Vionnet Did It Before Paco Rabanne: The Disc Dress

Madeleine Vionnet is a designer who never fails to surprise me. Here, from the Spring of 1929, is one of her dresses for young women:

Vionnet dress trimmed with discs, 1929 . Sketches from Paris, The Delineator, April 1929, page 40.

The title of the article is “Paris Keeps Evening Necks High and Hems Low for the Young Girl.”

The two dresses at top are by Vionnet; at bottom, left to right, are gowns by Worth, Lucien Lelong, and Lanvin. April 1929. The Delineator.

In the 1960s, Paco Rabanne became famous for his “Disc Dresses” — dresses made of plastic discs held together with metal rings. This one, dated 1965, is in the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum:

Paco Rabanne Disc Dress, 1965; Photograph from the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

Detail of disc dress construction, Paco Rabanne, 1965. Metropolitan Museum photo.

For a better view of the Paco Rabanne photographs, visit the Metropolitan Museum’s online collection. Click here. The 1960s disc dress was usually worn over a bodystocking. It was made for dancing. It wasn’t made for comfort — nor quiet.

It looks like Vionnet attached her large, overlapping discs to a chiffon underlayer:

Skirt of Vionnet disc dress, 1929.

“Madeleine Vionnet uses rose chiffon over white satin for a winsome model with skirt of overlapping discs and scarf.”

I’m not saying Rabanne even knew about this Vionnet design. I’m just saying that, when it comes to using big discs on evening wear, Vionnet got there first.

The wittiest, and best known,  later variation on the disc dress has to be the one costume designer Lizzy Gardiner wore while accepting her Academy Award for The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in 1995. It was made of hundreds of gold American Express Credit cards linked together in the style of the 1960s disc dresses.

I wonder if anyone has made a “disk dress” by wiring together old floppy disks.  Probably.

There is another Paco Rabanne disc dress (1967) in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, but the site may take a while to load. Click here.

 

Recycling, Paisley, and Shawls

A pink paisley printed dress, from Elegance, Fall 1965-66.

I was a sixties girl. Paisley patterns were worn by hippies and Vogue readers alike.

Indian textiles on the Beatles. Ringo, at right, is wearing a paisley print shirt. Public domain photo from http://www.brandeis.edu

In the 1960s, Western manufacturers adapted the pattern into double-knits, like this jacket. . .

A paisley knit suit jacket, Elegance magazine, Fall 1965-66.

. . . and created subtler prints based on Indian designs, like this light pink wool.

I owned several paisley dresses, with patterns ranging from ‘dark and subtle’ to ‘psychedelic and enormous.’

Simplicity pattern 6729 for a Jiffy dress, illustrated in Paisley on the left. 1966

But I never made the connection between the pattern I called “paisley” and the Scottish cloth-manufacturing town of Paisley until this month. This was a good month for learning about paisley. I had been reading a book about Jane Austen, which included an illustration of a “paisley” shawl; then I read a magazine from 1917 which showed examples of clothing made out of old paisley shawls.

A coat, hat, & bag, made from one Victorian  shawl, and a dress made from another old paisley shawl. Ladies’ Home Journal, Oct. 1917.

To me, it seemed like sacrilege to chop a huge, [already] 60-year old wool or cashmere shawl . . .

A cashmere shaw, mid-1800s, from Wikipedia.

. . . into ugly 1917 clothing, but, of course, such fabric recycling is an old tradition. The Metropolitan Museum has examples of Victorian Paisley shawls converted into mid-Victorian bathrobes, and dolman jackets, 1920s coats, and rather chic 1920s suits.

Finding the History of Paisley Patterns and Paisley Shawls

I found two excellent articles online about the history of the paisley pattern (called “boteh” in India) as it was adopted and adapted for mass manufacture during the 1800s. Threads of History gives a marvellous illustrated history of the development of both the shawl and the Paisley/boteh pattern (click here.) In Victoriana, Meg Andrews also discusses the fashion history of paisley, with many different illustrations, and explains why this luxury item eventually went out of style and into attics. (click here.)

The Real Jane Austen and Her Shawl

Rectangular Indian shawls were fashionable in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Image from Wikipedia.

I recently enjoyed reading The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, by Paula Byrne. This is not a conventional birth-to-death biography, but an exploration of Jane Austen’s world via several objects connected with her daily life: her portable writing desk, a silhouette of her family, a topaz necklace purchased for her by one of her sailor brothers, etc.  Chapter Two uses an East Indian Shawl as a springboard into her family connections with India, trade, and a family scandal (Like her character, Emma, Austen knew a young woman born out of wedlock. In Austen’s case, it was a near relation whom she knew quite well.) You can read detailed and very informative reviews of The Real Jane Austen in The Telegraph (click here), or by [Dickens expert and actor] Simon Callow (click here.)

Paisley Shawls Recycled, 1917

Having just read Paula Byrne’s Austen book, I had paisley shawls on my mind when I found these ‘recycled’ paisley shawls in the Ladies’ Home Journal, 1917:

It took one shawl to make this coat, hat, & bag;  a dress made from another Victorian Paisley shawl.  Ladies’ Home Journal, Oct. 1917.

When the United States entered World War I, in 1917, women expected fabric shortages. Women’s magazines like Delineator and Ladies’ Home Journal, both in the business of selling sewing patterns, began to write about ways that new clothing could be made from materials on hand. Women had always utilized dresses from the attic, and their own family’s used clothing, for children’s clothes, quilts, etc. (A bodice from the 1850s or 1860s is still relatively easy to find; finding an 1860s bodice with its matching skirt is much harder, since the skirts contained several yards of easily re-useable fabric.) Wool and silk Paisley shawls were among the garments frequently remade into robes, dresses, handbags and 1920s suits and coats.  (You can see the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of paisley shawls, and clothing made from shawls, by clicking here.)

More Creative Recycling, 1917

The Vintage Traveler has written about remade shawls and vintage clothing. Collectors of vintage clothing will probably cringe at this chiffon gown (pictured at right) converted into a couple of blouses:

A “terribly old-fashioned” chiffon  dress converted into a blouse. Ladies Home Journal, 1917

But I give full marks for creativity to this handbag — made from a scrap of black velvet and a pair of old, long, white leather gloves with black stitching!

Handbag made from old gloves, Ladies’ Home Journal, Oct. 1917.

Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the 60s and Beyond, by Jane Maas

Women in Advertising in the 1960s — an Ad Woman’s story 
If you’re a fan of the Mad Men TV series, you will be amazed by Jane Maas’ insider account. If you’ve never seen a single episode of Mad Men, you will probably find Mad Women fascinating, anyway. It’s also funny, gossipy, and well-researched, not completely dependent on Maas’ personal memories of being one of the first female advertising executives in the sixties. It’s full of mind-boggling facts; I found it very difficult to put down.

If you are too young to remember a time when ‘sexism’ was a revolutionary new concept, when the terms ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘glass ceiling’ didn’t exist, you should read this book. If, like me, you were a working woman in the 60s, you’ll find it triggers a lot of memories of ad campaigns (Does She or Doesn’t She?), social customs (‘We never drank in the morning’ ) [my italics] and 1960s fashions. (Maas is a great witness to fashion!)

How to Tell the Executives from the Secretaries

Maas mentions many details Mad Men costume designer Janie Bryant gets right, plus some that must have seemed too silly to put on television. ‘As soon as you were promoted from secretary to junior copy writer, you wore a hat in the office….  I never took my hat off, not even in the bathroom,’ said one woman who worked at the J. Walter Thompson Agency. A woman from Ogilvy and Mather explained, “Wearing a hat in the office was a badge. It proclaimed you were no longer a secretary.” (p. 115)

Office Attire in the 1960s

Not Allowed: A Culotte Skirt

Maas’ description of the formality (and discomfort) of office attire in the 1960s matches my memories. I worked for a bank in 1968-1970. Women were not allowed to wear trousers — not even a pantsuit with matching jacket. The first woman to become a project manager at Clairol told Maas that, when she wore a long-sleeved, knee-length, gray flannel culotte outfit to work, “They told me it was ‘inappropriate.”‘ In 1965, Maas, a New Yorker, was refused admittance to a restaurant because she was wearing a pantsuit.A Different Kind of Office

The entire 60s office environment Maas describes is so different from our own that it’s hard to imagine how so much work got done: “Think about what we didn’t have. Computers, for openers. The Internet. Cell phones. Faxes, almost obsolete today, hadn’t yet arrived. Neither had Federal Express…. Secretaries still needed carbon paper to make copies…. Xerox machines were just coming in….” Even television was so new that some ad agencies didn’t have any interest in television advertising. Peter Hochstein recalls that “the average set had a ten inch screen…!”

Jane Maas – from Copy Writer to Executive

Maas began as a copy writer at Ogilvy and Mather in 1964. At the time, the idea of having a woman handle accounts aimed at women was still revolutionary. “Women weren’t even taken seriously as consumers.” (p. 55) Eventually she handled accounts for Lever Brothers and General Foods. (At initial client meetings, she was occasionally mistaken for a secretary.)  By 1976 she was running her own agency. She co-authored the textbook How to Advertise. As an ad executive at Wells Richardson, she headed the I (Heart) New York campaign. She was also a working mother and happy wife at a time when marriage and motherhood were real barriers to a career. Luckily for us readers, her lively mind and sense of humor remain intact.