Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster Read Online Free PDF Page B

the most beautiful shirt of linen lace. I think it was the most beautiful dress I’ve ever owned.”
     
    T HAT ALL CHANGED with World War II. When the Nazis arrived in Paris in 1940 , many luxury businesses and couture houses—including Chanel—closed shop. But couturier Lucien Lelong, head of the French couture association at the time, persuaded several to remain open to save jobs and preserve pride. During the Occupation, the Nazis ransacked the association’s headquarters and confiscated its archives. They closed some houses—Madame Grès and Balenciaga among them—and tried to shut down the industry fourteen times. Their plan was to move couture houses to Berlin and Vienna, which were to be Europe’s new cultural capitals. Lelong and his confreres would have nothing of it. “You can force us to do anything you like,” Lelong declared, “but Paris haute couture will never move, neither as a whole nor bit by bit. Either it stays in Paris or it ceases to exist.” To keep going, some luxury companies and couture houses sold their products to the wives of Nazi officers and collaborators. Vuitton was among them. It is a part of the family history that the company does not mention anywhere. In fact, it was effectively buried until Vuitton biographer Stéphanie Bonvicini exposed it in her book Louis Vuitton: une saga française , in 2004 .
    The Vuittons were as divided as France. Georges’s grandson Claude-Louis joined the Second Armored Division in 1944 and fought against the Germans. Granddaughter Denyse Vuitton’s husband, Jean Ogliastro, was sent to a concentration camp, and survived; a cousin named René Gimpel, a respected art dealer, died while being deported in January 1945 . Their father, Gaston-Louis, however, sided with French general Philippe Pétain’s Nazi-backed government in Vichy for both political as well as business reasons, and instructed his oldest son, Henry-Louis, to work with Pétain’s regime to keep Vuitton going. The company had a store on the ground floor of Vichy’s elegant Hôtel du Parc next to other luxury goods shops, including the jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels. All were shut down by the Nazis except Vuitton. Furthermore, Vuitton opened a factory to produce propaganda items, including more than twenty-five hundred busts of General Pétain, and Henry-Louis was decorated by Pétain’s regime for his loyalty.
    When the war concluded, it took some time for the luxury business to get going again. Materials were scarce, and some workers never came home. Most shuttered houses started up again and a few new ones opened, including Pierre Balmain, Givenchy, and Christian Dior; the latter kicked off the revival of couture with his New Look in 1947 . “The styles [during the Occupation] were incredibly hideous and I couldn’t wait to do something better,” Dior said. “I revived the ripe bosom, the wasp waist and the soft shoulders, and molded them to the natural curves of the feminine body. It was a nostalgic voyage back to elegance.”
    French actress Leslie Caron remembers the period well. In 1953 , fresh from her success in An American in Paris, the twenty-one-year-old Caron was escorted to Dior by her former ballet master Roland Petit because, he told her, “you need to be dressed properly.” As Caron told me one summer evening in the salon of her Left Bank apartment in Paris, “It was as important to be well dressed as it was to be educated, have good manners, eat well.”
    Caron and Petit met with Christian Dior and his head vendeuse at the avenue Montaigne headquarters salon. “Roland knew very well the première vendeuse, who was a grande dame de la societé —the vendeuses moved in those circles,” Caron said. “They knew what to wear to which event and wouldn’t let any dress be worn by two clients for the same event. Never. And they had great authority. When they said, ‘No, darling, that simply does not suit you!’ you listened.” After picking out a white satin