{"id":95654,"date":"2016-03-16T15:27:03","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T19:27:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=95654"},"modified":"2017-04-17T13:06:49","modified_gmt":"2017-04-17T17:06:49","slug":"fashion-regained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/16\/fashion-regained\/","title":{"rendered":"Fashion Regained"},"content":{"rendered":"

Looking for Proust\u2019s muse in Paris.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Comtesse \u00c9lisabeth Greffulhe.<\/p><\/div>\n

After making a careful study of contemporary fashion plates, Baudelaire came to the conclusion that one couldn\u2019t examine clothes apart from the individual wearing them. \u201cYou might as well admire the tattered rags hung up as slack and lifeless as the skin of St. Bartholomeu,\u201d he wrote in his essay \u201cIn Praise of Cosmetics.\u201d In order to \u201crecover the light and movement of life,\u201d clothes needed to be animated by a living body, and it was only on this living body that they were to be understood. One wonders what he would\u2019ve made of the nascent trend of the fashion exhibition, in which the fashions of yesteryear appear on mannequins, those motionless abstractions of the human figure.<\/p>\n

\u201cLa Mode retrouv\u00e9e<\/a>,\u201d now at the Mus\u00e9e de la Mode in Paris, and coming in September to New York, uses clothes as a sort of Pompeiian ash in order to sketch the person who once filled them out. In this case, it\u2019s the Comtesse \u00c9lisabeth Greffulhe (1860\u20131952), who was by reputation the most fashionable woman of her time. At her salon on the Rue d\u2019Astorg, an integral part of the political and artistic milieux, she arranged for what was thought to be the impossible Russian-Franco alliance, as well as the reception of Faur\u00e9, Wagner, Isadora Duncan, and the Ballets Russes in Paris. Historians of the era have argued that no patron did more for music than she. And this at a time when, no matter the fact that she was married into wealth and rank, she had neither rights nor property as her own, as was the case for all women under the civil code of the Third Republic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Greffulhe is perhaps best remembered for the strong impression she made on a young Marcel Proust while sitting in her box at the Op\u00e9ra, a string of \u201cmauve orchids [hanging] down the nape of her neck.\u201d Legend has it that her network served as the basis for the third tome of \u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu<\/em>, Le C\u00f4t\u00e9 de Guermantes<\/em> (1920\/1921). The fictional Duchesse Guermantes, queen of the Faubourg Saint-Germain elite, reigns over the vacuous linguistic rituals of an obsolete nobility. Appearance was everything; in the face of republican egalitarian law, fine points of language and deportment became high-stakes systems of class signification.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Greffulhe in 1896, wearing a dress from the House of Worth. Photo: Paul Nadar, Courtesy Galliera \/ Roger-Viollet.<\/p><\/div>\n

It was in this context that Greffulhe carefully staged her public appearances, disappearances, and absences. \u201cAlways look at a person telling yourself: I want them to take away a memory of unmatched prestige,\u201d she wrote in an unfinished philosophical treatise. When she did deign to show up, Greffulhe made sure to be the center of attention, even when she wasn\u2019t supposed to be. \u201cThis wedding will always be remembered as the apotheosis of a woman with a willpower,\u201d a society journalist wrote in 1904. \u201cMadame Greffulhe reached the top of the steps \u2026 and was able to remain there for about a quarter of an hour, in full view of everyone.\u201d The wedding in question was not Greffulhe\u2019s, but her daughter, Elaine\u2019s; the countess\u2019s \u201cByzantine\u201d dress from the House of Worth\u2014replete with lam\u00e9 taffeta, gold yarn, silk tulle, and sequin appliqu\u00e9\u2014was written up more in the press than the bridal gown. Willpower she had.<\/p>\n

Her husband, meanwhile, consulted all his relatives about her education, and her mother-in-law never ceased to repeat that \u201cwomen should stay on their pedestal\u201d and \u201cmust never dabble in politics, a disgusting world.\u201d Greffulhe was well aware of the constraints within which she had to operate. \u201cTake a girl, raise her with a taste for art and beautiful things, make her think that she must be modest, and then marry her,\u201d she wrote in 1880. \u201cDoes that then mean that her private life is that of her husband\u2019s, too?\u201d The vengeance with which Greffulhe curated her own image can be explained, in part, because it was the only form of capital over which she could execute actual authority. Her presence was always a performance, a self-realization in the heat of the onlookers\u2019 gaze that was as existential as it was, according to her journals, \u201cmeditated in preparation\u201d for every possible kind of social interaction.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult to imagine that, at the time, this was a form of wild daring. Mere visibility for a woman used to be a form of degradation; a common pun took it that la voir <\/em>(to look at her) was l\u2019avoir <\/em>(to have her), and while men of politics and letters could operate in and for the world at large, the term femme publique <\/em>was used as a euphemism for prostitutes. Fashion was a long way from being taken seriously. Only when Charles Frederick Worth came up with haute couture and Impressionist artists gave up historical tableaux in order to paint their mistresses did people begin to describe clothes in artistic terms. St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9 went on to direct eight issues of La Derni\u00e8re Mode <\/em>with the intention of studying \u201cfashion as an art.\u201d<\/p>\n

While she was warned that an original cut was \u201cabsolutely forbidden,\u201d Greffulhe, in creating her own style and then rendering it public, changed the means and modes of what clothes could be for a woman of her social standing. Intermediaries between intimate aspiration and public display, her gowns came to be the books she never wrote and the paintings she never painted\u2014or so the exhibition catalogue says. (She did, at one point, put a dress she had painted on display, as if it were indeed a giant canvas.) Just as Proust, vis \u00e0 vis his translations of Ruskin, came to believe that all reading and writing served as a sort of translation of the inner self to sentient consciousness, so Greffulhe\u2019s fashions served to communicate her person to the exterior world\u2014a testament to the fact that her private life was not her husband\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Greffulhe in a ball gown, ca. 1887. Photo: Otto. Courtesy Galliera \/ Roger-Viollet.<\/p><\/div>\n

In reading Laure Hillerin\u2019s recent biography of Greffulhe, La comtesse Greffulhe:\u00a0L\u2019ombre des Guermantes\u2014<\/em>winner of the 2015 Prix C\u00e9leste Albaret, because yes, there is a prize given out in France every year for an oeuvre proustienne<\/em>\u2014you\u2019d think the comtesse donned her dresses in service of the music industry. I don\u2019t buy it\u2014style, no matter what the medium, necessitates a pleasure taken in its realization\u2014but it\u2019s true that music was her self-proclaimed true love. She used what the composer d\u2019Indy described as her \u201cmagical power,\u201d as well as twelve personal secretaries, in order to bring some of the most important artistic figures of the era to Paris, a move which was essential for their legacies. At a time when xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiment ran high, she imported works from foreign composers such as Wagner, Mahler, Handel, and Richard Strauss, the concerts taking on much-needed diplomatic functions. The mechanism was the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 des grandes auditions musicales de France, an organization she founded in 1890. By reputation it had many members, but a lack of meeting notes in the archives suggests that in actuality it effectively had only one\u2014herself. Its primary asset was her social purchase, used as a sort of cultural insurance policy.<\/p>\n

Given all this, it\u2019s a shame that the exhibition had to focus so much on Proust and not on this formidable energy field of a woman. He is, of course, the selling point, and will be even more so when the exhibition moves to the Fashion Institute of Technology this fall with the title \u201cProust\u2019s Muse.\u201d About three quarters of the quotes on the walls come from his books and letters, as well as those of Robert de Montesquiou, another dandy contemporary. Greffulhe\u2019s personality is ultimately presented through the eyes of men. If anything, the exhibition reminded me of the ball Proust first imagines the Duchesse Guermantes throwing, the one where guests swirl around without bodies, haloed in the celebrated aura of their names. Proust, whose whole career was founded on the separation of the work of art from the life of the artist, is meanwhile having asthma attacks in his grave.<\/p>\n

When writing the histories of women, an absence of literature means that the realities of the body are often mistaken as synonymous with female experience and identity. In this case, though \u201cLa Mode retrouv\u00e9e\u201d does an admirable job of delimiting Greffulhe\u2019s figure\u2014the mannequins are handsome, with slender wooden hands\u2014her body, the way she wore and moved in her clothes, seems to be the crucial missing element needed to understand the effect she had. The exhibition differentiates itself by presenting someone\u2019s wardrobe, not a brand collection, but this makes it all the more apparent that, as Baudelaire originally argued, fashion is as difficult a thing as time to regain.<\/p>\n

\u201cLa Mode retrouv\u00e9e<\/a>\u201d will be on through March 20 at the Palais Galliera, 10 avenue Pierre Ier de Serbie, 75116 Paris. The exhibition opens at the Museum at FIT<\/a>\u00a0on September 23.<\/em><\/p>\n

Madison Mainwaring is a graduate student at the \u00c9cole des Hautes \u00c9tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where she studies the way women responded to French Romantic ballet in the early nineteenth century. She has contributed to<\/em> The Atlantic,<\/em> T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and<\/em> VICE Magazine, among others.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Looking for Proust\u2019s muse in Paris. After making a careful study of contemporary fashion plates, Baudelaire came to the conclusion that one couldn\u2019t examine clothes apart from the individual wearing them. \u201cYou might as well admire the tattered rags hung up as slack and lifeless as the skin of St. Bartholomeu,\u201d he wrote in his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":826,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7555],"tags":[21546,21548,21547,538,865,18212,21552,3346,21550,21553,575,21549,270,21551,10601],"class_list":["post-95654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-history","tag-comtesse-elisabeth-greffulhe","tag-dresses","tag-elisabeth-greffulhe","tag-fashion","tag-france","tag-gowns","tag-high-society","tag-isadora-duncan","tag-la-mode-retrouvee","tag-laure-hillerin","tag-marcel-proust","tag-musee-de-la-mode","tag-paris","tag-society","tag-stephane-mallarme"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLa Mode Retrouv\u00e9e: Looking for Proust\u2019s Muse in Paris<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Madison Mainwaring on Comtesse \u00c9lisabeth Greffulhe, an inspiration to Proust whose elaborate dresses are the subject of an exhibition in Paris.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/16\/fashion-regained\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fashion Regained by Madison Mainwaring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 16, 2016 \u2013 Looking for Proust\u2019s muse in Paris. 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