Just the Way You Look Tonight Couture

By Martha Duffy

Christian Dior created not only the New Look but a new silhouette every six months. Mme. Gres has been turning out her gently flowing dresses pretty much the same way for more than a half-century. Paul Poiret, the first celebrity couturier, left nothing undesigned, not only what a woman wore but everything she touched. His spiritual heir, Ralph Lauren, clothes not only whole milieus but fantasies as well: the dream of belonging, whether to a club or a board or the ski crowd at Vail. Giorgio Armani influenced the way almost every designer thinks by adapting to classic dictates of menswear. In a long career, Cristobal Balenciaga was one of the very few who were always ahead of the game, but probably no one has figured it out as well as Yves Saint Laurent: in his teens he realized that women want both casual simplicity and studied opulence, and he has made millions by obliging them.

The handful of men and women who have succeeded for more than a few seasons in the total-risk business of high fashion are a caste apart. Surely the most richly rewarded artisans in the world, they are natural celebrities and dictators of taste and fads. Rare indeed is the designer who is not surefire copy for the press. So it comes as something of a surprise that Caroline Rennolds Milbank's Couture fills a real need. Very little of substance has been written about couturiers. Most of the best commentary on their work is squirreled away in novels: Proust's chronicling of the shift from Belle Epoque bustles to the more natural silhouette, Fitzgerald's and Waugh's pointillist evocations of '30s glamour, Mary McCarthy's accurate, often satiric eye for all feminine strategies.

Milbank has produced lucid, well-researched essays on 61 designers from Charles Frederick Worth, who is considered the first professional couturier, as distinct from a private dressmaker, to Armani and Issey Miyake, the latest clothing innovators. The author, who is 30, began her work four years ago when she headed the costume department at Sotheby's auction house and realized that there was no single useful reference work. Couture certainly is that, but it is also highly entertaining social history. Milbank is gifted at writing appreciations, often the hardest kind of criticism to do convincingly. But there is something of the fashion dictator in her as well. Armani is described with appropriate accuracy and awe, but he is the only Milanese included. Ignored as well are whole ranks of French headliners, including Claude Montana and Jean-Paul Gaultier, and the British radical Vivienne Westwood, a perennial darling of the fashion press.

A book like Couture is irresistible to an amateur fashion handicapper. The author gushes a bit over Karl Lagerfeld, a cheeky, fluent idea man, and finds nearly invisible depth in the creations of Hardy Amies, a reliable but stodgy British tailor. The book is hobbled by rather arbitrary categories she imposes to organize her designers: artists (Fortuny, Mary McFadden), purists (Chanel, Vionnet), architects (Balenciaga, Charles James), realists (Norman Norell and Miyake, of all people). Also, although it may be patrician not to talk about money, the vast fortunes made by the likes of Saint Laurent and Lauren go unrecorded, making the tone sound occasionally naive.

Still, most of Milbank's judgments are canny and her enthusiasms welcome. The chapter on Claire McCardell, "the first truly American designer," is an admirable essay on the sportswear of the '40s and '50s, on which most American style is based. Equally impressive is her account of Worth's career (1858-95). In a few paragraphs, the author sketches in that formidable designer's world; he learned the art of endless invention by the necessity of dressing the ladies of the French court, who were obliged always to appear in white and never to wear the same toilette twice. Worth even felt a heavy obligation to the French silkmaking industry. When crinolines became so enormous as to be dangerous to the wearer, Worth concocted the bustle as a way to use quantities of fabric without incarcerating his clients.

There are several entries on fashion's sublime kooks. Elsa Schiaparelli, a blithe and irreverent spirit, jazzed up the '30s with her whimsical lambchop hats and red-apple purses. Roberto Capucci still does what he has always insisted on doing, creating one outrageously intricate gown and never replicating it. Charles James, the most brilliant American designer ever, was shackled by paranoia and notorious business dealings. He died broke and nearly forgotten in 1978, but the influence of his fabulous ball gowns remains, whether they are executed in a Paris atelier or a Hollywood costume department.

Milbank has a fine eye for social comment. Her heart may belong to purists like Madeleine Vionnet or wits like Lagerfeld, but who are the most influential designers? High on her list would be Molyneux, Adrian, Givenchy and Lauren--because of the way they dressed show-biz stars. Molyneux popularized the slinky chic of the '30s with his costumes for Gertrude Lawrence in Private Lives. Adrian, a West Coast designer snubbed by the fashion establishment, camouflaged Joan Crawford's broad shoulders by exaggerating them and produced the dominant look of the '40s. When Jacqueline Kennedy brought elegant dressing to the White House in 1961, she was only copying the exquisite Audrey Hepburn, as created by Givenchy. And Ralph Lauren defined the ambience of the '70s in two movie jobs: Annie Hall and Robert Redford's clothes in The Great Gatsby. That sort of flourish, Milbank concludes, is the conjuring trick that all these magicians must master or else face failure: the ability to catch what's in the air just a little ahead of time and present it in a few yards of cloth as the way a woman wants to look that year.