Tango teas and fashion shows

The increasing popularity of sporting activities for women, the coordinated dance routines of the chorus line and the exhilaration of social dancing, from the tango to the maxixe (or machiche) and très moutarde, as well as many other popular dances, were the experiences of the body in motion that structured the viewing competences of pre-war fashion show audiences, and of the people who read about them in fashion magazines. As a stylized form of public intimacy, requiring contact not just of eye and hand but of the entire body, tango was a format perfectly suited for adaptation to the fashion show. At the beginning of the century, the syncopated patterns of American ragtime had arrived in Europe, chiming with the visual rhythms of chrono-photography, the chorus line and the fashion show. In 1903 Les Modes reported on the ‘crazy, instantaneous, incredible vogue’ for the new American dance le cake-walk that was replacing the passion for the valse lente (slow waltz).¹ For Jean Cocteau, it embodied the machine rhythms of modernity, brought from America to Paris in 1904 by the Elks, a husband and wife dance duo:

They danced, they glided, they reared, they bent double, treble, quadruple, they stood straight again, they bowed. And behind them a whole town, the whole of Europe, began to dance. And at their example rhythm took hold of the new world and after the new world the old world, and rhythm passed into the machines and from the machines it returned to the men and could never stop again.²

By 1914 popular dance tended to generate a standardized set of bodily movements. In the tango craze, which had started in 1911, the sinuous Argentinian tango became a Parisian staple: as one American journalist in Paris wrote in 1914, the French tango “is standardized, there are but five steps and of course everyone dances it alike. You can go anywhere in Paris and know that everyone will be dancing it alike and in a most exquisite manner.”³ By 1913 the tango craze had spread to fashion. The dance craze motivated designers to make dance dresses that allowed for the requisite movement: it was logical, therefore, to show these dresses in dance movements rather than by the customary mannequin walk; Poiret declared the new dances such as the tango and maxixe “the finest means of exhibiting women’s gracefulness.”⁴ In August 1913, Sem published the album Tangoville sur mer, in which he described “the tango of Paris, perfumed, wavy, adorably chiffonned, a product of the rue de la Paix.”⁵ That autumn, several couturiers incorporated dance demonstrations into their fashion shows. Also in 1913 Poiret designed costumes for a play, Le Tango, at the Théâtre de l’Athénée,⁶ and in September he invited the American dancers Irene and Vernon Castle Fig. 1 to dance at a tango dinner in the grounds of his house.

In New York, Lucile made Irene Castle’s tango dresses,⁷ while in Paris, Lucile’s 1913 autumn opening on Tuesday, 14 October took the form of a thé dansant, with music, tea and tangoing on the little stage equipped with professional stage lighting.⁸ The dancers were Lucile’s pretty ‘English manikins,’ wrote American Vogue, “who wore Lucile’s smartest tango frocks and—most wonderful of all things!—tango hair!”⁹ This consisted of coloured wigs in blue, green, violet or scarlet to match or contrast with the gowns they wore. Surviving newsreel shows her mannequins performing a tango modified by some social dance steps¹⁰ Fig. 2.

Paquin, by contrast, launched her autumn 1913 tango fashions from her London branch. On Monday, 24 November, she inaugurated a series of tango teas at the Palace Theatre, modelled by London girls chosen more for their looks than their dancing ability.¹¹ Fig. 3Her mannequins appeared on a white velvet-covered stage before descending on a narrow pathway into the auditorium to model four tango gowns, two for evening and two for day.¹² The fashion parade was preceded by professional dance demonstrations of the Argentine tango, the Brazilian maxixe and a ‘Futurist Waltz (coquetterie)’. In the interval between the demonstrations and the fashion parade, tea was served in both the foyer and the auditorium, where the theatre seats had been removed and replaced with tea tables and chairs.¹³

Entry to Paquin’s London Tango Teas was charged at five shillings and they ran every day of the week except Wednesdays.¹⁴ They set a London vogue for combined fashion shows and tango teas, sometimes also shown with film, like a mixed variety program.¹⁵ In spring 1914 Paquin’s mannequins modelled in New York in coloured tango wigs and tangoed in the intermission between shows, led by Irene and Vernon Castle.¹⁶ Tango was a way to bring elite fashion to a wide audience. Its purpose was marketing and publicity, rather than direct sales. Not all the women at tango teas were potential customers but, by choosing to show her tango fashions in London and New York rather than Paris, Paquin guaranteed international press coverage.

Besides tango teas, popular dance could be seen on newsreels and practised in Parisian dance schools where fashionable people went slumming de cinq à sept and ‘poets, … aristocrats and élégantes’ took tea at side tables and learnt “the new—and disreputable—dances.”¹⁷ An American fashion journalist in Paris wrote: “One goes to these spots [dance halls] for clothes as well as movement… The two are so closely connected over here, and elsewhere for that matter, that any discussion of one includes the other.”¹⁸ The laxity of dance hall culture began to permeate couture presentations and in 1914 Redfern held a tea at the fashionable restaurant and dance hall in the Bois de Boulogne, the Pré Catalan, mixing theatrical turns and dance demonstrations with a fashion show.¹⁹

Jeanne Paquin’s brother-in-law and one of her business partners, M. Joire, was an aficionado of popular dance hall culture and, in particular, of the tango. Mme Paquin said: “He is a dancing enthusiast—not that he dances himself, but he loves to stand and watch the tango and other dances in vogue, for they are the mirror of modern life. He is intensely interested in the aesthetics of dancing.”²⁰ So too was Sonia Delaunay who designed the first ‘simultaneous dress’ in 1913, which she wore to the Bal Bullier dance hall, although only as a spectator.²¹ By contrast, Gino Severini, passionately fond of dance halls, was himself an enthusiastic dancer who became interested in showing dancers in motion as opposed to what he saw as the static dance poses of Degas.²² Severini’s large dance hall painting, La Danse du ‘pan-pan’ au Monico (1909-11), with its suggestion of syncopation in the unexpected repetitions of the motif of the high-heeled shoe, was first shown in Paris in 1912.²³ However, it is his Blue Dancer of 1912 Fig. 4 that more effectively shows his intense interest in the movement of fabric and body together: the canvas is studded with real sequins stuck to the blue paint which is applied in translucent, faceted planes as thin as a layer of silk chiffon.

Moving to the music: Paquin and fashion in motion

The tango dress posed a particular challenge to designers: it had to allow movement without revealing too much leg. As the tango dancer leans her torso backwards beyond her centre of gravity, the back leg has to be extended and braced to take her weight. For this the fashionable skirts of the 1910s were too narrow and most couturiers solved the problem by introducing a slit up the back. Paquin, however, deplored the slit tango skirt.²⁴ Instead, M. Joire’s idea for the new tango collection was to replace the slash by inserting godets below the knee, fishtails of fabric that flared out in movement over the calves but preserved a slim silhouette in repose.²⁵ In 1914 Femina described the Paquin mannequins tangoing in New York in the new designs: “Their skirts which, following the line of the legs, were lightly pulled in by elastic at knee level, and then flared like the corollas of flowers, permitted a perfect freedom of movement.”²⁶ Mme Joire, Paquin’s sister-in-law and other business partner, demonstrated it to the journalists: “‘You see,’ she went on, kicking her right foot backward, ‘when one raises one’s foot in the dance, the skirt conforms perfectly to the motion, and there is nothing revealed.’”²⁷

In designing the new skirts, Paquin adopted a new method. Rather than requiring the mannequin to stand immobile for hours in the traditional way while a dress was cut on her, Paquin asked her mannequins to move in the models as she designed them, dancing, walking around and sitting down, so that she could correct all the faults that movement revealed.²⁸ Paquin called this “the quest for a very twentieth-century allure… with the minimum of fullness to give a woman entire freedom of movement”, and for that “we asked our mannequins to really live.”²⁹ The new skirt, “conceived to accompany all the movements of the walk and the dance”,³⁰ was launched in February 1914 on Paquin’s mannequin tour of America. In France it was launched not by mannequins but by the actress Arlette Dorgière in Paul Gavault’s Ma Tante d’Honfleur at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris.³¹ By April, it had been spotted at the Auteuil racetrack.³² Paquin’s incorporation of movement into the design process, and her design of clothes intended to be seen primarily in movement, anticipated by a decade Lucien Lelong’s ‘kinetic designs’ of the 1920s. Like Patou at Parry, Paquin provides evidence that the conjunction of movement and modernity were not solely a feature of 1920s’ modernism but, rather, that a modernist articulation of the body was occurring in the styling and showing of fashion before the First World War; the pre-war fashion show can, then, despite the Art Nouveau aesthetic of Paquin’s dresses, be understood as modernist in its underlying structures and scenography.

It is, however, a complicated form of modernism, one that is imbricated with everyday life, leisure and work in more complex ways than many art historical accounts of modernism allow. On the one hand, the fashion mannequin inaugurated a new kind of female performance in the 1910s. In the early 1900s the living mannequin had remained haunted by her prehistory as a static object; in the pre-war years that ghost was laid as she transformed herself into a walking, dancing subject—indeed, one who often troubled those of her contemporaries who worried about the changing role of women in the modern world. In movement, the mannequin vivant comes properly alive: no longer a living doll but an animated woman, she follows Paquin’s injunction to ‘really live’, vivre réellement. Yet, like her predecessor the figurante, it was as a silent woman performer that she really lived, one whose body was a speaking gesture, whose performance shared the characteristics of the new generation of actresses of the silent cinema such as Asta Nielsen, who turned their backs on nineteenth-century theatrical acting styles to create a new cinematic acting language of expressive movements of the entire body.

On the other hand, the scenography of the new mannequin performance situated it firmly in the realm of the rationalisation of the body. Paquin’s skirt was “the outcome of a modern necessity”, according to its designer.³³ The dance crazes of the pre-war years linked the mannequin irrevocably to movement and modernity but, in severing the links with the idea of the mannequin as an essentially static dummy, this modernist aesthetic linked her firmly to another kind of standardised body, the mechanical, synchronised and occasionally robotic body of modernism, a body which was rationalised across the cultural and commercial fields of art, work and leisure.

It was also a visceral body, nevertheless, tuned to the rhythms of modernity. As fashion mannequins moved to the rhythm, the designers they worked for touched a nerve in their musical choices. In 1904 Lucile was the first to use music at a fashion show.³⁴ Then, in Paris in 1911, Fantasio mocked her ‘miaow-sic’. By 1914 Sem was excoriating the mannequins parading to music, lambasting the tangos and music hall songs that accompanied them, but by then fashion show orchestras played popular dance tunes non-stop: “tango, one-step, très moutarde, and furlana”.³⁵

In 1913 the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was received with outrage. Like much music of 1913-14, its tri-tonal harmonies were an exercise in simultaneity but that was not its only offence. Alex Ross argues that the ending of the first part of the Rite of Spring, the Dance of the Earth, “prophesied a new type of popular art—low-down yet sophisticated, smartly savage, style and muscle intertwined… For much of the nineteenth century music had been a theatre of the mind; now composers would create a music of the body.”³⁶ Ross cites Virgil Thompson’s explanation of how “the body tends to move up and down in syncopated or polyrhythmic music because it wants to emphasis the main beat that the stray accents threaten to wipe out.”³⁷ The music of the body also provided a template for fashion modelling: physical, time-based and rhythmic, modelling can be organic and fluid or, equally, rule-bound and governed by conventions. At the same time that fashion began to absorb the rhythms of art and music, modernist music began to incorporate snatches of popular music like ragtime, jazz or tango, and to mimic the structures and patterns of fashion. Mary Davis argues that early twentieth-century fashion stood in an important relationship to “French musical modernism”.³⁸ In one example, she describes how Erik Satie was commissioned in 1914 by the fashion publisher Lucien Vogel to produce a piece on the theme of fashion. Satie’s score for Sports et divertissements incorporates the ‘perpetual tango’ and the racecourse, both associated with fashion modelling. Davis argues that it “is nothing short of a musical adaptation of the fashion magazine, complete with up-to-date illustrations depicting the latest styles.”³⁹ Ross identifies in Satie’s work ‘the germ of an alternative modernism’ that would reach maturity in the ‘machine-driven music of the twenties’, a specifically Parisian modernism that was “moving into the brightly lit world of daily life.”⁴⁰ In the 1920s this developed into what the dance historian Lynn Garafola calls ‘lifestyle modernism’ and ‘the sophisticated commonplace’, terms she uses to describe the compromised and conservative modernism of Cocteau in the 1920s: “Piquant, amusing, replete with the accoutrements of modern living… lifestyle modernism identified the new consumerist chic of the upper class.”⁴¹ Less judgementally, Ross recapitulates Garafola’s account of lifestyle modernism as combining ‘the spirit of high fashion, low culture and sexual play’, an apt description but one which somewhat voids Garafola’s thesis of its political critique.⁴²

Before the 1920s, however, in the period leading up to the First World War, syncopation and rhythm produced a swing and looseness to the body; fluid tango dresses moved to the music and a sense of possibility was articulated not in things but in patterns, matrices and flows, moving between flesh and fabric, sound and vision, commerce and culture.

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