I have never met any of the lucky women who owned a dress by Charles James. A college friend, though, had an aunt who wore a James to her engagement party, in the late nineteen-fifties. It must have been one of his last creations, since he went out of business in 1958. “Imagine that! A James in the family!” my friend said, as if she were speaking of a Vermeer. “I’ve always wondered what happened to it.”
I’ve always wondered what happened to James. His name draws a blank outside the fashion world, although Christian Dior called him “the greatest talent of my generation,” and Balenciaga, a miser with his enthusiasms, considered James “the only one in the world who has raised dressmaking from an applied art to a pure art.” But by the time this compliment reached James’s ears he was living at the Chelsea Hotel, nearly destitute, and estranged from all but a few devotees. They were mostly members of a wild younger generation that included Halston, a former protégé, who briefly gave James a job and, in 1969, produced a retrospective of his work in an East Village night club. James turned on him, though, as he had on so many friends and benefactors. He was demanding at his best, and substance abuse heightened his volatility.
Like Proust, who gave his mother’s furniture to a brothel, James sometimes lent a couture outfit to a club kid. But he also liked to model the clothes himself; his physique was elfin. Diana Vreeland recalled meeting James in the late nineteen-twenties, when he was voguing on a beach in the Hamptons in women’s hats of his own creation and “beautiful robes.” He was about to make his début as one of those boy wonders who have played an outsize role in the history of fashion. And there always was something of the boy wonder about him: a puerile sense of entitlement that did him in, a prodigious imagination that never gave out, and a conviction that he was immortal. James died at seventy-two, and at the end of his life he was wizened and frail, but he still had the luxuriant dark hair of a matinée idol. His grudges were luxuriant, too. He had so much bitterness to discharge, so much glory to recall, and such philosophy to impart—a whole science of couture—that he talked through the night to whoever would listen.
James’s years of obscurity never shook his confidence that posterity would give him his due, and, sure enough, the largest James retrospective ever mounted, “Charles James: Beyond Fashion,” opens on May 8th at the newly refurbished Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show’s curators, Harold Koda and Jan Glier Reeder, and its conservators, Sarah Scaturro and Glenn Petersen, have, in effect, rescued, restored, and annotated a lost gospel. Reeder, a James expert, spent three years demystifying a biography that James embroidered. Her catalogue essay is the first reliable chronology of the life and the work, and James’s range will astonish anyone who knows him only through a few photographs by Cecil Beaton. One of those images—a classical frieze, in which eight swanlike beauties are posed in a grand salon—is on the cover of the catalogue. Each ball gown is a pearly cascade of satin or taffeta, undergirded by an armature of bone, padding, or tulle.
Beaton’s picture, however, plays to received ideas about James that Koda and Reeder otherwise take pains to dispel. The mature James lacks the irony of a postmodernist, yet his samplings from the past (bustles, panniers, and crinolines) have the same nerve. The young James was a leader of the avant-garde, whose ingenious tailoring—“off-grain” cuts, displaced seams, asymmetric draping that eliminated darts—is hard to read in a photograph. (Fashion history has a prejudice for the photogenic, and the tour de force of simplicity is often slighted.) James designed several outfits with an adjustable fit, so that two sizes accommodated most figures. The infinity scarf and the wrap dress were his inventions, as was the down jacket—a puffer for evening in ivory satin, which Dali admired as a “soft sculpture.” One of James’s novelties was a proto sports bra.
By rights, he should be remembered, like Chanel, as one of those revolutionary pragmatists who changed the way that women dress. But James was often too early to get credit for his breakthroughs. He introduced an A-line coat ten years before Yves Saint Laurent, who had just taken over at Dior, made headlines with the Trapeze dress. It must also be said that Chanel and Saint Laurent focussed on women’s lives, while James fixated zealously on their proportions. “The feminine figure,” he believed, is “intrinsically wrong,” i.e. not platonically ideal by his standards. His mission to correct its flaws with a nip and a tuck, an arcing seam, a buckram implant, a cushion of air between skin and cloth diminished his relevance, even as it enhanced his prestige as an anatomist. The young find remedial fashion intrinsically uncool.
Charlie James, as he was known to his familiars, was born on July 18, 1906, at Agincourt House, not far from the Royal Military College in Sandhurst, England, where his father, Ralph, was an Army staff officer. The baby was named in honor of his late maternal grandfather, Charles Wilson Brega, a Chicago shipping and real-estate magnate. His daughter Louise had met Ralph on a world cruise with her family; he was returning from a posting in China.
In 1910, the Jameses moved into a sixteen-room mansion in London. At five or six, Charles began composing for the piano. He was sent to boarding school at eight, and, at fourteen, enrolled at Harrow, though he left before graduation, with dismal grades. He later suggested that his departure was precipitated by a “minor escapade,” although Reeder found no official record of it. James was openly gay from his late teens, she notes, and for the friends in his clique—Beaton among them—beautiful manners and bad behavior were the essence of chic. They shared a taste for fancy dress, makeup, and dramatics. (In the nineteen-thirties, James became a successful costume designer.) Ralph James considered his son a disgrace, and the antipathy was mutual. James turned to fashion, he explained to a correspondent, “out of a compulsion to be involved in a business of which my father disapproved.”
By 1924, James was living in his mother’s home town, and working for Commonwealth Edison, in a desk job arranged by the company’s president, a family friend. When the flamboyant teen-ager staged a fashion show—of batik beach wraps—at the office, he was reassigned to the architecture department, where he absorbed some of the technical concepts that he would apply to couture. In 1926, however, he did something unthinkable for a member of his class, male or female: he opened a millinery shop. Ralph forbade his wife and daughters (one older, one younger than their brother) to patronize it. Louise sent her friends, however, and the doyennes of Chicago society loyally helped to underwrite the ventures of her prodigy. James shaped his hats directly on clients’ heads, cutting, twisting, and scrunching the felt or straw into whimsical shapes. A red cloche had a Jack Russell’s cocked earflap; a turban molded to the skull suggested Amelia Earhart’s flight helmet.
Most American couturiers have been, at best, middle class. Adrian was the son of a milliner, Norell of a haberdasher; Mainbocher worked in the complaints department at Sears, Roebuck; Galanos’s parents ran a Greek restaurant in New Jersey. Debonair Bill Blass, the son of a travelling salesman, could recall a time when he and his lowly ilk were asked to use the service elevator. James’s connections gave him a ready clientele for the couture business that he launched in 1928, when he added a line of clothing to his hats and opened a salon in Manhattan, on the second story of a former stable owned by Noël Coward. Beaton promoted his work in Vogue, and James, who had considerable flair as a huckster, seduced the fashion press on both sides of the Atlantic.
In 1929, he was back in London, preceded by his reputation. Lady Ottoline Morrell became a client, and Virginia Woolf first heard of “the man milliner who was dropped by Heaven” through her friend Mary Hutchinson, a cousin of Lytton Strachey. “So geometrical is Charlie James,” Woolf reported to her lover Vita Sackville-West, “that if a stitch is crooked, Vita, the whole dress is torn to shreds, which Mary bears without wincing.” Hutchinson wore a James blouse for her portrait by Matisse, at the artist’s request. But, she later recalled, “Charlie was sometimes so entranced by the shape he was ‘sculpting’ over one’s own” that when a dress arrived “it was impossible to get into.”
James’s entrée to Bloomsbury was sponsored, in part, by his Harrow schoolmate Stephen Tennant, the gay aesthete who was a model for eccentric characters in novels by Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. James ran up a fetchingly polymorphous wardrobe for him that included slinky beach pajamas. Tennant gushed in a letter to Beaton about an “ineffably limp” dress shirt in creamy satin and the “stunningest” black trousers, which “seem glued to every fissure & ripple of thigh & bottom.” Yet, if James flirted with cross-dressing, he didn’t let his female clients take the same liberty. He claimed to prize character above beauty in a woman, but he was an absolutist in his reverence for an old-school ideal of femininity.
Between the two world wars, James owned exclusive salons in Paris, London, and New York. He tacked between them, stretching his resources (which is to say borrowed resources) thin. Financial improvidence eventually destroyed his business, and his artistic scruples—the only kind he possessed—routinely jeopardized his deadlines and contracts. Balenciaga’s couture ateliers produced some three hundred ensembles a year. James managed to create fewer than two thousand in the course of four decades. He once reworked a sleeve so many times that the labor and the materials invested in it supposedly amounted to twenty thousand dollars. The cost of such obsessiveness couldn’t be recouped, even at the astronomical prices that the world’s best-dressed women were happy to pay, while his opportunism strained their good will. The Countess of Rosse, a devoted patron, once brought a rich friend to James’s atelier. He told her, “I couldn’t possibly make anything for a frump like you.”
No one, least of all James, has ever accounted for his artistry as a tailor. Apparently, he spent time in Paris studying his trade, though where or under whose aegis is uncertain. He thought of his vocation as sartorial engineering, but Harold Koda believes that there was more instinct than science to James’s craft, and Richard Martin, the late fashion historian, dared to suggest that James “pretended to give serious thought to the structural elements of the dress, but a study . . . shows that he simply applied more and more layers until he achieved the needed density and shape.”
Instinct and reason, however, are both aspects of spatial intelligence. James could visualize a complex pattern in three dimensions, then wrap or drape it directly on a body. The manipulation of material was one of his signatures, and he had no qualms about distressing it, or combining classic luxury fabrics with funky synthetics, like a fuzzy white plush that resembled wet feathers. The architect of the Pantheon’s dome would have admired his cantilevered skirts, one of which, belonging to the Petal dress, had a circumference of nearly eighty feet. James’s masterpiece, by his own just assessment, was the famous Clover Leaf ball gown. I tried but failed to follow the cutaway drawings that illustrate its construction—it had thirty pattern pieces and weighed ten pounds—or Reeder’s description of “the semi-bias in the asymmetrical outer layer” and the “sequence of undulating curves, that work in symphony . . . with top and bottom curves undulating in opposite directions.” For a 2011 James show at the Chicago History Museum, the curators resorted to CT-scan technology to expose the bones of a James under its flesh. A photograph shows three bemused-looking technicians grappling with what looks like a supine débutante who wound up in the E.R. after the ball. It is actually James’s Swan dress strapped to a gurney.
Koda told me that “to really understand” a James “you have to take it apart.” But his catalogue essay, “The Calculus of Fashion,” does an excellent job of noninvasive deconstruction. And if you strip a James to its foundation what you find is sex. The true function of fashion, James said, is to arouse the mating instinct. The Broadway star Gertrude Lawrence was quoted as saying that she had never bought anything more respectable than a James—or as “utterly indecent.” His Taxi dress, of the early thirties, spiralled seamlessly around the body and clasped at the hip. (Later models zipped across the torso on a rakish diagonal.) The dress got its name, James explained, because he wanted to design a garment that a woman could slip into—or out of—in the back of a cab. A deceptively austere sheath, like the Coq Noir, of 1937, swaddled the figure like a mummy’s wrapping, but James bunched the excess silk at the back, forming an obscenely gorgeous labial bustle. A James gown invites you to imagine the lobes and crevices of the nude body beneath it, and it wasn’t for the faint of heart. “Elegance,” he wrote, “is not a social distinction but a sensual distinction.” Gypsy Rose Lee, the queen of burlesque, was a favorite client.
Upper-class life carried on during the Depression with an insouciant disregard for the general misery. Vreeland and her husband, a banker, who were living abroad, kept a liveried chauffeur for their Bugatti. By the end of the decade, James was juggling fully staffed couture ateliers in London and in Paris, where he stayed at the venerable Hôtel Lancaster. His friend Jean Cocteau lived across the hall, and Cocteau’s influence is apparent in a series of grosgrain opera coats that Beaton photographed against a background by Christian Bérard. The coats were an experiment in using humble materials for exalted purposes, and they have an aura—stark, dreamy, faintly vampiric—of costumes for a Surrealist chatelaine.
Cocteau also allegedly saved James from a suicide attempt, which was not his first. In Chicago, James had tried to kill himself over an unrequited love, having taken pains with the décor of his death scene: flickering candles, gilded mirrors, an ether-soaked handkerchief. “Racked by the pain in his nose,” Reeder writes, he was rushed to a hospital that his grandfather had funded. In some respects, however, James had an unusually robust survival instinct. He decamped from Paris for London in August of 1939, then sailed for New York.
The Second World War was a golden age for American fashion. Stylish women who had shopped in Paris were forced to become locavores. James opened a couture salon on East Fifty-seventh Street, but he also established relationships with leading retailers. In 1941, B. Altman mounted a show of his trouser-skirts. Wearing pants was still largely taboo for middle-class women—slacks were acceptable on the factory floor and for the construction jobs that women had stepped up to fill—but James devised a clever solution for the conflicting demands of comfort and propriety. The skirt was essentially a bifurcated sarong, threaded between the thighs. It freed the legs and their stride, but a crossover front panel dissembled their separation. A sporty knee-length version anticipated the culotte; a resort-wear evening ensemble came with a midriff-baring top. The respectable and the indecent were never far apart.
New York was tonic for James. He liked to deplore the vulgarity of garmentos, but he was nothing if not a man on the make. He found a kindred spirit in Florence Nightingale Graham, a former nursing student and makeup salesgirl from a small town in Ontario who had reinvented herself as Elizabeth Arden. James was her walker in New York and Chicago, although his mother failed to get her into the society pages—she was “trade.” When Arden became engaged to a Russian prince, James designed her trousseau. She shared James’s ambition to correct women’s flaws, and in 1943, when she decided to expand her beauty business to include custom-made clothes, she hired him to head the department. Their partnership ended in bickering over money and credit for his designs (she was not the first or the last of his associates whom he accused of piracy), and she was incensed by a backlit red vase that he had placed prominently in the window, giving her tony establishment, she felt, the air of a bordello. But, thanks in part to Arden’s patronage, James met Millicent Rogers, Babe Paley, Marietta Tree, Slim Keith, and Austine Hearst, among other glamorous clients, who inspired and subsidized some of his greatest work. Hearst commissioned the Clover Leaf gown for Eisenhower’s Inaugural ball, though she had to wear something else—it wasn’t ready.
When the war ended, James hired Japanese-Americans recently liberated from internment camps to staff his new atelier, on Madison Avenue. They worked, he wrote, on “my most important bigger clothes, ball dresses and such”—including the sumptuous baroque gowns in an advertising campaign, photographed by Beaton, for Modess sanitary napkins. The idea was “that any woman at a difficult moment can imagine herself a Duchess,” although, at a difficult moment, you could never have squeezed a James gown into the stall of a ladies’ room. The Japanese had “a special quality of precision” that James found lacking in the New York labor pool. Harold Koda, however, told me that James was a selective perfectionist. He violated the integrity of his fabrics, and, Koda said, “I was shocked to discover how shoddy some of his seams are.”
After the war, French fashion regained its predominance, which is to say its American market. Although James was among the world’s most expensive couturiers—he charged seven hundred to fifteen hundred dollars for a dress—he fulminated at the disproportionate profits and the obsequious coverage that his counterparts in Paris were reaping. The problem, as he saw it, was partly a lack of competition from an American fashion industry enfeebled by mediocrity and rife with plagiarism. To encourage native talent and originality, he joined forces with Michelle Murphy, of the Brooklyn Museum, and he created the prototype for a dress dummy whose figure held the promise, he thought, of transforming the fit of American sportswear. The Jennie was a slim but realistic modern Eve, with a small bust, a convex tummy, and a slouch. It never caught on commercially, though James’s advocacy did have a lasting consequence: He persuaded Millicent Rogers to donate twenty-four of her James gowns to the Brooklyn Museum. Her bequest set a precedent for treating couture as art—and as a tax deduction.
James’s career was approaching its zenith. In 1950, he won a prestigious Coty Award, the first of two, and, in 1953, the Neiman Marcus Award—fashion’s Oscar. (He startled the black-tie audience by appearing in jeans at the ceremony. “The bluejean is the only art form in apparel,” he explained.) He also branched out into other fields. The philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil hired James to decorate their house in Houston, designed by Philip Johnson. James’s voluptuous biomorphic furniture and hot color scheme—fuchsia, crimson, and tobacco halls; pewter, gold, and chartreuse upholstery—eroticized the modernist architecture. Johnson excluded the house from surveys of his work.
But no departure was more radical for James than his church wedding, in 1954, to Nancy Lee Gregory, a wealthy divorcée from Kansas, twenty years his junior. Some of their friends suspected venal motives, though James insisted he had married for love. “My wife knew I was homosexual,” he said in an interview years later, adding that “all of society is double-gaited.” When a son, Charles, Jr., was born, in 1956, James celebrated his new status with a collection of children’s wear. One of the pieces was a baby’s cape, in robin’s-egg blue, eccentrically cut, like the carapace of a tortoise, with front-set armholes designed to limit an infant’s “flailing.” Princess Grace of Monaco ordered eighteen items for the layette of her daughter, Caroline.
A late marriage and fatherhood sometimes mellow a restless bachelor, but they seemed to exacerbate James’s disaffections. The fine print of his financial dealings, documented by Elizabeth Ann Coleman, the curator of an important James show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1982, trace the death spiral of a grandiose enterprise out of control. The business had been diversified into a labyrinth of corporations that handled contracts for couture, ready-to-wear, faux furs, costume design, maternity fashions, the children’s wear, prom dresses, accessories, and other projects, many unrealized, including a foundation. In the first year of the marriage, when the couple was living at the Sherry Netherland Hotel, and James had just leased a sprawling new atelier, Charles James Manufacturers recorded revenues of $112,963, against expenditures of $310,266.
Bitter litigation with his licensees contributed to the brewing debacle. For much of the next four years, the couple lived on the run from their creditors—a list of their addresses includes more than a dozen hotels in New York, New Orleans, Kansas City, and Chicago. In 1957, days before the birth of their daughter, Louise, the Internal Revenue Service seized the contents of James’s showroom; a year later, city marshals raided his office, and the business sank under its debts. Nancy’s money was gone, and Charles was using amphetamines prescribed by Max Jacobson, the infamous Dr. Feelgood. “I do not know,” James said, “if I did right to marry and ruin Nancy, but . . . the necessity of success and achievement came first.” Nevertheless, their mutual tenderness survived divorce, and Nancy helped to preserve the James legacy. But she took the children and moved back to Kansas.
James landed at the Chelsea in 1964. The maids refused to clean his squalid rooms, which he shared with a beagle named Sputnik. He continued to produce custom clothing for the occasional client, but, fuelled by speed, he indulged in an orgy of blame. James ended his fifty-year friendship with Beaton over a perceived disloyalty, accused the Brooklyn Museum of stealing materials that he had left there for storage, returned his awards in a fit of pique, and denigrated Vreeland for a long list of slights.
Yet, in destitution, James discovered a talent for generosity as a teacher. He embarked on a series of projects focussed on “fashion engineering” with the Art Students League and Pratt Institute, and he won a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a textbook on the same subject. His young friends saw him as a link to the heroic age of couture. Antonio Lopez, the illustrator, preserved a record of James’s work in hundreds of drawings. Homer Layne, a Pratt student from Tennessee, became his chief assistant and the steward of his archives, which he gave to the Met last year. The photographer Bill Cunningham documented the late-night “seminars” at which James held forth on “the fine points of couture, the follies of the rich, and ‘the plagiarists of Seventh Avenue.’ ”
James never produced the textbook, and he never finished a memoir he was writing, which he intended to call “Beyond Fashion.” But in 1974 a British magazine published his autobiographical sketch, “A Portrait of a Genius by a Genius.” That is how he had lived—with a messianic faith in his uniqueness—and that is how he left the scene. On Friday, September 22, 1978, the day before he succumbed to pneumonia and heart disease, an ambulance was called to the hotel. “It may not mean anything to you,” James told the medics, “but I am what is popularly regarded as the greatest couturier in the Western world.”
Layne spent the weekend clearing out the rooms before the hotel could seize their contents. James owed six months of back rent. ♦
