store there. “I went for a month and worked there. I even learned some French,” she says.
Now that she’s at the helm, Carrion wants to respect her father’s vision, but implement some of her own ideas as well. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to keep the store the same as it was, with his ideas, but also with my ideas now too,” she says.
One big change she made was to close the smaller space adjacent to the main room where the women’s clothing was previously displayed. A furniture store will occupy that space in the coming months. But this doesn’t mean Bobby’s will no longer carry women’s vintage—quite the opposite: Carrion has dedicated the back of the store, a space originally used for storage, to women’s apparel and accessories. She took down a wall and moved around some cases, and the result is a store that’s more open and filled with light.
“Women would walk in and say ‘Oh, it’s just a men’s store,’ and walk out. I see people come in now and they walk straight back to the women’s section. They can see from the front of the store to the back. They can take everything in at once,” Carrion says.
She also has plans to make the store easier to shop by rotating stock seasonally. And someday, she wants to start designing.
↧
CHURCHILL THE PAINTER
↧
Remembering Andrew Marr on Winston Churchill: Blood, Sweat and Oil Paint, BBC Four
Andrew Marr on Churchill - Blood, Sweat and Oil Paint from Storm HD on Vimeo.
Andrew Marr looks at the role that painting played in Winston Churchill's life as a form of therapy, and relates it to his own process of recovery from a stroke.
Director: David Barrie
Andrew Marr on Winston Churchill: Blood, Sweat and Oil Paint, BBC Four, review: 'touchingly heartfelt'
Churchill’s paintings represented a kind of hidden autobiography, which meant that television had found something new to say about him, says James Walton
4 out of 5 stars
By James Walton10:00PM BST 17 Aug 2015
Now, if the quote wasn’t appearing in a review of Andrew Marr on Winston Churchill: Blood, Sweat and Oil Paint (BBC Four), I suspect it might have taken you a while to guess who once said, “If it weren’t for painting, I couldn’t live.” And, as the programme made clear, this wasn’t one of Churchill’s rhetorical flourishes, but a simple, even faintly puzzled statement of fact.
Churchill didn’t take up his brushes until middle age, but that still left him around 50 years in which to produce more than 500 works. Initially, when Marr claimed that, far from being a mere hobby, Churchill’s paintings represented a kind of hidden autobiography, it seemed like another piece of TV hype. By the end, it appeared almost indisputable. It also meant that, possibly for the first time in living memory, television had found something new to say about the man.
Marr constructed his case not just carefully, but chronologically. One early painting we saw was of a shattered Belgian village on the Western Front in 1916 where Churchill had, perhaps surprisingly, gone to lick his wounds after the failure of the Dardanelles campaign. (As Marr pointed out, it’s among the stranger coincidences of history that, at the time, another amateur painter and future war leader, in the shape of Adolf Hitler, was only 10 miles away.) And from there, Marr both argued and demonstrated, Churchill continued to use art as a means of battling his susceptibility to depression.
Marr also spoke about how he too has found painting a useful tool to recover after his stoke. To begin with, this comparison of himself to Churchill felt distinctly hubristic but, again (even if he did overdo it a bit), it made increasing sense, adding a touchingly heartfelt quality to his central thesis.
Andrew Marr on how art saved Winston Churchill’s life
The broadcaster investigates how only a love of painting kept suicide at bay for Britain’s wartime leader
Monday, 17th August 2015 at 3:42 pm
Andrew Marr knows about the healing power of painting better than anyone. More than two years have passed since the BBC presenter suffered a stroke, during a vigorous bout of high-intensity exercise, and he credits pencil, paintbrush and easel with aiding his physical and mental recovery.
He’s therefore ideally placed to explain why he believes painting saved the life of Britain’s most famous politician: that Winston Churchill, who famously suffered from bouts of severe depression, would have killed himself had he not been able to seek solace in his paint palette.
Throughout his life Churchill was tormented by the mental anguish he called his “black dog”. And in the years before becoming Prime Minister and leading the country to victory in the Second World War, Churchill suffered a series of political setbacks, including criticism for the disastrous Gallipoli expedition, which led to his resignation from the cabinet in 1915, and his “wilderness years” in the 1930s when he was out of power.
“I think Churchill was semi-suicidal at the time of his decline and that painting saved him,” Marr says. “It brought him back to sanity. Even when you’re under pressure in other areas of your life, to paint even half-competently you can only think about colour, line and shape. You’re thinking in a completely different way, pouring your entire self into it. And that is what Churchill found, that his personal crises would fall away once he was painting. And I think painting saved his life, candidly, so that he was still around to lead the country in 1940.”
The immersive nature of painting has helped Marr to face difficulties and demons in his own life, too. “I don’t have the kind of depression that Churchill had,” he says. “But recovery from something like a stroke is always difficult, and you get ups and downs. The most I would say is that painting has helped me through the downs and produced more of the ups than there would otherwise have been, which to me is a very important part of life.
“I certainly find that if I’m feeling down or gloomy or harried, if I paint for a few hours I feel better. I find it very difficult, but the nature of the difficulty is in itself a kind of therapy. The fact that I’m concentrating so hard, and things aren’t working, but then there are serendipitous moments when it goes well, all of that is good for me, mentally.”
Aside from the emotional impact of such a traumatic event, Marr’s stroke also took a physical toll, leaving him with impaired mobility on his left side. He says that, in his recovery, art has been “not as important as physiotherapy, but more important than beer”. Nevertheless, he has been forced to change his painting style.
“I don’t want to exaggerate my disability, but a natural thing to do would be to hold a small canvas in my left hand and crouch over and draw very minutely with my right,” he says. “I can’t do that since my stroke because my left hand won’t hold the canvas firmly enough.
“I’m now painting more abstract paintings, too. I always used to paint outside, with a canvas, and paint what was in front of me. But I simply can’t do that any more. I can’t carry the stuff, I can’t put up the easel, and if I do get it up the wind blows it over and I’m stuffed. I have to find a place inside where the situation is controlled and calm [he has a small studio], but that means, of course, that I’m not painting what’s in front of me, I’m painting what’s in my head, and that’s a completely different kettle of fish.”
Marr has entered earlier paintings in exhibitions, but says he has been advised by art expert friends that his abstracts aren’t yet ready to be shown publicly. Churchill, who was initially too shy to exhibit under his own name, sought advice from major 20th-century British painters such as Walter Sickert and William Nicholson, and Marr reveals that he too has had tuition.
“I was friendly with David Hockney for a few years,” he says, “and if you ask him about specific painting problems he is incredibly generous. I remember asking him how he does that particularly cold white sky that is so characteristic of the British winter. And he explained exactly how to do it, the oil paints to buy, the brushes. He definitely improved my painting.”
Marr insists that he is not an artist, merely “someone who paints and draws”, but what about Churchill? The former prime minister’s most famous painting, The Goldfish Pool at Chartwell, his family home in Kent, sold for £1.8 million last year. Was it really any good?
“I think if his paintings weren’t by Churchill, they wouldn’t be collected,” says Marr. “If they’d been done by Sidney Nobody down the road, we’d think that some of them are a damn good piece of Sunday painting. He is certainly not unskilled, but he is a pretty good, second-rate impressionist – and that’s meant to be praise.”
Andrew Marr on Churchill is on Monday 17th August at 9.00pm on BBC4
↧
↧
La Parisienne / Les Parisiens Ines de la Fressange et Sophie Gachet / VIDEO: Dans la tête d'Inès de la Fressange
 |
Inès de la Fressange at her Roger Vivier office. Credit Alice Dison for The New York Times PARIS |
Inès Marie Lætitia Églantine Isabelle de Seignard de La Fressange, born 11 August 1957, is a French model, aristocrat, style icon, fashion designer and perfumer. She was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1998.
Family and Childhood
La Fressange was born in Gassin, Var, France, the daughter of André de Seignard, Marquis de La Fressange (b. 1932), a French stockbroker, and his wife, the former Cecilia "Lita" Sánchez-Davila, an Argentine-Colombian model (closely related to two former presidents of Colombia, Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo and Alfonso Lopez Michelsen
Her family on her father's side comes from old French nobility, and had the seigneury of 'de La Fressange' in the Velay (in Auvergne). Her uncle, Hubert de La Fressange (b. 1923), died in the Second World War on 2 October 1944 in Anglemont, during which he participated in its liberation. Her grandmother, the marchioness to Paul de La Fressange, was born Simone Lazard, and was heiress to the Lazard banking fortune (Banque Lazard). She married two ministers in succession, Maurice Petsche, and then Louis Jacquinot.
She grew up in an 18th-century mill outside Paris with two brothers, Emmanuel, the eldest, and her younger brother, Ivan. She studied at the Tournelle Institution in Courgent, then at the Notre-dame de Mantes-la-Jolie Institution in the Yvelines where she got her bacalaureat at the age of 16, and then went to the L'École du Louvre in Paris.
Career
Tall at 180 cm (5'11") and with a weight of 50 kg (110 lb), she began her career as a model in 1974 at the age of 17. She quickly became nicknamed by many as "the talking mannequin", due to her tendency to talk with fashion journalists and express her opinions on her profession and on fashion.
In 1975, at the age of 18, La Fressange appeared for the first time in photos by Oliviero Toscani for Elle magazine, then modelled for Thierry Mugler and other designers.
In 1983 she became the first model to sign an exclusive modeling contract with the haute couture fashion house, Chanel, by fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, whose muse she became due to her remarkable resemblance to the brand's founder, Coco Chanel, who died in 1971. She was the first model to sign an exclusivity contract with a fashion house and the first model to become a big media personality and popular figure in fashion history, a symbol of the 1980s due to her omnipresence.
However, in 1989, Lagerfeld and La Fressange had an argument and parted company. Likely this argument was, at least in part, regarding her decision to lend her likeness to a bust of Marianne, the ubiquitous symbol of the French Republic. Lagerfeld reputedly condemned her decision, saying that Marianne was the embodiment of "everything that is boring, bourgeois, and provincial" and that he would not dress up historic monuments.
On 9 June 1990, in Tarascon, France, she married Luigi d'Urso (1951-2006), an Italian railroad executive, who died in 2006. Luigi was the son of Alessandro d'Urso, and his wife, Donna Clothilde Serra di Cassano (daughter of Don Luigi Serra, 9th Duke di Cassano, and Elizabeth Grant; and great-granddaughter of George Clymer, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, who signed both the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the United States Constitution in 1787). Luigi and Inès had two daughters, Nine Marie d'Urso (born 27 February 1994) and Violette Marie d'Urso (born 6 August 1999). She also has two stepdaughters, Clotilde d'Urso and India d'Urso, the daughters of Luigi d'Urso by his first wife, Guendalina Levier.
In 1991, with the financial support of the luxury brand, Orcofi, she created her own brand 'Inès de la Fressange' and opened her own Boutique, selling various products such as perfumes originating from the area in which her grandfather lived, at 12 Avenue Montaigne in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. It was an immediate success not only in France, but also in the USA and in Japan.
In December 1999, due to equity dilution, she was made redundant from her own company in which she was not a majority shareholder, her majority co-shareholders insisting it was because she had designed a pill-dispenser for the 'Elixir of Abbé Soury'. She lost the rights to use her name and personal brand, which she fought five years for in court.
She walked the runway for Gaultier during an event, at age 51.[3] She also walked the Chanel spring-summer 2011 show.
La Fressange and fashion journalist Sophie Gachet are the authors of Parisian Chic, a Style Guide.
This Is What ‘Parisienne’ Looks Like
Skin Deep
By ELAINE SCIOLINO APRIL 20, 2011
THE perfect Parisian woman is an illusion, bien sûr. But learning to pretend to be one is a serious business that dates back centuries.
It is an enterprise that continues to thrive with profitable how-to books like, “How to Become a Real Parisian,” “The Parisian Woman’s Guide to Style” and “All You Need to Be Impossibly French.” Now Inès de la Fressange, ex-runway model, former face of Chanel, Legion of Honor winner, designer, businesswoman and daughter of a marquis, offers yet another take on how to dress, shop, eat and act like a true “Parisienne.” This onetime muse of Karl Lagerfeld has spun her beauty and style tips into a confection of a best seller, “Parisian Chic: A Style Guide,” which has sold more than 100,000 copies in French and has just hit the American market.
The book might have withered and died on the shelves, except that Ms. de la Fressange combines a “je ne sais quoi” audacity with a sassy tone, and leaves readers believing that, by following her rules and experimenting with confidence, they, too, can be just like her.
They can’t.
Ms. de la Fressange is almost 6 feet tall, about 125 pounds and hipless. She has been the official model for Marianne, the ageless symbol of the French republic that appears on postage stamps and municipal buildings. She is wealthy and quadrilingual. She drinks wine and lots of strong espresso. She doesn’t diet. “Potatoes, chocolate, bonbons, wine, bread — I eat everything that’s good,” she said.
She is 53, but dared to pose topless for Madame Figaro magazine last year. “Photoshop helped,” she said, knowing you don’t really believe her. As for exercise, she said, “I thought about doing it once.”
She even smokes, a lot, but not in front of Americans. When asked about the three oversize ashtrays on the chrome and glass-topped table that serves as her desk, she replied: “You don’t see any ashtrays in my office! They are all art objects!”
She wears sensible lingerie from Etam and doesn’t use concealer to hide the circles under her deep-set eyes. One of her uniforms — a navy crew-neck sweater, rolled-up jeans and brown loafers — makes her look elegant-casual; most anyone else would look like the L. L. Bean catalog.
Ms. de la Fressange and Mr. Lagerfeld had a falling out decades ago but have since reconciled. After giving up modeling, Ms. de la Fressange became a fashion and accessories designer. Since 2003 she has been a “brand identity consultant” for Roger Vivier, the French shoe designer, installed in an office crammed with decades of her sentimental history in the Vivier boutique on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
She has just returned from Los Angeles, where she signed a contract to be one of the new faces for L’Oréal.
“I told them that France was an old country, and I guess they had to choose an old model,” she said: “They told me, ‘Oh, no, you aren’t the oldest. We had Jane Fonda.’ Facial bags are the new style!”
She graces a recent advertisement for Galeries Lafayette. Credit Alice Dison for The New York Times
It is that blend of self-deprecation and irreverence, delivered in one-liners with deep, throaty laughter and a dramatic toss of the head, that both men and women find enticing.
“It’s the fantasy of the entire world of women, even French women, to be the perfect Parisienne,” said Bertrand de Saint-Vincent, the society columnist for Le Figaro and author of “Tout Paris,” a volume of essays on the Parisian glitterati, their style, their parties, their foibles. Asked who comes closest, Mr. Saint-Vincent does not hesitate. “Inès!” he said.
Despite her relaxed, flexible style, Ms. de la Fressange is a disciplined businesswoman who knows how to sell her brand: herself.
A look from across the New York Times at the forces that shape the dress codes we share, with Vanessa Friedman as your personal shopper.
You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.
“She’s very clever because she knows the key to being beautiful is self-confidence,” said Sophie-Caroline de Margerie, a writer who captures the essence of Parisian style in “American Lady,” a new biography of Susan Mary Alsop, the American doyenne of French style. “In the end there’s no rule. It doesn’t matter what you wear, as long as it suits you, and as long as you feel pretty.”
Ms. de la Fressange is so strong a brand that the Galeries Lafayette department store is featuring this perfect Parisienne in a tie-in, with posters and advertisements of her in rolled-up jeans, black lace-up shoes, white socks and a beret, sitting behind an accordion. As for Ms. de la Fressange’s 239-page guidebook, it is printed with a leatherlike cover in shiny red with gold lettering. Ms. de la Fressange did the illustrations; her older daughter, Nine, who is 17, did the modeling. Its six-point guide to Parisian style includes a ban on coordinated outfits, feeling uncomfortable and looking rich.
Ms. de la Fressange also offers 10 lessons to master the “offbeat look à la Parisienne.” Among them: wearing jeans with gem-encrusted sandals, not sneakers; a pencil skirt with ballet flats, not heels; an evening dress with a straw handbag, not a gold clutch; a chiffon print dress with battered biker boots, not brand-new ballet flats; a sequined sweater with men’s trousers, not a skirt; a tuxedo jacket with sneakers, not femme fatale stilettos.
The perfect Parisienne never uses soap on her face or wears pink on her lips or goes out without makeup, even on weekends. She never buys long-stemmed flowers (too difficult to find a suitable vase), but likes to eat (“Rest assured, I do know a few size 4s.”). She washes her hair every morning. Asked if she feels like the perfect Parisienne, she replied, “Perfection is a nightmare. A great French wine would be nothing without the taste of the oak barrel or a touch of dust.”
Ms. de la Fressange’s life has not always been perfect. It turned tragic in 2006, when her husband, the Italian businessman Luigi d’Orso, died of a heart attack. She refers to the current love of her life, Denis Olivennes, a media executive, as her “fiancé,” even though they are not engaged. “ ‘Boyfriend’ sounds so childish, ‘partner’ sounds like a business. I guess I could call him, ‘the man I often see in the bedroom in the evening.’ ”
Then after all the lessons, and when you least expect it, she throws a curve. “Beware of good taste,” she commands in her book. “Who knew that black and navy were made for each other?” she writes. “No one — until Yves Saint Laurent gave us permission to boldly go where no one had gone before. You love orange dresses with yellow shoes? Go for it!”
Her book continues: “Fashion is constantly evolving, and that’s what makes it so interesting. The day will come when Parisians decree that mini-shorts with leopard-skin bomber jackets and studded ballet flats are the best things since sliced bread.”
But what true Parisienne eats sliced bread?
Après le succès de La Parisienne, Ines de la Fressange et Sophie Gachet décortiquent l’allure des Parisiens et révèlent leurs secrets de style.
Quelles sont les meilleures astuces de mode à Paris? Comment nouer sa cravate? Dans quel resto manger un bon burger? Où dénicher un parfum original ou des chaussures chic?
Toutes les réponses sont dans ce guide très illustré.
↧
Bristol 405 / What Was the Phantom Thread Car? / VIDEO:BRISTOL CARS EVOLUTION | From 1946 - 2018
What Was the Phantom Thread Car?
Written by Jack Stewart in Classic Cars, Entertainment, Luxury Vehicles, Sedans, Sporty/Performance Cars, TV/Movie Car, What was...
Instead of a Rolls Royce or Bentley, Phantom Thread producers put wealthy and successful lead character Reynolds Woodcock in a Bristol 405 sedan.
The recently released period-piece drama Phantom Thread is a noteworthy film for many reasons. For starters, it was written and directed by celebrated auteur Paul Thomas Anderson, it’s been nominated for six Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Actor in a Leading Role), and it stars Oscar-winning thespian Daniel Day-Lewis in what Day-Lewis himself says is his last acting performance. For car enthusiasts, however, the film’s Bristol 405 four-door saloon is the real star.
More TV and movie cars
The Day-Lewis character, Reynolds Woodcock, is a successful fashion designer in England in the Fifties who drives his Bristol aggressively. This is excellent vehicular casting, since the 405 was one of the best handling, most aerodynamic cars of its day—it was built to be driven fast.
The Bristol 405 was technically a product of the aviation industry. The Bristol Aeroplane Company built the Blenheim light bomber and the Beaufighter fighter/torpedo bomber (among others) during World War II. With the end of hostilities, Bristol diversified into auto production and bought the rights to the prewar BMW 328 engine and 326 chassis—the products of another firm with roots in aviation. The 328 engine was a 2.0-liter six with unusual “cross-pushrod” valvegear—a complex system that gave some of the advantages of a dual-overhead-cam layout, including hemispherical combustion chambers.
Bristol tapped into its aircraft roots with aviation-quality materials and construction, as well as a body design honed in a wind tunnel for excellent aerodynamics. An aluminum body kept weight down to a reasonable level. The 405 soon gained a reputation as a “businessman’s express,” with its steady handling, a top speed above 100 mph, understated styling, and a plush wood and leather interior.
The 405 saloon was built from 1955 through 1958, and was Bristol’s only 4-door sedan. Most Bristols were coupes, with the occasional convertible thrown in (the 405 itself was also available as a four-seater drophead coupe). Since Bristols were hand built, they cost several times the price of a contemporary Jaguar. Understandably, production was low—only about 300 405 saloons were built. Still, Bristol had a small but loyal clientele that allowed the company to produce cars until 2011. By the Sixties, Bristol’s small six couldn’t generate enough performance to keep up with rival sports cars, so the company bought Chrysler V8s. In 2004, Bristol introduced the Fighter, a gullwing supercar with a Dodge Viper V10 engine.
The Cars of “Metropolis”
Bristol went into bankruptcy in 2011, but was bought by a firm that plans to resume production with an all-new model called the Bullet. The preproduction Bullet harks back to Bristols of the Fifties with retro styling and a BMW engine—in this case a BMW 4.8-liter V8. The Bullet has yet to enter production, but it’s not hard to picture a future iteration of Reynolds Woodcock blasting through the English countryside in a fast Bristol.
Bristol 405
Bristol 405.JPG
Bristol 405 four-door saloon
Overview
Manufacturer Bristol Aeroplane Co. (now Bristol Cars)
Production 1953–1958
52 Bristol 404 units
308 Bristol 405 units
Body and chassis
Class Luxury car
Body style Two-door coupé (404)
Four-door saloon (405)
Two-door drophead coupé (405)
Layout FR layout
Powertrain
Engine 1,971 cc ohv I6
2,216 cc ohv I6[1]
Chronology
Predecessor Bristol 403
Successor Bristol 406
"In this latest product from Bristol Cars Ltd, I am in the happy position of having very little with which to find fault"
Bill Boddy in Motor Sport, February 1956
"One starts to throw this car into corners after a very few miles of motoring. The high geared steering responds to a single quick turn of the two spoke wheel, and the 405 goes round, as uncompromisingly upright as a Calvinist pastor ..."
Mike Brown in The Autocar, May 1955
The Bristol 404 and Bristol 405 are British luxury cars which were manufactured by the Bristol Aeroplane Company. The 404 was manufactured from 1953 to 1958, and the 405 from 1955 to 1958. The models were successors to the Bristol 403. The 404 was a two-seat coupé and the 405 was available as a four-seat, four-door saloon and as a four-seat, two-door drophead coupé.
Unlike previous or later Bristol models, there is considerable confusion in nomenclature when it comes to the Bristol 404 and 405. The 404 was a very short-wheelbase (8 feet (2,438 mm) as against 9 feet 6 inches (2,896 mm)) version of the 405, but was introduced in 1953, whereas the 405 was not introduced until 1955 and continued until 1958.
The 405 itself was seen in two versions. The more common (265 of 308 built) is a four-door saloon built on the standard chassis of the previous Bristols, whilst the 405 drophead coupé or 405D (43 built) had a coupé body by Abbotts of Farnham. The body used aluminium panels over a steel and ash frame, mounted on a substantial horse-shoe shaped chassis.[2] Most cars built had a highly tuned (through advanced valve timing) version of the 2 litre six-cylinder engine called the 100C which developed 125 bhp (93 kW) as against the 105 bhp (78 kW) of the standard 100B 405 engine. Even the 105 bhp engine was fitted with Solex triple downdraft carburettors.[2] With UK fuel supplies no longer restricted to the low-octane wartime "pool petrol", all engines for the 404 and 405 came with higher compression ratios than predecessor Bristols — 8.5:1 as against 7.5:1. Rack and pinion steering was fitted and the car's handling won accolades from press reports when the car was introduced (and subsequently).
Compared to the 403, the 404 and 405 had an improved gearbox with much shorter gear lever which improved what was already by the standards of the day a very slick gearchange. The 405, though not the 404, had overdrive as standard apart from the earliest models, and front disc brakes became an option apart from the earliest models, and were fitted to almost all 405 drophead coupés. A few late 405s were fitted with the torquier 2.2 litre engine introduced in the later 406.
Externally, a notable feature of the 404 and 405 was the abandonment of the BMW-style radiator grille for one much more like an aero-engine. The 405, although the only four-door car ever built by Bristol, had styling that the company was later to refine for many years on their later Chrysler V8-engined cars during the 1960s. It was also the model that introduced the Bristol feature of sizable lockers in the front wings accessed externally by gullwing doors. The locker on the nearside held the spare wheel and jack, whilst that on the offside housed the battery and fuse panel.
↧
The Life and Times of Victoria, née Lockwood, ex Lady Spencer and ex wife of Jonathan Aitken ...
Earl Spencer's ex-wife at the centre of a love feud between her estranged husband and soldier lover
By Richard Kay and Ian Evans
UPDATED: 07:39 BST, 16 April 2009
Earl Spencer's ex-wife is embroiled in an astonishing love spat between two other men in her life.
Victoria Aitken, whose maiden name is Lockwood, was married to Princess Diana's brother for eight years.
The former model has sat on the sidelines as her estranged second husband Jonathan Aitken - no relation to the once-jailed former Tory Minister - has allegedly fought over her with her new lover James Clinch, in her adopted home city of Cape Town.
Mrs Aitken 43, parted from her second husband in the autumn after - he claims - she became involved with Mr Clinch, a former British soldier who lives in South Africa.
According to documents lodged at the High Court of South Africa in Cape Town, Mr Aitken, a South African, has not taken the break-up well. Mr Clinch accuses Mr Aitken of threatening to kill him.
He has applied for a restraining order against Mr Aitken preventing him from assaulting him, coming near his children his office and home, in Kenilworth suburb.
The former lieutenant in the 1st Battalion, The Queen's Regiment, alleges Mr Aitken threatened to have him 'shot in the head' - which Mr Aitken strenuously denies.
In return, Mr Aitken has launched a £75,000 (1m Rand) claim for damages against Mr Clinch for breaking up his marriage.
Legal documents said some of the money would compensate him for the 'loss of affection, comfort, society and services of the said Victoria'.
Mr Aitken, who was forced out of the family's Constantia home, still lives in the wealthy suburb. He said in court papers: 'I detest Clinch as a human being. I have no intention of assaulting Clinch or bringing harm to him.'
Married: Victoria and Jonathan Aitken in 2006. Mr Aitken denies threatening to kill his now estranged wife's new lover James Clinch
Mr Clinch alleges Mr Aitken has admitted he was to blame for the break-up
and that he was 'a bad husband and father'. Mr Aitken denies the claims.
To date, there has been no police involvement in the claims and counter-claims.
Mrs Aitken divorced Lord Spencer in 1997. They have four children. She married Mr Aitken in 2005. They have a son. But she has started divorce proceedings.
Mr Clinch, 41, split with his wife Samantha three years ago. But Mr Aitken has befriended her, calling on her support against his love rival.
In court papers Mr Clinch says: 'Mrs Aitken and I are in love with each other.'
A friend of Mrs Aitken said: 'Her relationship with Mr Clinch did not begin until after Jonathan had moved out of the marital home and divorce proceedings had begun.
'There was no extra-marital affair between them because her marriage was effectively over.'
Catherine Victoria Lockwood is the daughter of John Lockwood and Jean née Holt. On 16 September 1989, she married Charles Spencer, then Viscount Althorp, at the Church of St Mary, Great Brington. During her first marriage she was styled as Victoria, Viscountess Althorp, and later Victoria Spencer, Countess Spencer. Prince Harry was a pageboy at their wedding.
Children:
Lady Kitty Eleanor Spencer (born 28 December 1990)
Lady Eliza Victoria Spencer (born 10 July 1992)
Lady Katya Amelia Spencer (born 10 July 1992)
Louis Frederick John Spencer, Viscount Althorp (born 14 March 1994); heir-apparent to the earldom.
She suffered from eating disorders and drug and alcohol abuse during her first marriage. It was alleged that the earl had an extra-marital affair with a journalist early in the marriage. The couple moved with their four children to South Africa in 1995 to avoid the media. After their divorce on 3 December 1997, Lord Spencer moved back to the United Kingdom, and subsequently remarried twice.
By NEIL SEARS
Last updated at 08:51 14 March 2008
She has battled with drink, drugs and eating disorders - and seen her marriage to Princess Diana's brother end in acrimonious divorce.
But at the age of 43, Victoria Spencer has never looked better.
She is pictured here with her teenage daughter Lady Kitty at their home in Cape Town.
And she looks more like an older sister than a mother of five who has had more than her share of turmoil.
Victoria married Earl Spencer in 1989, with Prince Harry as a pageboy. Kitty was born the next year, followed by twins Eliza and Amelia in 1992, and Louis in 1994.
It was only after Louis's arrival that she confronted her addictions to heroin and alcohol, and her anorexia and bulimia - having a heart tattooed on her arm to symbolise her rebirth.
But the couple's marriage collapsed after their move to South Africa and when Kitty was seven they divorced acrimoniously.
Earl Spencer has since remarried and divorced, gaining two more children in the process.
Victoria, meanwhile, has been married for three years to Jonathan Aitken - unrelated to the disgraced former Conservative cabinet minister - and has a five-year-old son, Samuel, by him.
She says that her late sister-in-law was a great support during her marital problems.
"I suppose Diana and I had quite a bit in common with our eating disorders and broken marriages, and she was compassionate."
Victoria adds that discovering six months after Kitty's birth that Earl Spencer had conducted a post-marital affair with journalist Sally Ann Lasson was "a hard and painful betrayal".
"It turned me overnight from a deeply contented, first-time mother to a hurt, scared and devastated woman."
Daughter Kitty, 17, tells Hello! magazine how her parents informed her of their divorce.
"They told me that they didn't love one another any more, but that they still loved me.
"The positives of the situation were highlighted, such as two Christmases, two birthdays and two bedrooms!"
Lady Kitty expects to return to Britain this year and live with her father at his Althorp estate in Northamptonshire before starting university in 2009.
She jokes that her background is so troubled it should feature on daytime TV.
"Sometimes I feel like my family should be on the Jerry Springer Show.
"From the outside, the structure looks so dysfunctional. However, every single member of my family is part of my happiness."
Kitty adds that the frequent criticism heaped on her father has done nothing to dent her love for him. She speaks to him daily.
"It's hurtful for any daughter to read negative things about her father, but he's someone who remains true to himself.
"I am definitely a daddy's girl. I'm more like him than my mother. We share the same sense of humour and have similar interests.
Poor little rich girls
Emily Hourican
July 3 2011 5:00 AM
Sun-kissed and glamorous, they nearly stole the show at the recent royal wedding. The Spencer girls -- Lady Kitty and her younger sisters, twins Lady Eliza and Amelia -- are sexy, wealthy and well connected.
Despite a dysfunctional background -- they are the elder children of the serially unfaithful Earl Spencer and his ex-wife, former heroin addict Victoria Lockwood -- the sophisticated trio are highly eligible, university-educated party girls. Emily Hourican reports on the next generation of Spencer women
For all the glories of the family name and estate, the most enduring image of Lady Diana and Earl Spencer's childhood is one of almost Gothic loneliness and neglect. Their mother Frances Shand Kydd left home when Charles was just three and Diana six, running off with the heir to a wallpaper fortune. After her own mother spoke out against Frances, the children were entrusted to their father's care by the courts. He employed a succession of nannies, some cold and even cruel, who banged the children's heads together when they misbehaved and withheld the love they craved. As a result, Charles and Diana clung to each other, seeking the consistency and companionship that was lacking from the large, empty houses they grew up in.
It was a childhood from which, arguably, Earl Spencer never quite recovered; that can be seen at the root of his own acrimonious divorces and failure to sustain loving relationships. And it is a childhood that maybe still echoes in the lives of his own children, of whom he has six by two wives. Because although undeniably a fond father, he has lived with none of his six children for very long past their infancy, and neither has he always considered their well-being during his difficult divorces.
The three daughters from his first marriage, Lady Kitty, Amelia and Eliza, all with their father's wide-spaced blue eyes and fair colouring, are the first to really capture public attention. They were the sensation of the recent royal wedding, an unexpected boon to photographers -- Diana's nieces, emerging, fully formed, from their previously secluded South African upbringing.
Sexy and sophisticated, with platinum tresses, perfect make-up and the pouting attitude of cover girls, they added dash and glamour to what was a surprisingly dowdy affair. In fact, their style was considerably more glossy beach-babe than aristocratic understatement, clear evidence of their comparatively relaxed Cape Town upbringing.
Twenty-year-old Lady Kitty, who has a distinct look of Sophie Dahl in her modelling hey-day, wore a nude-toned body-con dress by Victoria Beckham, and, in particular, seemed to be using the wedding as a kind of social announcement, a coming-out of sorts; although having been on the cover of Tatler two years ago, 19 years after her mother Victoria Lockwood, and previously voted Most Eligible Girl in Britain by the magazine, she is clearly no stranger to exposure. In fact, she has a sophisticated instinct for publicity, as well as a willingness to blurt out indiscretions to those beyond the family circle.
The three Spencer girls are friends of Prince Harry more than William's, and seem well matched to Harry's racier set; in fact, they have the same kind of high-maintenance blonde glamour and good-time ethos as Harry's on-off girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, who was brought up in Zimbabwe before moving to the UK.
However, behind the sun-kissed reflection of wealth (the family fortune is an estimated £100m) and privilege, theirs is a story that reads sometimes as bleakly as Charles and Diana's own, a tale of three poor little rich girls with a distinct exhibitionist streak that might just be the legacy of a legacy; the long shadow of Earl Spencer's miserable childhood stretching far across to the other side of the world.
In fact, Lady Kitty has joked that they belong in the world of daytime TV. "Sometimes I feel like my family should be on The Jerry Springer Show," she told Hello! Magazine in 2008, though also insisting: "From the outside, the structure looks so dysfunctional. However, every single member of my family is part of my happiness."
Charles Spencer and Victoria Lockwood, a model, were married in 1989, after knowing each other just a few months, with Prince Harry as a page boy. Kitty was born a year later, and within six months of her birth, Earl Spencer had begun an affair with a journalist. "It turned me overnight from a deeply contented, first-time mother to a hurt, scared and devastated woman," Victoria later said of the discovery that her husband was cheating with an old flame. However, she had twins Amelia and Eliza two years later, and the son and heir Louis -- whose birth was greeted with unreconstructed whoops of triumph by the Spencer family -- two years after that. But by the time Louis was born, the marriage was well into injury time, with Victoria suffering from serious addictions to heroin and alcohol, along with a pronounced eating disorder.
Victoria went for treatment and managed to kick her destructive habits, getting a tattoo of a heart on her right arm to symbolise her rebirth. However, she is far from complacent about her recovery, saying a few years ago: "There are no holidays from this illness. The price of freedom is constant vigilance. I attend recovery meetings every week and I will do so for the rest of my life."
It was then the family moved to South Africa, to try to patch things up and create a more solid domestic life, away from the camera lenses and snide headlines of the English media. Like most such moves, though, it failed in its objectives. After all, a physical relocation is far easier than any emotional rapprochement. The Earl continued to philander, and in 1997 the couple divorced in a highly public and acrimonious fashion. She accused him of sleeping with dozens of women, many while she was in rehab, while he quipped nastily when reminded of his duty to stick by his wife through thick and thin, that she was "thin, and certainly thick".
Kitty was seven at the time and the twins five; too young to realise that their parents were playing out a vicious battle of tit-for-tat in the media, or that the family name was the subject of much smug public jeering, but certainly old enough to understand that their world was crashing down around them. "They told me they didn't love one another any more, but they still loved me," said Kitty of that time. "The positives of the situation were highlighted, such as two Christmases, two birthdays and two bedrooms." It's an attitude that seems, more than anything, a brave attempt to look for the good in something plainly devastating.
For a time, Earl Spencer, who always said he would never entrust his children's care to nannies after his own miserable experiences, stayed in South Africa, dating Calvin Klein model Josie Borain. But once that ended, he returned to England, where he married Caroline Freud, ex-wife of Matthew Freud, and had two more children. Undoubtedly a better father than he was a husband, Spencer worked hard at maintaining contact -- he flew to South Africa every month or so and phoned regularly, while the children spent four holidays a year at the family home Althorp -- but he never again lived in the same country as them, and, despite the odd masterful intervention, his influence on their day-to-day lives was necessarily limited.
For a while, it looked as if the Spencer story would settle into a pleasant, perfectly traditional groove -- wrong match followed happily by right match. Charles seemed happy with Caroline, who was in many ways his soulmate, with similar interests and a supportive nature, and together they forged great plans for the modernising of Althorp and the establishment of a literary festival there.
They bought a house in Maida Vale -- from Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour -- and looked to be blending their families in a modern, relaxed, successful way, eased by plenty of money and genuine goodwill. Caroline's two boys by her marriage to Freud were just slightly younger than Louis, and interested in the same kinds of things, happy to kick a football around the stunning grounds at Althorp, while Spencer's girls, Kitty, Amelia and Eliza were seemingly delighted with their new baby half-brother.
Caroline described her step-children as "the most delightful you could ever hope to meet", and said they made her job easy. Had things continued in this vein, it would have been just another unremarkable story of initial hiccup then happy ever after. Instead, Spencer, who seems ever to scupper his own chances of stability, filed for divorce in 2006 when his sixth and youngest child was just four months old, and started an affair with Coleen Sullivan, a US journalist who came to interview him for a documentary on Princess Diana.
He and Caroline went through a divorce nearly as nasty and messy as his first, with most of the bitterness centred around the house in London, which Caroline badly wanted to retain. Initially, the Spencer girls are said to have sided with her, asking that she be allowed to stay there, but the passage of time greatly altered their allegiances, and by 2009 Lady Kitty was quoted as saying, very indiscreetly: "She's an awful woman, I'm glad he's divorcing her," to a journalist she met in the VIP enclosure at Wimbledon. It was Kitty who accompanied her father to the divorce hearings in London's High Court, an indication that he, as is so often the case with divorced men, has somehow elevated her to the status of companion, giving her the role a wife would normally fill. And, as is often the case for girls who have difficult, overbearing fathers, Kitty seems to identify strongly with Earl Spencer "It's hurtful for any daughter to read negative things about her father, but he's someone who remains true to himself," she has said. "I am definitely a daddy's girl. I'm more like him than my mother. We share the same sense of humour and have similar interests."
Meanwhile, apart from visits to England and Althorp, the girls and Louis were brought up by Victoria in Cape Town. She, too, married again, to Jonathan Aitken, a South African businessman who she met in rehab, and they had a son. Her other children liked Aitken, who was charming and charismatic, but after a couple of years he lapsed back into addiction and, in 2009, Victoria demanded a divorce, saying his conduct was "irreconcilable with the continuation of a normal marital relationship". She then began a romance with a former British Army lieutenant James Clinch, much to the chagrin of Aitken, and a nasty, convoluted domestic row broke out. Clinch filed a restraining order against Aitken, who he claims tried to shoot him, while Aitken, who denied the allegations, counter-claimed, suing Clinch for £250,000 for breaking up his marriage.
Meanwhile, Charles himself remarried recently for a third time, to Canadian philanthropist and, of course, former model Karen Gordon.
And what of the girls and Louis in all of this? Earl Spencer stepped in, the lordly deus ex machina, and removed them from the scene of the storm, installing them in a luxurious mansion, supervised only by au pairs and domestic staff.
They were also given the responsibility of managing their own money. "My father is strict about the money he gives us," Kitty said in an interview. "It's all worked out so we can buy petrol, pay for our car insurance, books, accommodation and that sort of thing. I've also got a set amount of spending money, and if I go over, then that's it." Kitty was 19 at the time, studying politics and psychology at Cape Town University, while the twins, 17, and Louis, 15, were still at school. Eliza at the time was also recovering from a terrible personal shock; her first serious boyfriend Christopher Elliot, a talented body-surfer, was killed in a car accident just a few days before her 16th birthday.
And yes, like any young people with great personal freedom and large incomes, the girls threw themselves into partying and are regulars on the Cape Town nightclub scene. Their Facebook pages and those of their friends carry provocative pictures of the girls dancing, preening, striking poses that are sometimes flirtatious, sometimes seriously raunchy, showing two fingers to the camera, occasionally dressed like extras from a Madonna video in tight bodices and super-short skirts.
Growing up in South Africa has allowed them far more freedom than would have been the case in Britain, where simply being Diana's nieces would have guaranteed them an oppressive degree of media attention, and it is highly unlikely such photos would exist in so accessible a forum had the girls been raised in the more stifling atmosphere of the English aristocracy. There is a wild streak to these three that is perfectly in keeping with the family name and, indeed, with their mother's difficult history, but the publicising of it is still relatively unusual for their class.
Amelia recently got into trouble with the law after an alleged fracas outside a fast-food restaurant. She was accused of common assault along with a male friend after claims that she "swore at, smacked and kicked" a man on crutches. But just in time for the royal wedding, she was cleared of all charges.
And the partying, though exuberant, is also relatively innocent; after all, the girls have their mother as an example of what not to do. Victoria, who has been clean for many years now, has done her work well. "I would never touch drugs -- we saw what she used to be like," Kitty told Tatler some years ago. "But she's cool, she's not over-protective. She doesn't drill into us 'don't touch drugs'. She's just brought us up so that we don't want to, rather than we can't."
And, despite all the partying, the twins did well enough in their final exams to get into university -- Eliza to Varsity College and Amelia the University of Cape Town. Kitty, meanwhile, has graduated and is turning her attention to designing her own range of casual wear.
"I'm sick of being compared to other people and I just want to achieve stuff in my own right, for my self-worth and self-respect," she said recently. She has been talking about a move to the UK for years, to be close to her father and exploit the many opportunities open to her since appearing as Tatler's Most Eligible Girl in Britain in 2007. Following the bombshell of her recent royal wedding appearance, and given the media appetite for all things upper class, now would seem to be a very good time. But whether Kitty can turn the media fascination into commercial success, or is destined to play out the same kind of role -- aristocrat in public meltdown, basically -- as her father and aunt, remains to be seen.
Sunday Indo Living
↧
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality by Jonathan Aitken . Remembering Jonathan Aitken
Jonathan Aitken: 'I lost it all - except my £33,000 MP's pension'
Fame & Fortune: The disgraced former Conservative MP on divorce, prison, bankruptcy - and how he can still afford £15,240 for his Isa each year
Life's lessons: 'I accepted that life had changed and got on with it,' says Jonathan Aiken of being broke Photo: Geoffrey Swaine/REX Shutterstock
By Donna Ferguson8:00AM BST 14 Jun 2015
Jonathan Aitken, 72, is a former Conservative MP and Cabinet minister, who served seven months in prison for perjury in 1999 after he sued The Guardian for libel. He lives in Kensington with his second wife, Elizabeth, who is also in her seventies, and has four children.
How did your childhood influence your work ethic and attitude towards money?
I spent a lot of my childhood in hospital as a tuberculosis patient. When I was about four, I fell ill with TB and was then immobilised on an iron lung for three-and-a-half years, looked after by nuns. It made me very competitive because a lot of the children on the TB ward died. I was very keen not to die – so I worked hard at the breathing exercises and I enjoyed my schoolwork. I certainly had no interest in money.
Your father was the Conservative MP Sir William Aitken, a nephew of Lord Beaverbrook. Was your family very well off?
For a long time, we weren’t particularly. I grew up in the era of food rationing, so no one seemed to be. I remember eggs were rationed and minding a bit that I only got two eggs a week.
As a family, we were quite frugal and careful. Going to the cinema or the theatre was a big treat.
We did become more prosperous when I was in my teens. My father somehow or other made money and bought a very nice moated house called Playford [in Suffolk]. When you live in an Elizabethan moated manor house, you realise that your father’s done all right.
• The best of our money stories sent once a week - find out more
Did you get any pocket money?
Yes, something like sixpence a week. Those were the days when you could still buy a packet of crisps for a farthing. I was always a bit cautious with my pocket money – I’ve always been a saver.
Assistant tennis and funerals reporter for the East Anglian Daily Times. It was a school holiday job – I was 17. I was paid £4 a day. That was riches in those days.
Has there been a time in your life when you didn’t know how you were going to pay the bills?
After I went bankrupt, there were two very rough years when I was out of prison and on a bankrupt’s allowance. I had £200 or £250 a week to live on. I had to make economies like travelling by bus and buying food in the supermarket after midnight, because prices halved due to sell-by dates.
I wasn’t desperate, my mother used to help out occasionally. I eventually settled my debts under an IVA [an individual voluntary arrangement].
What’s the worst thing about being broke?
Adjusting. I had a dramatic reduction in my standard of living. I’d been rather rich. Through the Eighties and Nineties, I was the chairman of a small merchant bank which I had founded. I had banking deals in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. My car was a Jaguar. One minute I’d been having lunch at Claridge’s and I had a big house in the heart of Westminster and a country house in Sandwich Bay in Kent and then, crash, I had a big fall.
• How to buy and sell shares on Telegraph Investor
Was it painful?
It was, in many ways – I went through defeat, divorce, disgrace, bankruptcy and jail. That’s a royal flush of crises by anyone’s standards. It was painful financially, certainly, but not as painful as getting divorced or going to jail. I’d put being broke third or fourth.
The worst thing was not being able to provide for my children. I minded not being the provider of the family, but I managed.
How did you cope?
I went back to Oxford as a student, to study theology. Most of my fellow students were training to be priests and were almost poorer than I was.
It was hard, but although I was broke, it wasn’t a breaking experience – I accepted that life had changed and got on with it. I learnt how to manage quite quickly. I exchanged Mammon for God.
How much have you had to pay out in legal fees since 1997?
I think it was £4m. That, and an expensive divorce, was what brought me to bankruptcy.
What’s your main source of income nowadays?
Pensions. In a good year, I used to put £20,000 away into my pension pot, so I have a good occupational pension from the investment bank, as well as a parliamentary pension of £33,000 a year [he was an MP for 23 years].
I still earn money as a business consultant and an author – I’ve always found it possible to earn money with my pen. I write quite a bit for newspapers, and I had a biography out on Margaret Thatcher which sold well last year.
More Fame & Fortune:
• Irvine Welsh: 'I was a heroin addict – then I found buy-to-let'
• Kay Burley: 'How I knew Poundland shares would soar'
• Andrew Morton: 'I made £1m from Diana's story, initially'
What is the most lucrative work you have ever done?
I must have made £250,000 from my book on Nixon [published in 1993].
After I came out of prison, I was paid $15,000 to make a speech in the United States.
Worst money mistake you’ve ever made?
Suing The Guardian for libel. It cost me my reputation, my home, my parliamentary career and my lifestyle.
Are you a spender or a saver?
I’m definitely a saver these days. I save to provide for whatever’s left to me of life’s journey, and to still contribute something towards my children. But I’m never going to be rich again – nor am I interested in that.
Do you support any charities?
Yes. My main focus is charitable work, which includes charitable giving but much more is the work of being a trustee. I’m a trustee or some other office of eight charities, and almost all of them are in the criminal justice or Christian field. For example, Nacro, the crime reduction charity, and Caring for Ex-offenders.
I donate more than 50pc of my time and a good 15pc of my money to them.
Do you have property?
No. I lost it all, and I wouldn’t want a property now. I’m happy to rent. I’ve really lost interest in possessions. I haven’t bought anything of any significant value for nearly 20 years.
If you were Chancellor, what economic policies would you change?
I think it’s hard to handle the economy more wisely than George Osborne. I’m a tremendous Osborne fan. I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury so I understand quite a bit about curbing government expenditure. I think the Treasury under George Osborne has been a success story. There are small things I’d like to see: more encouragement for small businesses and the inheritance tax threshold raised to £1m.
What’s the most expensive thing you’ve ever bought (apart from property)?
For a time I collected political first editions and got them signed by their authors. I think the collection was worth £50,000, but I lost them all in my bankruptcy.
What’s the one luxury or indulgence you couldn’t live without?
I still take the trouble to buy handmade suits. They’re expensive – about £2,000. I buy one every two years.
Notorious: Jonathan Aitken and his daughter Alexandra arriving at court during his libel trial against The Guardian
How do you prefer to pay for things – cash, or debt or credit card?
Cheque. I pay for a lot of things by cheque still. I use the credit card a bit because I just have to, and I don’t pay by cheque in the supermarket. I’m sure that would get people angry.
But I’m old-fashioned enough to think there’s something rather solid about a transaction like paying your tailor by cheque, and I do my charitable giving by cheque. I realise I’m a bit of a dying breed.
How do you tip?
Typically on the high side – about 15pc. I don’t go to restaurants that much, but the ones I go to, I know them quite well, so I’m reasonably generous to them.
Do you invest in stocks and shares?
I do a little bit. I put the maximum amount [£15,240] into my annual Isa.
- Get a weekly round-up of our best investment ideas
What do you invest in?
I happen to think that India is a very up-and-coming market, so I bought some shares in an Indian investment trust for this year’s Isa, but I don’t play the stock market the way I used to.
What are your financial priorities for the next five or 10 years?
Keeping my head above water. Remaining modestly solvent and saving so that I can leave something to my children. I don’t think I’ll ever retire. I enjoy working and I’m busier than I’ve almost ever been, with my consulting, my writing, my speaking engagements and my charity work.
Money comes very low on my list of priorities. I don’t really want to have money, and I don’t really think of it that much. Life is very full and I’m very happy.
- Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken’s biography of the former Prime Minister, is available to buy now
 |
Jonathan Aitken: A broken man Twenty years ago his star was in the ascendant. Jonathan Aitken mixed with beautiful women, made millions and was tipped to be a future Prime Minister. Today he is disgraced, divorced and facing a lengthy prison sentence. This is the story of the man who lied and lost by Kim Sengupta Wednesday 20 January 1999 00:02 GMT0 It was a pleasant evening of good food, fine wine and exquisite company. Jonathan Aitken, 30, successful, handsome and with all the right connections, was charting the future course of his life to a choice selection of his actor friends and chums in the media. Go into business and become fabulously rich, become an MP, then a minister and finally prime minister. There were dates for the scaling of each of these peaks. The climb was slower than he anticipated. But 22 years later, in 1994, he was in the Cabinet as chief secretary to the Treasury. He'd made a pile of money from lucrative business deals with Arabs. And he owned properties at home and abroad including a pounds 2m Westminster house, the former London home of Brendan Bracken, where he entertained the likes of Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger. The downfall that followed is almost Shakespearean in its dimensions: here stands a man fatally flawed by his own arrogance. The final act came with his disastrous High Court action against The Guardian and Granada TV, and the words that would later come back to haunt him: "the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play." Aitken had sued over a series of serious allegations made about his relationship with wealthy Arabs, including the report that a pounds 1,000 bill for his stay at the Ritz Hotel in Paris in l993 had been paid by a Saudi contact. Giving evidence, Aitken lied under oath about the payment, inventing roles in the saga for his wife and young daughter. He was found out and humiliatingly forced to withdraw his action. The man whose head had been full of great plans at the age of 30 suddenly discovered that he'd lost his credibility as a public figure. The dreams of greatness are now just cold ashes. But yesterday the man once tipped as a future Tory leader managed to make a mark of sorts in history - as the first former cabinet minister to plead guilty to perjury and perverting the course of justice and, with that, likely to face a lengthy prison sentence. Aitken is, he says, now broke. The house in Westminster will have to be sold. His marriage, he says, is over. Politically he is a man who is isolated, apart from a small circle of maverick right-wing friends. |
Aitken jailed for 18 months
4.45pm update
By Guardian staff and agencies
Tue 8 Jun 1999 16.44 BST First published on Tue 8 Jun 1999 16.44 BST
Former cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken was jailed at the Old Bailey today for 18 months after admitting perjury and perverting the course of justice.
He received 18 months for both counts, to run concurrently.
Mr Justice Scott Baker told Aitken: "For nearly four years you wove a web of deceit in which you entangled yourself and from which there was no way out unless you were prepared to come clean and tell the truth. Unfortunately you were not."
The prosecution
Case history
Former Conservative Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken forced himself into a position "where perjury was almost inevitable", the Old Bailey was told today.
He allowed aides of the Saudi royal family to pay his £1,000 hotel bill during a stay at the Paris Ritz in September 1993.
But he was a Government minister in charge of Defence Procurement at the time, and banned from taking hospitality which might place him under an obligation, Mr David Waters QC, prosecuting, told the court.
When the Guardian newspaper got a copy of the bill and challenged Mr Aitken, he told them his wife Lolicia had paid his part of it using money he had given her.
Mr Aitken continued with the same lies when he tried to sue the Guardian and Granada television for libel in the High Court in 1997, said Mr Waters, adding: "In fact, he forced himself into a position were perjury was almost inevitable - inevitable unless he was to admit telling lies years before."
Mr Aitken, 56, who until the last election was Tory MP for Thanet, Kent, for 23 years, and who was in the Cabinet as First Secretary to the Treasury in 1994-5, has admitted committing perjury during the High Court libel action.
He has also admitted attempting to pervert the course of justice by drafting a witness statement for his daughter Victoria, 18, in which she backed up his version of events.
The 16-day libel hearing collapsed after evidence was produced that Mr Aitken's wife and daughter were in Switzerland during the weekend of September 17-19, 1993, when he had said they were in Paris.
Mr Waters said Mr Aitken was arrested in March 1998 and charged in May. Two other charges, alleging perverting the course of justice and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, had been ordered to lie on file not proceeded with after Mr Aitken denied them at an earlier hearing.
Mr Waters said: "It is fair to say between 1992-95, there is evidence to show that he was a hard-working and conscientious minister." Mr Aitken resigned as a Minister in 1995 to begin the civil proceedings.
Aitken arrives in court
Mr Aitken, wearing a smart blue suit and tie, arrived for today's hearing looking grave. He was met by photographers as he entered the court with a group of friends.
His mother Lady Aitken, actress sister Maria Aitken, and his son William, 16, had arrived moments earlier. With them were his twin daughters Victoria and Alexandra, both 18, and their half-sister Petrina Khashoggi, also 18.
His former boss, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who was Defence Secretary at the time Mr Aitken was Defence Procurement Minister between 1992-4, also sat in court, waiting to give evidence.
Mr Aitken spoke only once, replying when asked to confirm that his name was Jonathan William Patrick Aitken: "It is."
Aitken's stay at the Ritz
Mr Aitken had "formed a very close relationship" with Said Ayas, a principal aide to Prince Mohammed, the son of the king of Saudi Arabia, shortly after becoming an MP in 1974. He had also become acquainted with the prince. Mr Ayas and his wife became godparents to the Mr Aitken twins.
Mr Aitken had stayed in a room at the Ritz which had been marked for payment from the account of the "Ayas party" who were staying in two other rooms at the hotel, said Mr Waters.
After The Guardian got a copy of the bill in 1994, it challenged Mr Aitken who replied that his wife had paid his portion of the account in cash.
The cash payment had been made by a woman employed by the Saudis, Mr Waters told the court.
Mr Aitken received information from Ritz president Frank Klein about his bill which showed how he was prepared to "pervert and utilise the information to his own advantage", Mr Waters said.
Mr Klein wrote to Mr Aitken telling him that a cashier recalled "a brunette lady of European aspect, speaking French, paid the cash sum of 4,257 francs in favour of the account of Mr Ayas".
Mr Waters said part of the letter was helpful to Mr Aitken if he was using it dishonestly. Other parts were unhelpful.
The fact that the amount represented only about half of the sum owed and that it was "in favour" or Mr Ayas's account presented a problem to his story.
The letter to the Cabinet Secretary
In a letter to Cabinet Secretary Sir Robin Butler, he cut out the references to the sum and Mr Ayas.
Mr Aitken told him it was his wife who paid the bill, when it was in fact a member of the Saudi entourage.
Sir Robin later met the then Prime Minister, John Major, who said Mr Aitken could dampen the speculation by producing the Ritz bill.
Sir Robin then called Mr Aitken for another meeting and it was then that he produced the bill.
Mr Aitken was forced to change his story and said that Abdul Rahman, another hotel guest and the nephew of Said Ayas, had paid part of his bill by mistake.
Mr Aitken told Sir Robin that he had "squared the circle" and paid Rahman back the other part of his bill.
He described it as an "unfortunate confusion" but the Guardian went ahead with a further article about Mr Aitken's weekend at the Ritz, which prompted the libel writ, according to Mr Waters.
Aitken's family alibi
According to his original false account, Mr Aitken insisted that he had not had business meetings during the weekend at the Ritz.
During cross-examination at the libel trial, he confirmed that his statement contained the "truth and the whole truth", Mr Waters said.
He claimed that his daughter and wife had spent some time in Paris over the weekend but left before he arrived. "The reality being, they had not been there at all," Mr Waters told the court.
The libel trial collapsed when documents obtained from British Airways showed that his family did not go to Paris but flew straight to Switzerland.
Mr Aitken had claimed his wife and daughter had travelled to Aiglon College in Switzerland, where Victoria was due to start school, via Paris, and that he had been delayed on official business and missed them.
He initially claimed he had stayed in Paris spending a quiet weekend, working on his biography of Richard Nixon and meeting family friends.
He then claimed his wife returned to the Ritz on Sunday to meet him after dropping off his daughter at the school, Mr Waters said.
But in fact his wife and daughter were never even in France.
Mr Aitken had claimed that he drafted a false document for his teenage daughter Victoria to back up his story only when inconsistencies emerged in his story.
The judge asked how old Victoria was at the time the statement was drafted because it was a "very grave" feature of the case that Mr Aitken involved his daughter in the crime.
After the collapse of the trial and his subsequent arrest, Mr Aitken made a statement to police admitting that he had lied, Mr Waters said.
In it, he said: "I deeply regret the lies I told and decisions I took to mislead a large number of people. "This is a burden I will have to bear for the rest of my life."
The defence
Evidence from Sir Malcolm Rifkind
Sir John Nutting QC, defending, called Sir Malcolm Rifkind to speak on Mr Aitken's behalf.
Sir Malcolm confirmed he had entered Parliament as an MP at the same time as Mr Aitken after the 1974 general election.
He said they had not had a close personal relationship but he had visited Mr Aitken's Westminster home on several occasions for meetings of the "Conservative Philosophy Group".
"I thought of him as a very able, intelligent and articulate MP, someone who had very considerable experience and who was always thought of as potential ministerial calibre," he said.
Mr Aitken was in a unique position later as a junior defence minister because of his good contacts with influential Middle East Royal families with whom Britain wanted to do business, Sir Malcolm said.
Sir Malcolm, who volunteered to speak on Mr Aitken's behalf, described him as the most able junior minister he had come across during his years in government.
He was "able and intelligent" but, most of all, his personal contacts in the Middle East turned out to be crucial when it came to protecting Britain's contracts abroad.
He had access to top levels of government in Saudi Arabia and other countries which were usually exclusive to the Prime Minister or senior cabinet members.
Sir Malcolm cited two separate occasions when Mr Aitken used his influence abroad to help persuade Kuwait and Saudi Arabia not to cancel billion-pound contracts with Britain and award them to other countries.
On the second occasion he had set up a meeting between King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and the then premier John Major to stop a £4billion contract going to the United States.
The outcome safeguard many defence jobs in this country, said Sir Malcolm.
He had no reason to believe that Mr Aitken had ever benefited personally from his contacts and the amount of work he did while working for the government left him little time to do anything else. "I felt he was carrying out work in very responsible way," said Sir Malcolm.
"I had no hesitation in telling the Prime Minister that he had been a very impressive minister and the public interest had been extremely well served."
He had contacted Aitken and offered to speak in his defence, he said.
The benefits of a friendship with Prince Mohammed
Sir John Nutting QC said Aitken's close friendship with Prince Mohammed had provided a "valuable link" between the governments of Britain and Saudi Arabia, and it was against this background that he wanted the judge to view the events at the Ritz hotel.
The two men had met when Aitken was still a merchant banker and the director of a company looking after the prince's interests in Britain, Sir John said.
"The defendant and Prince Mohammed had formed, after their initial meeting, an enduring friendship which lasted up to the time during which both of them had positions in Government in their countries," Sir John went on.
Outlining six points he said he intended to cover, he said they included the extent of Aitken's contrition, and the consequences of the trial on his health, and on his family.
"If anyone supposes I am here to follow the slimy trail of every red herring which has been drawn across this case, they will be disappointed," he told the court.
Sir John said Aitken had planned to meet Prince Mohammed at the Paris Ritz on Friday 17 for dinner.
But Aitken was delayed because of an official visit for the reburial of General Wladyslaw Sikorski in Poland, and the appointment was cancelled.
The prince had to return to Geneva, and arrangements were made to hold the meeting there on Sunday, which was where and when it eventually took place, Sir John told the Old Bailey.
The bill at the Ritz
Aitken's bill at the Ritz was paid because of the "hospitality not untypical of Arabs", Sir John said. The bill was only a small sum to the Arabs and to Aitken at that time.
Sir John said it was this conversation about the bill which was the main cause of Aitken's downfall, but details of the conversation had "vanished long ago into the ether".
He added: "When later he realised the trap in which he had caused himself to fall, he began to tell a series of lies and half-truths which nearly six years later have brought him before your Lordship and into the dock of the Old Bailey."
Defence talks
He said when Aitken and the prince finally met in Geneva, they discussed Saudi Arabian security issues, especially the activities of Russian submarines as part of Iran's new arsenal of weapons.
"To meet this threat the Royal Navy had offered to lease to Saudi Arabia four Upholder submarines that were surplus to the Royal Navy's requirements," Sir John said.
"It's perhaps important to add in view of allegations made subsequently about the weekend that those Upholder discussions involved government to government negotiations or navy to navy leasing arrangements which had nothing to do with third party contractors, or businessmen or middle men or commission men or anyone else."
Sir John said Aitken had provided "generous and reciprocal" hospitality over a period of time, and it was a moot point whether the bill-paying incident had breached the guidance for ministers.
Allegations of sleaze
But the questioning from the newspaper had come at the height of "Tory sleaze" allegations and Aitken felt under pressure to keep his reputation clean.
The source of the tip-off to the Guardian had been Mohamed Al Fayed, the owner of the Ritz, who had initially alleged that £1 million in cash was shared out at the meeting with Mark Thatcher and others.
Sir John said: "The allegation as to the meeting was simply untrue. The defendant has never been paid in cash or in kind for any arms deal."
It was to Aitken's "everlasting regret" that he had lied about who paid the bill - he had done so after speaking to Ayas who was under pressure from his employers to avoid publicity.
He was in a dilemma when later more allegations were made against him - he felt he had to clear his name with the libel action. Three of the allegations had been dropped during the course of that trial.
Sir John said Aitken felt he had no choice but to launch libel action against the Guardian despite the fact that it could expose him to admitting that he had lied about the Ritz bill.
He had been accused of serious offences, including corruption and arranging prostitutes for Arab friends, which he felt compelled to defend.
"He was faced with a very genuine dilemma," said the QC. "To say nothing and allow very serious allegations, the falsity of which he believed he could prove, to go unchallenged or to fight them and risk that in the Ritz bill he would have to tell a lie."
Questioned by the judge
The judge questioned why Aitken had not come clean about the bill at the time and then gone on to challenge the other points.
That, said Sir John, was not realistically an option because he had already said too much about the weekend at the Ritz to go back on his word and expect to be taken seriously.
Untrue allegations
Several of the allegations which had been made against him were later dropped, notably the claim that he had arranged prostitutes for Arab contacts.
It was also clearly untrue, said Sir John, that Aitken had tried to conceal his contacts in the Middle East and indeed the fact was well known by many of his parliamentary colleagues.
His former secretary, Valerie Scott, who had spoken to the Guardian and contributed to his downfall, had written to Aitken in January this year.
Her letter said: "I am sorry to say that the consequence of my interviews and witness statement was that they did contain many inaccuracies. Some of those were misrepresentations, some were mis-recollections, others were mistakes and others were caused by my words being taken out of context and being used in a way that now makes me feel uncomfortable."
She said her words had been "manipulated" into being unfair to Aitken in the articles and programme.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality by Jonathan Aitken – review
Aitken's anecdotes make for lively reading in a bracingly honest account of the Tory heroine's faults
Simon Hoggart
Wed 16 Oct 2013 16.30 BST First published on Wed 16 Oct 2013 16.30 BST
Slipping her moorings … Margaret Thatcher, with Denis, leaves 10 Downing Street for the last time as prime minister in 1990. Photograph: Lennox Ken/mirrorpix
Years ago I asked a section editor on the paper for which I then worked whether he was going to employ a particular journalist. "No, I won't," he replied, "because he is an incompetent, lazy, stupid, arrogant plagiariser, who can't even write. And I speak as a friend of his."
Which is rather the way Jonathan Aitken speaks of his friend Margaret Thatcher. Here is just a selection of the words he uses to describe her – either deploying his own judgment or that of people he quotes: phoney, bullying, obnoxious, hypocritical, deplorable, unpleasant, alienating, opportunistic, confrontational, monomaniacal, disloyal, dysfunctional, snarky, pedestrian, hesitant, insufferably rude, foolish, arrogant, grudge-bearing and an anachronistic bigot.
Jim Prior found her "vindictive and nasty"; others spoke of "her tendency to fly off the handle too early, her capacity to get the wrong end of the stick and her reluctance to apologise". She was "the least collegiate politician I have ever met … this is because she has no friends". Others accuse her of "governessy hatred", of being a "stubborn Salome" who "liked to hog the limelight". Tim Bell, her favourite adman, called her "the old bat", and Bernard Ingham, her loyal press secretary, said she was "the most tactless woman I have ever met in my life".
And Aitken speaks as a friend of hers. They got off to a bad start. He ended a three-year affair with Carol Thatcher, and her mother said bitterly: "He made Carol cry." At a dinner party, shortly after she became Tory leader, he was asked about her Middle East policies, and said: "She knows so little … she probably thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus." This reached Private Eye, and her factotum Airey Neave demanded Aitken make an apology in person, in the division lobby: "She'll be wearing a green dress."
But he is, overall, a huge admirer. He believes she was sound and brave on most foreign affairs: the Falklands, the ending of the cold war, the liberation of Kuwait, and the euro (though he suggests that she rewrote history when declaring she was always against our membership of the ERM).
Her judgment was less reliable in domestic affairs. Aitken points out that she could not distinguish between the striking miners and Arthur Scargill, regarding them all as members of the enemy within. That contempt for the working-class people of the north and the Midlands brought a cost that the Conservative party is still paying. The poll tax: surely the product of a disordered mind? She began to treat the people closest to her with evident contempt, most of all Geoffrey Howe who received a bollocking in cabinet that no schoolteacher would be allowed to administer today. When the "stalking donkey", Anthony Meyer, stood against her in 1989, she had a good campaign team in place, but the whips warned her that on top of the handful of votes Meyer got, there were all the abstentions, spoiled ballots and dozens of MPs who had to be arm-twisted into supporting her. The situation was therefore far more dangerous than it appeared. She brushed their fears aside as the hobgoblins of lesser minds, and a year later insouciantly cleared off to Paris for a ceremonial summit, which she could easily have skipped. But she loved mingling with world leaders, and telling them where they were wrong. Meanwhile, she left behind as her campaign manager Peter Morrison, a lazy alcoholic, who believed all the fake pledges of support and spent much of the campaign asleep, drunk or both.
By the time of her defenestration, she had become the world's most powerful bag lady, of the type who harangue you at bus stops, and who are best ignored, except that you can't ignore the prime minister. You could call her, as a female King Lear, "a very foolish fond old woman", except there was little fond about her – apart from some engaging nonsenses. Just before the Falklands war ended in her greatest victory – which she won by ignoring or assailing almost all her own cabinet and a very substantial chunk of the Tory party in parliament, plus the president of the United States and his most senior officials – she could be found cooking the food at a children's party for the families of Downing Street staff. Admirable in some ways; barking in others.
By the end, however, she had slipped her moorings. Even one of her most devoted supporters, the right-wing MP Nick Budgen declared that she was "off her rocker". She retired (Aitken says her notorious "I shall be a very good backseat driver" remark was directed at George Bush rather than John Major) but devoted much of her life, like Ted Heath, to trashing her successor behind his back. We all need a hobby, and that was hers. (There's another good account of this in John Sergeant's book Maggie.)
The Fall of Thatcher could be staged, not least because hers was a very modern hubris. Having started out lacking in real confidence – her first cabinet was stuffed with grandees who opposed all that she stood for – she was brought down in the end by believing her own publicity. She adopted with wild enthusiasm the "iron lady" sobriquet coined by the USSR army newspaper, forgetting that everything in those Soviet rags was lies and propaganda. I recall a grandiloquent speech, after the fall, to American travel agents in Glasgow, who must have been puzzled to learn she had ended the cold war herself, with Ronald Reagan as Robin to her Batman. She could give solipsism a bad name.
The pleasure of Aitken's readable, even beguiling, book is in the anecdotes. He suspects that her breathtakingly arrogant attempt to stop Bernard Weatherill from becoming Speaker – something she had absolutely no right to do – helped bring her down. He arranged that Howe's killer speech in 1990 would be heard when the chamber was full, and in complete silence, giving it maximum effect. She realised then that the end was near, but couldn't grasp even then her own contribution to the coming catastrophe, and chose to blame the cabinet instead – "treachery with a smile on its face".
Then there was the time she went to holiday on Islay: the host family's noisy offspring meant she was unable to sleep, so she went for a walk in a hooded coat. Mistaken by a security officer for a sinister intruder, she was pinned to the wet moorland by a slavering police dog. For some anti-Thatcherites, that story alone will be worth the price of the book.
One day we might reach a reasonable assessment of Thatcher, somewhere between the adulation and the loathing: she achieved a reasonable amount economically at home (while pitching us into the tooth-and-claw capitalism we suffer today), had some influence on the world stage, and in the last few years in power lost the plot. This book, by an alarmingly candid friend, will go a long way towards helping find that balance.
↧
↧
SUNDAY IMAGES / Just Five ...
↧
A disastrous Victorian episode. The Eglinton Tournament/ 1839. The “Return to Camelot” in pouring rain …
"The Eglinton Tournament of 1839 was a re-enactment of a medieval joust and revel held in Scotland on Friday 30 August. It was funded and organized by Archibald Montgomerie, 13th Earl of Eglinton, and took place at Eglinton Castle, near Kilwinning in Scotland. The Queen of Beauty was Georgiana Seymour, Duchess of Somerset. Many distinguished visitors took part, including the future Napoleon III of France.
The Tournament was a deliberate act of Romanticism, and drew 100,000 spectators. It is primarily known now for the ridicule poured on it by the Whigs. Problems were caused by rainstorms. At the time views were mixed: "Whatever opinion may be formed of the success of the Tournament, as an imitation of ancient manners and customs, we heard only one feeling of admiration expressed at the gorgeousness of the whole scene, considered only as a pageant. Even on Wednesday, when the procession was seen to the greatest possible disadvantage, the dullest eye glistened with delight as the lengthy and stately train swept into the marshalled lists". Participants had undergone regular training.
The preparations, and the many works of art commissioned for or inspired by the Eglinton Tournament, had an effect on public feeling and the course of 19th-century Gothic revivalism. Its ambition carried over to events such as the lavish Tournament of Brussels in 1905, and presaged the historical reenactments of the present. Features of the tournament were actually inspired by Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe: it was attempting "to be a living re-enactment of the literary romances". In Eglinton’s own words “I am aware of the manifold deficiencies in its exhibition — more perhaps than those who were not so deeply interested in it; I am aware that it was a very humble imitation of the scenes which my imagination had portrayed, but I have, at least, done something towards the revival of chivalry”.
While others made a profit, Lord Eglinton had to absorb losses. The Earl's granddaughter, Viva Montgomerie recalled in her memoirs that "he had spent most of the wealth of the estate".
The intended day was 29 August but steady rain caused a postponement.
The opening parade comprised forty knights, each with his own entourage who were to ride to the castle, picked up a lady, officer or knight, and returned to the lists, the pictureseque estate drive being lined with thousands of spectators.
Elaborate rehearsals and training in St John’s Wood had not prepared participants for the crowded and already sodden conditions on the day and the opening parade took three hours longer than planned to marshal.
Although the day had dawned clear and fine, as the knights and their entourages struggled to organise the parade the sky began to darken. Just at the moment when the parade was finally arranged — just as Lady Seymour, the Queen of Beauty, was heralded by trumpets — there was a flash of lightning, a great crash of thunder, and the black clouds of Ayrshire let loose with a sudden and violent rainstorm.
Lord Eglinton immediately ordered the ladies into carriages, but the knights and their entourages, soon soaked in the squall and covered in mud, marched into the lists down a parade route lined by the umbrella bearing audience.
The tiltyard was designed by Samuel Luke Pratt, with stands to hold 2,000. Pratt's grandstand roof, was a work of art in splendid scarlet, but, after days of rain and now in a new rainstorm of freek severity, it started to leak badly.
Unsurprisingly, the unmanageably large crowds did not return on the second day.
"In autumn of 1838 one-hundred and fifty prospective knights met in the showroom of Samuel Pratt, a dealer in medieval armor at No. 47 Bond Street, London. Many backed out when they realised the astronomical costs and difficulties, but "about forty" were determined to try regardless. Pratt was to be in charge of all the arrangements, the pavilions and armour, banners, decor and costumes. He also would supply the stands, marquees and great tents for the feast and ball. Although all the armour supplied by Pratt was supposed to have been genuinely medieval, it is unclear how many of the suits actually were; the only armour that was kept track of, that of the 3rd Marquess of Waterford, on display in 1963 at Windsor Castle, is a pastiche. Some of the armour used was on loan from the Tower of London and, not realising at that time that changes in diet and health since the late Middle Ages had increased average stature, it was noted with interest that mostly the suits were too small and had to be let out before they could be worn. The family sold the Earl of Eglinton's own armour during the 1925 sale of the castle contents."
Art expert buys Knights' shields
Shields created for a 19th Century Scottish jousting tournament which was contested by the future Napoleon III of France have been bought for the nation.
The trophies were commissioned by the 13th Earl of Eglinton for his three-day medieval re-enactment in 1839.
Eight of the original 40 shields, which were found in the attic of Skelmorlie Castle, Ayrshire, were sold at auction to art expert James Knox for £8,000.
He said he hoped to make them the centrepiece of a new exhibition.
About 100,000 people are thought to have attended the Eglinton tournament, which cost £40,000 and was intended as a display of medieval pageantry.
'Blockbuster exhibition'
About 150 prospective knights were originally lined up, although only 14 took part.
The re-enactment of the jousting competition became a wash-out after heavy rain flooded the nearby Lugton Water, meaning that spectators were forced to walk miles through the mud as their carriages became stuck in the quagmire.
Mr Knox, who is also campaigning to raise funds to buy 20 rare watercolours that recorded the event, said: "I am delighted to have been able to buy the Eglinton shields for Scotland.
"I hope to use the shields as a centrepiece to a blockbuster exhibition about the tournament in Edinburgh and Ayrshire."
The shields, originally valued at between £3,000 and £5,000, were sold by the owner of Skelmorlie Castle in Ayrshire, where they were found during an attic clear-out.
"The dress rehearsals were held in London at a garden behind the Eyre Arms, St John's Wood, a tavern close to Regent's Park, the last one on Saturday 13 July 1839. Nineteen knights participated. The audience was invitation only; many of "the very elite of the most elite" (said the "Court Journal") were invited to watch, and 2,690 attended. The rehearsal went perfectly. The weather was sunny, the banners and armour and tents impressive, the jousting successful. Even critics conceded that the tournament was likely to be a fine show.
Mass-production of memorabilia copies of artworks commissions for the tournament demonstrated that it was not only upper-class Britain that took notice. Tories eyed antique armour and dreamed of courtly love, and Queen Victoria twice noted in her diary that she had discussed the tournament with Lord Melbourne and although her view was that the event would be a foolish amusement, the choice of Lady Seymour as Queen of Beauty was to her liking. With only two months to live that tragic figure, Lady Flora Hastings, wrote in 1839 to her mother on the subject of the upcoming Eglinton Tournament, expressing her concern that one of the knights might be killed in the violent sport.
On the other hand the Whigs, the social reformers, and the Utilitarians expressed outrage at such a fantasy at a time when the economy was in a shambles, when poverty was rampant and many workers were starving. Emotions ran high, with satirical cartoons, insults and passions aroused on both sides, the Whigs calling the Tories wastrels and the Tories calling the Whigs heartless. Whatever Eglinton's original intent, the tournament was symbolic of romantic defiance in the face of the spirit of revolution that was frightenting so much of old guard Europe during the second quarter of the 19th century."
There were some problems with the planning and location of the tournament. Eglinton Castle, eight miles from the west coast of Scotland in Ayrshire, was imitation Gothic, an 18th-century Georgian mansion with battlements and turrets added. The near-coastal mountainous terrain was prone to frequent, torrential rains.
The Tournament was held on a meadow or holm at a loop in the Lugton Water. The ground chosen for the tournament was low, almost marshy, with grassy slopes rising on all sides. The Knights on horseback and their retinue reached the tilt yard ('C' on the map) via an enclosed ride ('G' on the map), whilst the guests and visitors made their way to the stands via the route marked 'F' on the map illustrated. Both groups crossed over the three arched Gothic Eglinton Tournament Bridge. An 1837 map of Eglinton Castle, Grounds and Tilt yard shows that the tilt yard was already in extistence at this early date, but it is not recorded what its fate was after the tournament was over.
Lord Eglinton announced that the public would be welcome; he requested medieval fancy dress, if possible, and tickets were free but would have to be applied for. Expecting a healthy turnout — the Eglinton race meetings generally got local audiences of up to 1500 — he made arrangements for grandstands for the guests and comfortable seating for the expected crowd of about 4000. He notified the press (The Times, the Morning Post, the Court Gazette, and "the other important or popular journals") of the offer of free tickets to all.
The response returned from across the social spectrum: readers of the Bath Figaro, the Cornish Guardian, the Sheffield Iris, the Wisbech Star in the East and many other newspapers — readers "from every county in the British Isles"— applied to Lord Eglinton for tickets. Through the month of August letters came by the hundreds into Castle Eglinton requesting tickets for parties of twenty, fifty, a hundred people.
A scrapbook of nearly a thousand of these letters still survives, filled with pleas, anecdotes, promises of medieval dress, and assertions of Tory sympathies. Lord Eglinton accepted the challenge, issued the requested tickets and planned for a vastly larger effort.
"Although the day had dawned clear and fine, as the knights and their entourages struggled to organise the parade the sky began to darken. Just at the moment when the parade was finally arranged — just as Lady Seymour, the Queen of Beauty, was heralded by trumpets — there was a flash of lightning, a great crash of thunder, and the black clouds of Ayrshire let loose with a sudden and violent rainstorm."
↧
THE RETURN TO CAMELOT: CHIVALRY AND THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN by Mark Girouard.
Magnanimity
Richard Altick
The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman by Mark Girouard
Yale, 312 pp, £12.50, September 1981, ISBN 0 300 02739 7
It was the muddiest fiasco since the flooding Avon put paid, just seventy years earlier, to Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee extravaganza at Stratford. In 1839 the 26-year-old Earl of Eglinton held at his Scottish estate a magnificent chivalric entertainment, complete with chain-mailed jousters on caparisoned horses, a court of noble women attending the Queen of Beauty, and all the pageantry and bloodless combat proper to Medieval entertainment. The cream of society was invited and spent a huge sum outfitting itself. On the opening day the road to Eglinton was clogged for thirty miles as 100,000 commoners (it was said) gathered to watch Scott’s romances brought to life. But within a few hours a raging storm sent them slogging homeward through morasses of mud, and the blue-blooded cast and audience, their Medieval hair-dos now sodden and lank, retreated into marquees that leaked water at every crevice. The next day, the torrent continuing, the knights tilted with mops and broomsticks in the waterlogged ballroom. The press had a field day of its own. In that year of severe depression, with the clouds of Chartism steadily darkening, the nation could do with a spot of comic relief, especially in the form of the aristocracy making expensive fools of themselves.
This was not the first event in the history of revived medievalism to symbolise, however inadvertently, the vulnerability of the chivalric ideal in modern society, nor was it to be the last. Already, in 1825, the tall tower of William Beckford’s new baronial hall. Font-hill Abbey, had collapsed without warning. A few years after the Eglinton debacle, one of the day’s leading artists, William Dyce, was commissioned to paint allegorical frescoes on Arthurian themes in the Queen’s Robing Room in the new Houses of Parliament. A decade later, a coterie of young, untried artists including Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Morris set out to adorn the walls of the Oxford Union with similar subjects. But neither Dyce nor the high-spirited youths were qualified to paint in fresco, and the Oxford pictures decayed and disappeared even more rapidly than the ones at Westminster, which required extensive repairs as early as 1868.
Despite these calamities, the Victorians were bent on adopting the Arthurian ideal as the supreme guide to conduct. Courtesy, gentleness, honour, physical valour, mercifulness, generosity, sexual purity, devoted service to women, consideration for the oppressed – mortal man could scarcely accommodate more virtues than these. Although Burke, in his famous lament over Marie Antoinette, had declared, ‘The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of England is extinguished forever,’ at the beginning of the 19th century the Romantic delight in things Medieval had nurtured a regenerated admiration of chivalry. Outside literature (Scott’s romances set in the Middle Ages, such as Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward, were to kindle the imaginations of countless boys and men throughout the century), the chivalric vogue manifested itself first in such fancy-dress forms as the Eglinton tournament and Queen Victoria’s ‘bal costumé’ of 1842, but by mid-century it was the spirit of chivalry, not its mere trappings, that predominated. Against a background of lavishly renovated castles, such as William Burges produced at Cardiff for Lord Bute, and country-house halls stuffed with arms and armour, the fashionable ‘collectibles’ of the day, the ethic of the mounted knight with sword and shield turned up in innumerable social contexts. From Disraeli’s Young Englanders it passed to Kingsley’s Muscular Christians, bringing workingmen’s colleges and settlement houses to the underprivileged, and thence to the self-consciously virtuous, studiously unintellectual, pattern-cut products of the public schools. Alfred Tennyson’s Uncle Charles, convinced that his family was descended from the Medieval d’Eyncourts, devoted his patrimony to converting a modest Lincolnshire house into the imposing Bayons Manor, ‘the most convincing re-creation yet put up in England of the manor house of a late-medieval gentleman’, and Bayons Manor, in turn, into a castle equipped with fortifications, drawbridge and artificially-ruined keep – an enterprise vividly described not long ago in Robert Martin’s biography of the poet. Decades later, Charles’s nephew, the Poet Laureate, could pay no higher tribute to the late Prince Consort than by dedicating the first several Idylls of the King to his memory as ‘Scarce other than my king’s ideal knight’. Between them, the two Tennysons illustrated two major aspects of the chivalric obsession. Fancy expanded into pretentiousness which then lapsed into absurdity, and noble sentiments carried within them the seeds of cant.
The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.
THE RETURN TO CAMELOT: CHIVALRY AND THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN
By
KIRKUS REVIEW
A sweeping, reverberating exploration of the critical part played by the concept of chivalry in forming the English gentleman's character from the period of the French Revolution through the heyday of imperial expansion and the rude awakening of World War I. Though Girouard (Life in the English Country House) tends to see history as the sum of particles of experience (visible particles largely), his wide-angle vision leads him to marshal an extraordinary diversity of evidence, including: the highly stylized sex lives of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, the curious revival of Gothic castle architecture, the commercial success of inspirational novels (Tom Brown's Schooldays, et al.), and the radical conservatism of Thomas Carlyle and the Christian Socialists. But only toward the close--after keeping the reader suspended, if absorbed--does Girouard produce his central thesis: the complimentary relationship between the image of the gentleman and the exigencies of 19th-century ruling-class life. ""The changing image of the gentleman had obvious attractions to those born into the ruling class,"" he writes. ""It meant that, at a time when inherited privilege was increasingly under attack, they were presented with a powerful weapon with which to overcome criticism and keep their position."" That ""changing image"" served--we recognize throughout--to disguise a multitude of often questionable social and political attitudes: rabid anti-intellectualism, hostility toward the middle class, fanatic devotion to physical fitness, and a political vision dominated by both nostalgia for the feudal past and unquestioned faith in the imperial future. Girouard's inquiry also accommodates many a fanciful diversion--as when he suggests that the high-chivalric Englinton Tournament, a jousting event which drew upwards of 100,000 spectators and participants, may have originated in seven-year-old Charles Lamb's fascination with pet guinea pigs. . . which he transformed by the hundreds ""into knights, counts and dukes"" (garbed and housed to suit). The book really hits its stride, however, in the final chapters, particularly the three devoted to public school athletics, the Boy Scouts, and the development of British imperial policy. Telling points are made here too by the panoply of illustrations, a Girouard trademark. (See the early Rugby footballers in velvet caps and patterned jerseys--forerunner of the modern football jersey?--or the book cover featuring St. George with the Boy Scout fleur-de-lis on his shield.) With apposite literary excerpts as well, a contribution to the history of ideas that will especially appeal to those who fancy the tangible.
Pub Date: Oct. 1st, 1981 Publisher: Yale Univ. Press
Michael K. Smith
4.0 out of 5 stars
Girouard investigates a little-known aspect of Victorian England
February 26, 2014
Around about the time of its wars against the French Revolution and then Napoleon, England witnessed an odd and interesting phenomenon that lasted through the entire 19th century and right up to the end of the Great War: The revival of the medieval code of chivalry, with King Arthur, knights in armor, the notion of courtly love, and all. The ideals of personal bravery and honour, service to the nation, and self-sacrifice reappeared in modified form and helped shape British culture for several generations, not only in art and literature but even in politics.
Sir Walter Scott's novels had a lot to do with reviving the myth of chivalry (and it was indeed mostly a myth), and so, too, did the paintings of Benjamin West, featuring the Black Prince and other knightly heroes. And Tennyson helped further the new myth in the next generation. There was a new rise of interest in the Middle Ages, but George IV and then the Victorians interpreted that period to suit themselves. Those with the money to build new country homes often opted for what they fancied were medieval-style castles. Prince Albert's tomb features a reclining sculpture on top depicting the Prince in full armor with his favorite dog at his feet, also in medieval funerary style. Even Baden-Powell promoted his new Boy Scouts in Arthurian chivalric terms.
The whole thing reached its climax with the deaths of Capt. Robert Scott and his companions in Antarctica early in 1912 (especially Capt. Oates, who "walked out to his death an English gentleman") and with the sinking of the TITANIC later that same year. Many of the English males aboard politely helped their wives and other women into the lifeboats and then stepped back, content to go down with the ship. At least, that was the myth. (Though it's true that Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star Line, slipped into a boat at the last moment, and so survived -- and was never able to hold up his head again.) And just to round out 1912, there was also a jousting tournament at Earl's Court, in which a dozen aristocrats donned armor and went at each other with lances. (Lord Ashby St. Legers beat out the Duke of Marlborough for the gold cup.)
As always, Girouard brings his narrative to life with color and wit, all based on careful research. If you have an interest in social history, or in 19th-century literature, this heavily illustrated volume will teach you a great deal you probably didn't know.
↧