Lucien Lelong, President of the Chambre Syndicale, who had argued so strongly with the Germans at the beginning of the war to keep French couture Paris-based, now felt the need to write to American Vogue defending the extravagance of the first fashion shows after the Liberation: ‘For four years we have fought to keep couture alive because it represents a Parisian industry of prime importance and because it was a means of avoiding unemployment for workers and consequent forced labour in Germany and, lastly, to preserve for la Haute Couture Parisienne the place it has always had in the eyes of the world.’
It was in this atmosphere that he and colleagues such as Robert Ricci, head of public relations for the Chambre Syndicale and son of the couturier Nina Ricci, dreamed up a brilliantly original scheme to create a Petit Théatre de la Mode, harking back to an eighteenth-century practice of presenting fashion to the world by means of dressed dolls. The plan was to dress up 170 scaled-down figures, one-third of human size, made of wire with porcelain heads, in clothes fashioned by at least fifty of the great Parisian couture houses, including Cristóbal Balenciaga, Jacques Fath, Jean Patou and Elsa Schiaparelli, all desperate to revive their pre-war fortunes. The dolls, wearing real jewellery designed to scale by Boucheron, Cartier and Van Cleef, and lingerie that could not be seen but which was delicately stitched on, were mounted on sets created by designers such as Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard. It was an entirely Paris-based initiative, an unashamed attempt to reassert quickly the dominance of French high fashion and to demonstrate the superiority of French creativity. And it was supported by the newly created French Ministry of Reconstruction partly because, while the country’s economy was in ruins, it provided employment for the hundreds of ancillary seamstresses and bead-makers, craftsmen and artisans involved in the textile industry, and partly because it was a way of bringing much needed dollars into the country to rebuild its shattered industrial base. For hours, days and weeks everyone worked, often without heat, with little electricity and meagre food supplies, to create the tiny shoes, handbags, belts, gloves and bags, all meticulously crafted – often, given the shortages of fabric, from scraps. Top hairdressers were brought in to create elegant wigs from a mixture of human hair and glass thread.
The show opened at the Louvre in Paris on 28 March 1945, and was enormously popular, attracting more than 100,000 visitors, as well as raising a million francs for French war relief. Plans were put into operation to tour the exhibition, which moved to London in early December, followed by Leeds, New York and San Francisco, as well as Copenhagen, Stockholm and Vienna the following year. For many British women, whose wartime clothes had been guided by comfort, restraint and deliberately sober severity, such a lavish display, often impractical and overtly sexy, was perplexing.