Photos: Charles James: The Designer’s Life in Vogue
Photographed by Cecil Beaton, Vogue, May 10, 19301/15Nothing could keep Charles James, with his streamroller personality, from fashion: not his imposing British father, nor his lack of training. At age twenty, James became a milliner, using the name Charles Boucheron (borrowed from a friend), exciting attention by cutting his hats right on his customers’ heads. His well-heeled clientele, did not, however, include his immediate family, who were forbidden by James senior from patronizing the family’s own “mad hatter.”
In 1930, Cecil Beaton photographed the actress/dancer Tilly Losch, left, and the debutante Marianne Van Rensselaer in Boucheron hats for Vogue.
Photographed by Cecil Beaton, Vogue, November 1, 19362/15Among those posing for Cecil Beaton in James’s “poetic mantles” against a surreal set by fashion artist Christian “Bébé” Bérard, is the actress Ruth Ford. James’s client list, which was disproportionate to his small output, included burlesque performers and royalty, Vogue girls and literati, as well as designers. “I knew Chanel very well,” James would later tell New York magazine. “I gave her my dresses, but Mme Schiaparelli had to pay.”
Photographed by Horst P. Horst, Vogue, June 15, 19373/15This photograph of British actress Joan Fontaine in James’s delicate dress with ribbon bodice (the designer was at this time creating fabrics for the French textile house Colcombet), was published in 1937, the year that the then London-based James gave his first Paris presentation. Seeing the clothes, so the story goes, Paul Poiret, once “the king of fashion,” said to James: “I pass you my crown, wear it well.”
Photographed by Horst P. Horst, Vogue, March 1, 19404/15Vogue would praise James as a “master of color comparatives, of the cut and fold of exceptional cloths.” Here, his “grand-entrance evening cape . . . slit to make sweeping wings.”
René Bouët-Willaumez, Vogue, July 19445/15Obsolescence was not something that preoccupied James, who believed that his clothes were “on different schedules going into eternity.” “1944 or 1928?” quizzed Vogue when it published this sketch of a draped James dress. The answer? It was an updated (i.e. abbreviated) version of his “most famous London dress,” designed in 1928.
