What Am I Doing Here? by Bruce Chatwin

that were a model for their day, airy and flooded with light: ‘I remembered the horrible work conditions when I was a girl and I wanted ours to be the best . . . in that way you get the best work.’ She stationed herself in a strategic position on the main floor: no one who moved across the room escaped her vigilant eye: ‘We lost no valuable time . . . ’
    There was no time to be lost. The Maison Vionnet produced six hundred models a year, which is twice as many as Dior. Each dress was photographed for reasons of copyright: a practice hitherto unknown. Every label on a Vionnet dress bore the fingerprint of Madame herself. Illicit pirating of her designs distressed her, not for financial reasons, but because mass-production was a betrayal of her art. She needn’t have worried. A Vionnet dress relied on the subtlest combination of fine workmanship and handling of cloth. It was, in practice, uncopiable.
    She rarely designed models on paper, but created them in miniature on a small doll or mannequin eighty centimetres high. The doll is now one of the more famous props of French couture, but it mystified Abel Vionnet when his daughter brought it home in the evenings. She was a middle-aged woman, yet she persisted in dressing her doll. Had she failed to grow up?
    She confesses she was to blame for his bewilderment: ‘I dared not tell Papa the extent of my business. I was afraid he would pay us a visit, and make a public sermon on the evils of ambition.’
    Once Madame Vionnet had evolved her style, she stuck to it. When rival couturiers lifted skirts above the knee, she refused: ‘To show the knee is ordinaire . . . vulgaire . . . !’ She admired the fluid lines of Japanese costume and the severity of the Classical Greek tunic. Her most characteristic dress, to be seen in quantity at every race-meeting at Longchamps, was a shift of cream silk. But this Greek-inspired simplicity was manoeuvred to extremes of opulence. An evening gown of black velvet and white mink – her original combination – was the subject of one of Edward Steichen’s best fashion photographs for Vogue.
    A Vionnet dress looks nothing in the hand. It contains no pads, no artificial stiffening, and flops limply on its hanger. There are two hundred of them at the Centre de Documentation de la Couture, and they are something of a trial to the ladies who look after them. ‘What can one do with it?’ asks the curator with despairing eyes as she holds up a tube of flimsy white material – for she cannot work out how it was worn. She also tells me that Vionnet clients had the same difficulty, and used to telephone in panic when they couldn’t understand how to put a dress on.
    Not so Madame! She calls for the maid to take me upstairs, to the wardrobe where her favourite models are stored. We station a couturier’s dummy beside her chair, and on it put a black evening dress with a design of sea-horses, in the style of Attic red-figure vase painting. Suddenly, the hands shoot forward and with a tug here, another tug there, the dress miraculously comes alive.
    â€˜I am a woman of the most extraordinary vitality,’ Madame Vionnet assures me. ‘I have never been bored for a second. I have never been envious of anyone or anything, and now I have achieved a certain tranquillity.’ She is satisfied with her work, satisfied to sit in her salon and read a biography of Cardinal Richelieu.
    â€˜I could, of course, live in Rome,’ she reflects, as if a move to Rome were a possibility. ‘But I love my country and I wish to die here.’
    She does tire easily and, towards the end of the interview, her conversation tailed off into staccato bursts. But she is still interested in the events of Paris fashion – and certainly knows what to dislike! ‘Totalement déséquilibré!’ she snorts at a photo of a Courrèges dress in Vogue. Couture is the art for which she has lived,