Paris was terrifying for many but, at the same time, social life flourished as usual for the upper crust, le gratin, a shrinking number of privileged individuals.* On the evening of 17 July, the day after the round-up, Josée de Chambrun was partying with her friend Arletty and her Luftwaffe officer Soehring, and the next day Bunny, her husband, won at the races at Maisons-Laffitte, while in the evening the French film actor Raimu was entertained for dinner by the Lavals. It took more than events at the Vél’ d’Hiv to keep Josée away from her favourite activities for long, whether this was socializing with the stars or buying hats from Balenciaga or dresses from Schiaparelli. The one required the other. But she was not alone. Records from Van Cleef & Arpels show that the Paris showroom continued selling its dazzling creations in 1942, and not just to Germans. The firm’s file cards of jewellery sales indicate that the purchaser was sometimes a named German officer, sometimes simply ‘Allemand Civil’ or ‘Officier Allemand’, but there were still many sales to French clients such as the Faucigny-Lucinge family, whose name appears regularly. Similarly, when a special couture ration card was negotiated with the Vichy government, enabling thirty couture houses to continue their creative work with certain complicated restrictions, it was French women as well as German who continued to buy. No fashion house was allowed to produce more than seventy-five outfits and each outfit had controls on the amount of fabric permitted. Yet Balenciaga saw sales rise by 400 per cent in 1941 and 1942 – although the house was briefly closed by the Germans in 1944 because it had exceeded its quota. To attend any fashion show during the Occupation one needed a special pass, but – of 20,000 such passes issued – only 200 were given to wives of German officers, many of whom were on the invitation lists of Otto and Suzanne Abetz. The rest went to French women.
But Parisiennes were creative, and many of them had their own dressmaker who would copy high fashion. The twenty-one-year-old Elisabeth Meynard was typical: even though it was summer, she enjoyed wearing a ‘smart suit of smooth brown velvet, which my favourite Jewish Polish dressmaker, moonlighting to bring in some extra cash, had made for me with material bought as upholstery fabric’. Jacques Fath, who started trading as a couturier only in 1939, was able to increase the number of his skilled staff from 176 in 1942 (many of them drawn from other houses that had been forced to close) to 193 in 1943 and 244 in 1944. His pretty wife, Geneviève, was a key asset as she was not only photographed in his creations on magazine covers, such as Pour Elle in March 1942, but, according to the influential historian of fashion Dominique Veillon, it was she who maintained the crucial business connections with the German purchasing office in Paris’s Rue Vernet, ensuring that Fath’s creations were reproduced and discussed in the French and German press. There were others in the fashion industry who maintained an equally opportunist, if not actively collaborationist, attitude by joining the Cercle Européen, an ideological centre for those who believed in Nazi ideas, among whom Marcel Rochas is the best-known. Rochas had been suspect ever since he and Maggy Rouff agreed to present a private show to German dignitaries in November 1940. But in 1942, as the elegant Odette Fabius noted, once Jews had been forced to wear the yellow star, ‘he no longer greeted even good customers and friends because they were Jewish[,] and crossed the road to avoid catching their eye when he chanced to meet them in the Avenue Montaigne’. Since her own apartment was on the Avenue Montaigne she was especially well placed to observe this.