Thursday 2 June 2016

The Imitation Game: Lucie Clayton and the World of Modelling

“A top model is an infinitely valuable commercial asset, more photographed than any film star and more imitated than any woman in history”, wrote Lucie Clayton in her book, The World of Modelling and how to get the London model-girl look. Throughout history, the profession of modelling and the act of imitation have been closely intertwined, exemplified by no one more ably than Lucie Clayton herself. In 1968, when The World of Modelling was published, she was at the height of her fame. Her modelling agency had discovered ‘the face of the 60s’ in Jean Shrimpton and was exporting the desirability of the Swinging London look, and how to imitate it, worldwide.


LIVING MODELS

Forty years earlier, when the school had opened, the very idea of being a model was questionable, let alone aspiring to resemble one. In 1928, fashion modelling was still a very new profession. While the British couturier Charles Frederick Worth was credited with creating the first “living model”, using his wife Marie to display his designs in the 1860s, but it wasn’t until the early twentieth century when Lucile popularised the idea of the fashion parade at her London salon. Lucile also began the practice of selecting only beautiful women to model her clothes, taking them from their working class jobs and recasting them with exotic sounding new names. She created a theatrical, ‘catwalk’-like structure for her models to parade down and show-off her latest lavish, romantic designs.

The practice created such a sensation it was quickly imitated. In 1909 Harrods’ Diamond Jubilee celebrations included a display of “living models”, Selfridges’ introduced regular in-house fashion parades and other department stores swiftly followed suit. By 1924, Whiteley’s was ambitiously promising “the biggest and most attractive mannequin parade ever staged”. Mannequins were modern. In Dorothy Whipple’s 1930 novel High Wages, the opening of a determinedly fashionable women’s clothing shop in a small Lancashire town is – naturally – celebrated with a mannequin parade, “something new for Tidsley”.

However, for their high visibility, these early models had a particularly poor reputation, as I’ve written about in previous posts. And they lacked any real power. As mannequins paraded in stores, their role wasonly a few steps removed from the carefully choreographed steps of theatrical chorus girls, who were, similarly, often costumed by couturiers. “Model” was employed as a useful catchall term, employed to cover up an array of less reputable jobs. But, as Lucile set the precedent for her models to appear in public, to wear the most up-to-date fashions and to become the object of desire for wealthy suitors, they became able to transverse Britain’s strict class stratified society in a way not possible for other working class women.


FROM BLACKPOOL TO HANOVER SQUARE 

Although reported by the press of the time, there are few names of individual models from the industry’s early history that are still familiar today. One exception is Lucie Clayton, although a name now more closely associated with finishing school than fashion modelling. However, Clayton – responsible for finessing the social niceties of generations of women – was a product of the fluid, sometimes unsavoury profession that was modelling in the early 20th century. What’s more,despite her fame for teaching debutantes to curtsey, Clayton’s background was unmistakably working class, arriving at her Hanover Square offices from Blackpool, via Tooting.

Despite her more conventional-sounding name, Lucie Clayton’s business was rooted in performance as much as the likes of Lucile’s models. Born Lucy Sylvia Dorrell in around 1909, she became Clayton in 1926 by deed poll. Working as a mannequin gave her a means to leave Blackpool, first working in northern cities before moving to London. She hit headlines for insuring her long, blond hair for £1000 (or so the story goes: surviving photographs from the 1920s and 30s show her with bobbed, dark hair). Time working in Paris taught her the advantages of deportment and etiquette for social advancement, and she claimed to have become so successful at modelling that she began passing jobs onto her friends.

Her jobs weren’t the only thing she shared. At the same time she changed her name, her fellow occupants of Elmbourne Road, Tooting, also both became a “Clayton”. Although the reasons for this are unrecorded, it was perhaps part of a greater master plan. Two years after the name change, and while still in her teens, the Lucie Clayton Charm School was established. Somewhere along the way “Lucy” also had become “Lucie”.



“YOU CAN NO LONGER TELL A SHOP GIRL FROM A DUCHESS”

Lucie’s business was part mannequin agency, part mannequin-training school. Although it wasn’t the first modelling agency in the world – an honour that goes to John Robert Powers in the United States in 1923 – it was significant that its figurehead was a woman (something unmatched by the States until Eileen Ford established Ford Models with her husband in 1946). The schooling aspect of her business was responding to a real need. In the same year the agency was founded, the “big call on the mannequins” prompted by the popularity of fashion parades meant that, reported The Times, some firms “experienced considerable difficulty in supplying their needs”.

However, the demand for these schools came as much from the public as from businesses needing to fill positions in their mannequin parades. As Lucie demonstrated,modelling was a way a woman could escape the limitations of her background. It offered fame, glamour, and – if the many novels about mannequins were to be believed – the possibility of a glittering marriage. It fitted perfectly with the desire for reinvention to beginning to also be capitalised on by the burgeoning beauty and cosmetic industry (fittingly, Lucie’s husband, Alex Golledge, worked in advertising). In 1933, The Vogue Book of Beauty criticised any woman who regarded her appearance as fixed and unalterable (as, prior to the 1920s, it would have been considered proper to do) because it meant “some vital, shining part of her is extinguished forever”. The 1930s also saw the birth of the makeover feature, a media staple ever since. And, when that pillar of the British clothing establishment Jaeger, re-launched in the decade, their advertising claimed that “thanks to [us] you can no longer tell a shop girl from a Duchess”.


“ONE CANNOT BLAME THE MANNEQUINS. IT IS THEIR BUSINESS”

The boundaries between respectable and unrespectable women in public were becoming increasingly blurred – it could no longer be assumed that a woman in public in make-up was a prostitute – and such advertising helped fuel existing postwar anxiety about appearances and identities. The work of the mannequin only further confused these distinctions. Her job was primarily, in Colette’s words, "to excite covetousness", and – for the first time – upper class women were coveting how their social inferiors dressed and looked. As Caroline Evans describes in Mechanical Smile, her book about the early French and American fashion models, it was mannequins who would be the first to wear the newest fashions, and they would be the ones to establish exactly how it was worn. Even before the First World War, The Times commented on how “it was the mannequins who started the forward movement from below the waist, and it was the same young women who taught the society woman how to shuffle along in very tight skirts. One cannot blame the mannequins. It is their business; but why need a society woman take a mannequin for a model of deportment?”

But the mannequins were frequently blamed, and with charges that were more serious than purely sartorial. Marek Kohn is discussing the ‘dope girls’ of the 1920s in the description of the ‘combination of the marginality and modernity made them the ideal raw material for an awful warning to women as a whole’ but it could have equally been written about models. The silent modernity of the mannequin made them easy targets in contemporary fiction, “They’re a bad lot, those mannequins, and as clever as they’re made,” states Rosemary Gray in her 1932 story His Mannequin Wife, reflecting common attitudes of the period. Other novels cast mannequins as duplicitous liars and cheats, husband stealers and drug smugglers, descriptions that could have been lifted straight from contemporary press reports.

Mannequins may have mixed with high society, but they weren’t yet accepted into it. Although by 1936 the Marquis of Donegall could confidently state that “mannequins of the dress and hat firms are absolutely ‘the thing’ with Mayfair young men”, the vulnerability of the mannequin’s position was illustrated in a case brought by Lady Erroll in 1929. She sued the Daily Express for claiming she had become a mannequin. Awarding Lady Erroll £120 in damages (an amount it would have taken the average model roughly two years to earn), the judge concluded that, while he was not suggesting a mannequin was “not a respectable person or was a person of bad character who could in any way be sneered at or despised”, it was nonetheless defamatory of a woman of Lady Erroll’s “social character and reputation”.

By equipping anyone prepared to pay her fees with the tools to learn the affectations of class and style, Lucie Clayton was attacking such social stratification,although she cleverly avoided positioning herself as such.


ELOQUENT ICONS OF MODERNITY 

While other businesses clearly labelled themselves as “mannequin training schools”, by naming her company the more innocent sounding “charm academy”, Lucie bypassed the tawdry associations conjured up by the word ‘mannequin’. Agency owners in the United States echoed her action in the 1930s and ’40s and, only in the 1950s, when the profession was much more admired, did Lucie Clayton’s school start using the word ‘mannequin’ as part of its name.

If, in the words of Caroline Evans, “mannequins had a powerful symbolic presence. They were eloquent icons of modernity, even in their silence”, Lucie Clayton recognised that this silence kept models as symbols only – it allowed them to remain typecast as improper, villainesses or simply not there. She broke their silence by stripping away some of the myths and mystique that had developed around fashion modelling. She spoke to the press and allowed photographers and news camera into her school – there are several British Pathé films dating from the 1930s to the 1950s taken at the Charm Academy that report on girls exercising, being groomed and trained in the act of modelling. Lucie was skilled at winning headlines for her work. In 1937, for example, she trained eight unemployed girls from Wales as mannequins for free, later touring them as ‘Ambassadresses of Britain’ around the United States.


POLISHING ITS IMAGE: THE BRITISH MANNEQUIN AND PHOTOGRAPHIC MODEL ASSOCIATION 

Lucie’s activities reflected a wider desire to increase industry standards and, in 1938, the British Mannequin and Photographic Model Association was founded. Lucie’s husband, Alex Golledge, was its first secretary. The Association’s objectives were straightforward: to “procure satisfactory wages and conditions of employment” for mannequins and "to promote and protect the welfare and the interests’ of its members, as well as improving ‘the general position and status of mannequins". Over 150 mannequins attended the first meeting, with their demands widely reported in the press. Golledge – the only male on the committee – commented on the costs associated with modelling: the money spent on hairdressing, cosmetics, stockings, dresses and suits and gloves and accessories, at that time provided at the models’ expense, rather than by their employers. Gloria, a model who had become famous as the face of Selfridges, voiced her discontent with the profession, telling a reporter “we have been nobody’s children for too long”. Lucie, meanwhile, set about organising the Mannequin’s Ball to raise money for Guy’s Hospital and awareness of the Union, and ensured it made the front page by inventing a new dance for the occasion, the "Mannequin Glide". Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is how the women they look like they are having fun.

Over time, such endeavours helped raise the reputation of modelling in Britain. According to Lucie Clayton’s The World of Modelling, it was with such continual “polishing of its image” that modelling could be reinvented for a new age. It was no longer the terrain of immoral girls on the make, but a world suitable for respectable young debutantes. The successful model of the 1940s and ’50s was typified by the likes of the unmistakably upper class Barbara Goalen: cool, in control and most definitely a lady. By the 1960s, fashion modelling was the era’s most desirable profession. Working with David Bailey,Jean Shrimpton – Lucie Clayton’s star graduate – changed look of modelling once again. This time it became young and fresh, matching the fun fashions and spirit of the sixties. By 1968, The World of Modelling proclaimed that, unlike their predecessors of the 1920s and ’30s, top models had successfully “swept aside class distinction and broken through international barriers”.

But modelling’s wide appeal risked pulling the profession back to what Clayton and her contemporaries had fought so hard against. By the 1960s, the description “model” was once again being used as a smokescreen for less reputable activities. Agency owner and former mannequin, Cherry Marshall was not alone in criticising the “call-girls, nightclub hostesses and dollies in pin-up magazines” that chose to describe themselves as “model girls”. In fact, Marshall’s agency, Lucie Clayton and five others joined forces to become The Association of London Model Agents in an attempt to maintain standards. There were still many battles to be fought. During the Profumo Affair, for example, the press continually politely referred to both Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies as ‘freelance models’, causing Lucie Clayton to wrote to The Times to once more defend her profession’s reputation. Criticising their use of the description, she suggested that, as Ms. Keeler was currently writing her memoirs for a Sunday paper, it was surely only fair that she should from then on be known as "the well-known journalist".

LUCIE CLAYTON: A NOM DE GUERRE 

Except that Lucie was also being deliberately lax with her accuracy. This “Lucie Clayton” wasn’t exactly who she said she was either. In 1950, Lucie had sold her agency, her school and her name to a businessman Leslie Kark, and, from then on, his wife Evelyn would appear, be photographed, and write books, all under the name Lucie Clayton. It was her who had written to The Times, continuing the efforts of her predecessor. Describing her own battles fought within the modelling industry, Kark admitted that Lucie Clayton was “appropriately” a nom de guerre.


Lucie Clayton’s name still belongs to the Kark family, who have kept the business moving along with the times, just as it had responded to the desires of the 1920s. In the 1960s,classes at the Lucie Clayton school included how to prepare for TV appearances; in the 1980s, the syllabus included an introduction to the Stock Exchange. In the 21st century, when the emphasis is on models to be ‘natural’ untrained beauties, the modelling element has gone entirely from Lucie Clayton, but the business still caters to today’s needs. It has become part of a business school, while part of their original premises has been converted into an exclusive property development.

The story of the "real" Lucie Clayton slipped from view entirely, her death date unknown, perhaps appropriately for an industry that places no value on the old. The modelling industry continues, pedalling youth, the new and the latest fantasies of beauty, itself – like Lucie Clayton – a testament to the power of reinvention.

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Saturday 13 February 2016

Dodie Smith’s The Town in Bloom and all the single ladies



Despite the title, this isn’t a Valentine’s-themed post – but if you happen to be single, it’ll probably make you grateful for some of the advantages of 21st-century life. Last weekend, I went to a study day at City Lit that was inspired by Virginia Nicolson’s Singled Out, a book telling some of the stories of the “surplus women” after the First World War. Although this was a period when opportunities for women were growing enormously, they still had to battle with inadequate wages, or living situations. For every inspiring career woman, or bachelor girl striding forth, twenty more would be agonising over whether they could afford anything more than a bread roll for their lunch.

You don’t need to look far to find such women in literature of the period – think of the almost destitute Miss Pettigrew, who gets to “live” for one day, or Muriel of Winifred Holtby’s The Crowded Street, who eventually rescued by her friend Delia from a life of waiting at home for a husband to show up. Appropriately enough, by chance the next book I picked up – The Town in Bloom by Dodie Bloom (set in the mid-1920s, but published in 1965) – also charted the bid of an interwar heroine to strike out on her own.

Not that the family-less Mouse has much choice, but – despite her name – she’s certainly given more confidence and faith in her own abilities than the other characters above. She arrives in London, from Manchester, with a little cash determined to become an actress and installs herself at the Club – a hostel for other single women – in “a rather handsome building with a lot of heavy stonework”.  She’s swept up by the fashionable Molly and Lilian, who work as “glorified chorus” girls, to join their “village”. We learn, as does Mouse, that means “one of the groups of cubicles into which some of the big rooms are divided.”

Mouse goes on to describe her cubicle:
“It is almost private as the partitions are solid and go up to within a foot or so of the ceiling. And I have a good big cupboard, a washstand, combined with a dressing table which has long drawers, a folding table and a chair. There is a large window (some of the cubicles don’t have windows) and from my bed I can see tall trees in the quite large Club garden.”

From the “almost private” bedroom to washing to eating, their space is not their own: Take washing, for example:
“After breakfast I was initiated into the never-ending Battle of the Bathroom Door. There were plenty of ‘cold bathrooms’ where there was hot and cold water in the wash basin but only a cold tap for the bath. Access to cold bathrooms was free, but one could only get into a “hot bathroom” by putting tuppence into a slot-machine on the door. Molly believed cleanliness should be free, always left bathroom doors open, and took advantage of any she found open.”

Mouse’s account is almost an exact replica of that of Mary Margaret Grieve, a trainee reporter on the Nursing Mirror, and one of the women quoted in Singled Out:
“It was a great gloomy mansion block, but from her minute first-floor cubicle she could just see stars between the chimney-pots. Hostel life was full of shifts and expedients. The mean manageress charged threepence for a bath; for this sum the geyser produced a barely tepid puddle at the bottom of the tub.”

Mouse’s living situation at least seems jolly – although her meals “were apt to be a bit meagre”, they were “pleasantly served on brightly decorated earthenware, and our nice, pink-uniformed waitress was said to get specially good helpings for her tables.” The girls seem to survive on regular feasts of toasted “Veda” bread and gossip.

Despite Mouse’s endearing enthusiasm, it’s hard to escape the slight depressing air that hangs around the Club. The majority of its inhabitants (ranging in age from teenagers to 60 plus) are looking for the love affair that will take them away from it all – and the phone call that never comes:

“The company in the lounge seemed mainly composed of out-of-work actresses waiting for telephone calls from agents and managers, which seldom came. Some of these girls were doubly out of luck as they also awaited called from elusive men friends. (So many members were in the midst of unhappy love affairs, so few in the midst of happy ones – and even the fortunate few put in a good deal of time waiting for telephone calls. Every time the lounge door opened girls raised their heads hoping to hear their names called; then, when disappointed, sank back into apathy.”

Mouse does escape through a love affair – but she never marries. Instead, we later learn, she’s made a life through a “mishmash” of “acting, writing, book shops, dress shops”. (An experience that somewhat echoes the life of another interwar young lady, Jean Lucey Pratt, whose journals were recently published as A Notable Woman.) Mouse does, however, stay true to the enterprising, plucky new woman that, I learned last week, was being promoted by the advertising of the period.

In fact, Mouse refuses to grow old, shocking her village neighbours by her preference for sixties teenage fashions worn with “black woolly tights” and hanging out with the local twenty-something CND member. And, true to many of the stories contained in Singled Out (and Jean Lucey Pratt), she also remains only just one step away from financial peril. But Mouse a marvellous example of a Singled Out woman, a reminder that life could be different from what it had been before – if only you had the slight bit of capital, energy and dogged determination to make it so.


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Saturday 23 January 2016

Dude ranches and the women in denim

Women pose at a Wyoming ranch, c. 1930. From Fine Art of the West, via

In January, when we're seemingly encouraged to beat ourselves up for various life failings, I try to promote a bit of being nice to yourself. With that in mind, for the 'Looking Back' slot in that month's issue of The Simple Things, I suggested a feature on the history of denim - after all, what's easier than pulling on a pair of jeans?

Bar Nick Kamen in a laundrette and the occasional story of people hunting for priceless denim in abandoned mines, I knew very little about the topic and I headed straight for the copy of Denim: A Visual History in the British Library (always slightly too expensive on eBay). Among the familiar brand names of Levi's, Lee and Wrangler and their links to denim as workwear, I found a reference to the first Lady Levi's in the 1930s with a tantalising mention of them being born out of the freedom of the dude ranches, and their associations with the quickie divorce. And, naturally, that became one of my key preoccupations.

The fantastic thing about writing for a magazine is that you can call on people far more knowledgeable than yourself to fill in some of the gaps. I spoke to Professor Alison Goodrun, who had recently returned from the Autry Center for Western Heritage (you can read her excellent blog here), researching female dude ranchers and resort wear. Dude ranch holidays peaked in the 1920s and 30s and offered a 'back to nature' retreat for wealthy East coasters. In reality, these were elaborate commercial enterprises, offering all kind of creature comforts and pushing vacationers into their outfitters to get fully kitted out in your western gear. It was a form of holiday wear. Just as wearing beach pyjamas was allowable by the seaside, jeans became acceptable wear on the dude ranch. Although they were sold in a select few East coast stores, a pair of jeans brought back from the West was the sought after souvenir.


‘Dude Ranch Vacations’ print advert for Northern Pacific/Yellowstone Park Rail Line, in The Sportsman magazine, March 1933. (BNSF Railway Company). Via Style Stakes project


The idea of freedom is captured wonderfully in this advert, featured on Professor Goodrun's blog. Like the best adverts, it's completely aspirational, promising an escape from everyday life and from social norms. But, as she points out, it's a complete break from traditional 'Old World' riding gear - it's a challenge to the upright regulations of English riding turn-out.

The Women, via

As I mentioned the subject to others, the reference came back time and time again: The Women. In this 1939 film, they decamp on a ranch to Reno waiting for their divorcees to come through. Each woman wears their own take on the Western look, from Mary's suitably wholesome checked shirt to the Countess De Lave's glitzy and ridiculous get-up.


I love this image of a 1942 shop display at Chicago's Marshall Field & Company, showing suitable dude ranch attire for such wealthy women. And Lisette Model's photographs of soon-to-be divorcees at Nevada dude ranches, taken in 1949 for Harper's Bazaar, are also amazing.

Diana Cooper and Iris Tree, from Diana Cooper's Autobiography

All of these wealthy women in western wear took me back to an amazing image I'd seen much earlier, this grainy image of British aristocrat Diana Cooper, photographed with fellow actress Iris Tree, included in Cooper's autobiography. Had they too succumbed to ranch fever? Although not providing fulsome details, Cooper indeed writes of "an orgy of 'dude' buying" on their arrival into Kansas City. Ever the trend setter, Cooper's entry dates to 1926.

About the same time I filed my article, Denim: Fashion's Frontier opened at New York's FIT, exploring denim's history and including a shout-out to the dude ranch. Although I can't get to New York, I was pleased to discover FIT's assistant curator is giving a free lecture in London in March, which I can attend (side note: how great does this display about the Snow/Vreeland heyday of Harper's Bazaar sound?). How delightful also that the sequel to the popular street style book, Denim Dudes, will focus on Denim 'Dudettes' - promising more stylish women in denim.

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Sunday 3 January 2016

51 books in 2015 – how did I do?



At the start of 2014, I resolved to read 50 books over the course of the year. It was such a successful resolution (more so than never biting my nails again, perhaps unsurprisingly) that I decided to do it all again the following year, with the added challenge of trying to read one more book.

So, how did I do? You can see a list of the books I read during 2015 here. I’m pleased that I beat my target by two whole books. And, although I’m proud of my overall total – 53! – and the mixture of fiction and non-fiction, looking through the list, it’s quickly obvious that it’s quite limited in scope, with the vast majority written by white women. Only seven of the books were penned by men, just two were originally written in a language other than English and none date to pre-twentieth century.


Although I’ve enjoyed this year’s reading, it’s hard to pick out books I’ve really loved. There have been several big disappointments – Sarah Water’s The Paying Guests started out brilliantly, but descended into soapy disappointment; Carol was one of those rare examples of where I thought the film far surpassed the book (and I read the book first). I’ve yet to watch Brooklyn, but perhaps that will also fall into this category, as I loved Nora Webster far more than I did Colm Toibin’s earlier, much-praised book.



The book that took over my life and I was longing to discuss with other people was – as I think it was for many other people this year – A Little Life. I also consumed by Linda Grant’s stylish and intelligent take on aspirations in the second-half of the twentieth century in Upstairs at The Party.



I bemoaned my lack of books from earlier centuries, but the twentieth century got a very strong showing. I discovered some fantastic fiction from around the First World War, thanks to researching for a feature on the homefront for Article magazine, saw the 1920s and 30s through the eyes of Noel Streatfeild, enjoyed jitterbugging, rationing and fashioning in the 1940s, (im)perfect wives, debutantes and lesbians – and concrete buildings from the mid-century. And not forgetting the joy of 1980s movies, thanks to Hadley Freeman. That brings me onto the last book I read this year, which tells the story of women throughout the twentieth century through personal experience (albeit without so many references to Dirty Dancing a la Hadley). It’s A Notable Woman, the previously unpublished journals of Jean Lucey Pratt. She faithfully kept a diary from 1925, aged 15, up to her death in the 1980s. It’s wonderful discovery, and I hope to write something more substantial about it another time.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m aiming to read 54 books during 2016. You can follow my progress here. I’d like at least one to be pre-twentieth century, and definitely more by BAME authors. I might try and read a few more things men have written too.  

Any recommendations let me know. I’d also love to hear about your favourite – or most disappointing – books you’ve read this year.

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