But it was not only impoverished Parisiennes who reacted angrily to Dior’s New Look. Chanel, who had welcomed the success of the New Look ‘with barely suppressed contempt’, was motivated not by concern that Dior’s lavish designs failed to take account of ordinary women’s suffering so much as by jealousy and fury that her own earlier success in sweeping away the corsets women had been forced to wear was now being trumped. ‘I make fashions women can live in, breathe in, feel comfortable in, and look young in,’ she had declared to Ballard. Now she felt her fashion legacy slipping away. One wealthy Dior client commented that the dress she had just bought was ‘the most amazing dress she had ever seen’, adding, ‘I can’t walk, eat or even sit down.’
Chanel, Schiaparelli and Jeanne Lanvin, three enormously influential pre-war female designers, had, it seemed, all had their day. The post-war couture houses were almost exclusively male. During the war, both Dior and Pierre Balmain had learned their trade working for Lucien Lelong. But Balmain now decided to found his own maison de couture and in 1947 hired an English woman as his Directrice. Ginette Spanier was married to a French doctor, Paul-Emile Seidmann, and being Jewish had spent most of the war in hiding from the Nazis in occupied France.* They managed to avoid deportation by frequently moving about the country and often went without money or enough food. After the Liberation, Ginette found a job working as a translator for the American army, not least at the Nuremberg trials, while Paul-Emile worked with camp survivors in Paris. Both were decorated for their work. Ginette said later that her character had been forged in the war years. It was the war that had ‘confirmed in me all I find most important in life: friends and England and love of warmth and love of life itself. It taught me to fear anything dead and cruel and genteel and therefore lacking in humanity … the war taught me to mistrust possessions.’ And yet this woman who might have been killed at any instant, who darned threadbare clothes over and over again, never saw fashion as trivial. In Paris it wasn’t. As Directrice at Balmain, she was responsible for every human problem throughout the front and back offices, including parts of the company which the public could see and much that they could not, such as feuds between two vendeuses, each claiming commission when a dress was sold. This was a significant matter, since Balmain counted among his clients the Duchess of Windsor? and Marlene Dietrich, as well as many other actresses and royalty. Ginette took her job immensely seriously and became something of a legend.
With fashion spearheading the economic revival of France, the twenty-two-year-old Simone Bodin, daughter of a Normandy railway worker, was not unusual in seeking her fortune in Paris. After her father had abandoned the family, Simone and her sister were brought up during the war by their mother, a teacher. As soon as Paris had been liberated, Simone moved to the capital, finding whatever work she could either as a babysitter or as an architect’s assistant, but hoping to become a dress designer. A chance introduction to the couturier Jacques Costet led to an offer to model for him, as he admired her fresh-faced, country-girl looks and her slim figure. But when his business floundered, she went to work for Lucien Lelong, having turned down an offer from the less experienced Christian Dior. However, she was soon tempted away from Lelong to work for Jacques Fath, who had flourished during the war and was able to offer her a five-times salary increase.