CHAPTER ONE
SUCH CLOTHES HAVE NEVER BEEN MADE IN AMERICA BEFORE
Edna Woolman Chase and Carmel Snow
Vogue's role in the first few months of the war was a gratifying if complex one... We were the liaison between Paris and New York. The most cogent questions from the Paris office were: How does the wind blow on Seventh Avenue? Are the wholesalers profiting by the war to push American design? —EDNA WOOLMAN CHASE
I was no more willing to concede the permanent fall of Paris than General de Gaulle. —CARMEL SNOW
New York, January 13, 1940
The morning was chilly and overcast, with a promise of rain before the day was done. The ice-cold waters of the Hudson, lapping up against the hull of the SS Washington, docked at Pier 59 on Manhattan's West Side, were the same discouraging gray as the sky. Passengers filing onto the ship turned up their collars against the wind that gusted skirts above knees and threatened to send hats pinwheeling into the river. As they waited to show their tickets, they could not help but notice the ship's new wartime insignia. High above the waterline, on both the port and starboard sides and large enough to be visible even in poor conditions at sea, were painted her name; the name of the shipping company that owned her, United States Lines; and two enormous American flags. It was a precaution meant to prevent attacks on civilian vessels. No ship wanted to meet the same fate as the Athenia, a British passenger liner that had been torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in September, just two days after the outbreak of the war, with a loss of 125 lives, many of them children. By unmistakably labeling the Washington a civilian ship, United States Lines hoped to keep her and her passengers safe.
The risk involved in crossing the Atlantic, combined with wartime restrictions on travel to belligerent countries, meant that although the Washington had been built to carry more than 1,100 passengers, only 167 were boarding that day for the crossing to Genoa. One group that was not to be deterred, however, were the American retailers and journalists who bought and reported on Paris fashion. They were bound for the spring 1940 collections, which were proceeding despite the fact that France was at war. Neither Hitler's submarines nor his armies could dissuade them from making the pilgrimage, even if it meant traveling via a neutral Italian city and continuing their journey by train.
In previous years, the American fashion contingent had made the Atlantic crossing so frequently, some as often as seven times a year, that their preferred boat, the French liner Normandie, had been nicknamed the Seventh Avenue Express, a reference to what was then the very center of the American fashion industry, a square mile of midtown Manhattan where more than five thousand firms designed and produced almost all the nation's clothes. The war, however, had raised concerns about how the French Legend would continue to work its charm. World War I had registered as barely a blip to the fashion world, with almost no interruption in the haute couture schedule or the export of French clothes; like migratory birds, American buyers crossed the Atlantic twice a year throughout that conflict, running the gauntlet of German submarines and mines each time. So far, Paris had again been spared. But if that was to change, the fashion industries of both the United States and France would be radically altered. To those who worried about the continued good health of the Paris couture, the fate of the Normandie presented a troubling metaphor. On this winter morning, Seventh Avenue's favorite boat was docked forty blocks uptown, at Pier 88. At the outbreak of the war, the $50 million liner had been in New York Harbor; rather than bring her back to her home port, where she could fall into German hands, the French Line had opted to leave her there (she would later be scrapped after being damaged by fire while being converted to an American troop ship). Her opulent Art Deco interiors, which had once hosted celebrities like Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich, were silent and dark.
Fashion was one of France's chief industries, both culturally prestigious and, with an annual turnover of 25 billion francs, of vital economic importance. But the presence of international buyers and press, coupled with the ability to export the couturiers' designs, was critical to its well-being. If the war made this impossible, the economic fallout would be instantaneous, as it had been when the onset of the Great Depression had curtailed spending from North and South America and dozens of couture houses had closed. When France found itself at war in September 1939, the government instituted an immediate mobilization. Trenches were dug in Paris's Tuileries Garden, and able-bodied men, including many couturiers, were instructed to report for duty.
Vogue's Paris editor, Bettina Wilson (who would become Bettina Ballard when she married for the second time, in 1947, to an architect named William F. R. Ballard), reported that within a week, the city had emptied of men: "You couldn't find a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, a butcher—it was a mass male exit." But as the Phoney War—or drôle de guerre, the nine-month lull in military action that followed the defeat of Poland in September 1939—dragged on, the French government, conscious of the economic importance of their work and the many jobs that relied on the success of their collections, gave the couturiers leave to return to their studios to design the spring 1940 collections. To woo the Americans and ease the inconvenience of the voyage, the couturiers' association, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, had paid for a special train to transport them from Genoa to Paris. Traveling on the Washington were officials from the French embassy, ready to deploy their professional charm to ensure that the orders from New York continued to flow. For their part, the Americans boarding the ship that morning did so with the feeling that they were coming to the aid of their French colleagues; many had even packed food and other small luxuries to distribute when they arrived in Paris.
