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| Hardy Amies ball gown (from the V&A collection) |
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| Hardy Amies and models |
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| Norman Hartnell dress for the actress Lilli Palmer to wear to a Coronation Ball in 1953 (from the V&A collection). |
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| Coronation gown by Norman Hartnell |
The
idea of a ball gown might seem anachronistic – gone are the days where a
debutante spent a season whirling around in voluminous dresses, hoping to be
swept off her feet (and thereafter down the aisle) by an eligible young man. But
a new V&A exhibition (Ballgowns: British Glamour since 1950) suggests that
the showstopping dress remains as potent a symbol of escapism as always. For
here is the glittering material evidence of the continuing power of the
Cinderella fairytale, wherein a girl’s life is transformed by the wand of a
fairy godmother who declares ‘you shall go to the ball’. Alternatively, in the
words of the V&A fashion curator Oriel Cullen, ‘ball gowns are so
celebratory, created for a grand occasion, and encapsulating a special moment,
that it seems appropriate to stage the exhibition now, in the year of the
Olympics and the Jubilee’.
The
pieces on show at the V&A span six decades: from Norman Hartnell’s royal
gowns in 1950s, to Catherine Walker’s 1989 ‘Elvis’ design for Diana, Princess
of Wales (so-called because of the high-standing white ruff collar,
embroidered, like the rest of the silk outfit, with thousands of pearls), to
more recent dresses by Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and Gareth Pugh. As
such, the ballgowns mark a shift from the traditional splendour of the
Coronation in 1953 to the celebrity exhibitionism of the red carpet; and also,
as observed by Sonnet Stanfill (co-curator of the V&A exhibition), ‘from
the private event to the public parade’. Not that the debutantes of the 1950s
were kept from outside view: the social season included Royal Ascot and
regattas at Henley and Cowes. They were photographed at Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball, all of them wearing long white dresses, as if in training for
their future weddings, and arriving at Buckingham Palace to be presented to the
Queen (a tradition described by Prince Philip as ‘bloody daft’, which finally
ended in 1958).
Above
all, the pageantry of the Coronation, with its attendant parties and receptions,
was an opportunity for British ballgowns to be displayed at their most splendid,
in a manner that went beyond the surface frivolities of fashion. Oriole Cullen
notes that in the run-up to the Coronation, the Queen’s couturier Norman
Hartnell had an atelier employing 350 people, not only producing ball gowns for
society women, but also formal robes for all the female members of the Royal
Family. ‘This parade of monarchy… which heralded the future reign of Queen
Elizabeth II, was a welcome celebration for many after the years of austerity
that followed the Second World War, and this most spectacular of ceremonies
signalled a hoped-for return to a period of prosperity.’
Of
the gowns on show at the V&A, one in particular demonstrates a touch of the
gaiety and glamour that lightened the pomp of a royal occasion: designed by
Hartnell for the actress Lilli Palmer to wear to a Coronation ball, it is of
cream duchesse satin embellished with pink beaded petals and leaves, including a
pair of saucily flamboyant flowers over each breast. And despite the widespread
characterization of the early Fifties as an era of deferential convention in
British society, the young debutantes who were presented at court were not immune
to subversive tendencies: in 1952, firecrackers were discovered inside the
traditional party cake at Queen Charlotte’s Ball, ready to explode when it was
cut. As for sex, the ‘debs’ delights’ on offer were variously catalogued as MSC (‘Makes Skin Creep’) or NSIT (‘Not
Safe In Taxis’); Patrick Lichfield, then a young Sandhurst officer who
accompanied his sister as a debutante in 1958, confessed in his memoir to
having fallen into the latter category, but remembered the season with some
affection. ‘Those deb dances were, for a while at least, sheer magic; acre upon
acre of pink chiffon and starched cotton effortlessly ebbing and flowing… the
whole in constant motion all the while until I began to feel myself in serious
danger of becoming socially seasick.’
Sartorial
rebellion was inevitable, away from decorous ballgowns and toward the iconoclasm
represented by Mary Quant, who opened her first King’s Road boutique in 1955. Two
years previously, Quant had met her future husband and business partner, Alexander
Plunket Greene, at Goldsmiths Art School; by then, although she admired Englishwomen’s
tweeds, she was already dubious about the merits of their evening dresses.
‘Quite grand young women had to have their frocks made by aged retainers
retired off in the upstairs attics of Victorian-style households,’ she writes
in her recent autobiography. ‘Young women would point out the charms of some
delicious dress in French Vogue and Mabel the ex-nanny would have a bash at
making it, with some heavy fabric bought, reduced, in Jacqmar’s sale. The poor
girls then had to compete with a chic debutante over from Paris…’
Quant,
of course, became famous for her controversial mini-skirts; but the move to
off-the-peg fashion was also apparent in couturiers like John Cavanagh, who
introduced a boutique line of evening gowns for younger customers. Cavanagh had
worked with Pierre Balmain in Paris for three years, from 1947, before opening
his own premises in Mayfair in 1952, and his rigorous training in French couture
refined his ready-to-wear designs. The V&A exhibition includes Cavanagh’s
chic black petal dress, impeccably tailored but with a youthful insouciance,
alongside a more startling mustard yellow evening gown worn by the young
Princess Anne from the boutique range at Bellville Sassoon (the latter a design
house established in 1953 by a former debutante, Belinda Bellville).
Not
that the ballgown is the sole preserve of the ingenue, as is apparent in the
designs of the redoubtable Hardy Amies, who opened his Savile Row couture house
after distinguishing himself as a British Intelligence officer during the
Second World War, and received a royal
warrant as the Queen’s dressmaker in 1955. The V&A collection contains two
elegantly grownup gowns by Amies, one in subtle grey silk with a contrasting
pink sash, and another in bold crimson satin, chosen by a Mrs Lister Bolton,
that would look as confident now if worn by Cate Blanchett on a red carpet as
it did in 1950.
But
given their fairytale associations, it seems fitting that some of the most
memorable ballgowns exist untrammeled in the imagination, rather than within the
sealed vitrines of the V&A. As an undergraduate in the early Eighties, I
would buy second-hand ballgowns (no one called them vintage in those days) from
a stall in Cambridge market, for less than a couple of pounds apiece. The
dresses were older than I was, yet perfect for all manner of youthful pleasures
(my favourite, in lemon yellow chiffon, took me from picnics to garden parties
to a Roxy Music concert). Sadly, none of them survived unscathed (torn on my
bicycle, stained with grass or smudged with ink); unlike the gown most
cherished in my memory, worn by Nancy Mitford’s heroine in ‘The Pursuit of
Love’: ‘Linda had one particularly ravishing ball-dress made of masses of pale
grey tulle down to her feet… and made a sensation whenever she appeared in her
yards of tulle, very much disapproved of by Uncle Matthew, on the grounds that
he had known three women burnt to death in tulle ball-dresses.’
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| John Cavanagh evening gown (V&A collection) |
Mitford
wrote lovingly of Linda in 1945, looking back to a golden summer season before
the grim shadows of the Second World War. In the reality of the harsh winter
that followed, when rationing was still severe, Mitford ventured out to her first
big party since the beginning of the war in an improvised dress, made by sewing
an old nightie onto a cast-off satin ball-gown. ‘I think at balls it is better
to look a joke than dreary don’t you,’ she remarked to her sister Diana.
Subsequent pictures of Mitford reveal her to look neither dreary nor a joke; she
used the money she made from The Pursuit of Love to move to Paris and buy
herself Dior couture.
Nowadays,
the ball-gown appears to be having something of a revival, and not only for
Hollywood celebrities twirling on the awards circuit. Shanghai’s first
debutante ball was staged in January this year, with ten British debs flown in
for the occasion, to mingle with some of the richest people in China. In the
new world of global capitalism, it seems that the ballgown still has a place in
a fairytale with a twist; white satin and diamond tiaras, beneath the red flag
of Communism flying high over the People’s Republic of China.
