From the Cradle to the Best-Dressed List and Back
Note: Introduction missing
… company, installed themselves at the Plaza Hotel and called up
buyers and fashion editors. They came, looked at the clothes, which
were to sell from $10 to $35 in sizes 3 to 6x, approved of Mrs. Lent's
theories, placed orders and wrote feature stories.
"Everything has been Eton or terribly appliqued, and no color," said
Mrs. Lent, listing what was wrong with boys' clothes. "Little boys are
all bones and beautiful little necks. They should have clean lines
and nice colors, without looking like little girls, of course. I also
love white on little boys." But don't little boys have an affinity for
dirt?" someone asked. "I change my son two times a day. I want him to
have pride in himself," Mrs. Lent replied.
She took the Eton jacket and made it into a cutaway. "It's an
18th-century look," she said. She did away with collars and sleeve
buttons. Short pants buttoned onto shirts instead of being held up
with straps. "They're always falling and driving little boys crazy,"
she said. She also omitted the fly from the pants, seemingly unconcerned
about what this would do to a newly toilet-trained size 3.
Nevertheless, Rachel Lent struck a responsive chord in the fashion
industry. Said Women's Wear Daily on September 19, 1966:
RACHEL LENT ALWAYS DOES EVERYTHING RIGHT. Mrs. Lent's holiday clothes for little boys are paragons of fashion rectitude and propriety. Her attention to just the right fashion details makes all the difference.
LITTLE MR. RIGHT wears Mrs. Lent's blue worsted playsuit with white stitching trim and white pearl buttons. Mrs. Lent never heard of plastic buttons.
Two months later, Women's Wear reported again on Rachel Lent:
RACHEL DOESN'T APPROVE Of the way most parents dress their boys. "Mothers do everything for their little girls except buy them fur coats, and the boys walk into school in T-shirts and jeans. A child's appearance has an awful lot to do with his behavior. Put a girl in a pretty dress and she behaves like a lady. If you put a boy in something he really likes he will behave tike a well-mannered child-and I don't mean like Little Lord Fauntleroy.".
Until recently, little boys had been the last of the free souls.
They were let alone between the time they graduated from diapers
they felt compelled to become teen-age pests. No one bothered about
their fashion quotient. Then jealous mothers, whose friends were
having such fun coordinating themselves to their daughters, started
lobbying. Designers heard them. Now they and wishful writers like
those who work for Women's Wear Daily refuse to believe that boys are
made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. As far as they and
other progressive elements in the fashion industry are concerned,
boys are coordinated sugar and spice. They can be coordinated to their
mothers, sisters or their fathers. "Dressed like twin brothers, a
father and a son," reads a caption in L'Express, the French weekly
news magazine, beside a photograph of a three-foot pygmy with
sideburns descending to the bottom of his earlobes, his hands jammed
into the pockets of his tweed trousers. "We've already had the
mother-daughter look. Thanks to the lightning progress of baby
ready-to-wear, it's been extended to boys. Junior may, like papa,
wear a crinkled cotton shirt, coordinated Shetland pullover and
trousers and buckskin jacket. Provided, alas, that papa can afford
them. Striped crinkled cotton shirt, 39 francs. Shetland, open at the
neck, 69 francs. Trousers, 59 francs. Buckskin jacket, 220 francs.
O'Kennedy, 50 Champs-Élysées." Figure roughly 5 francs to the dollar
Boy or girl, the child who performs his duty as an accessory to his
mother and father must have a look, a carefully coordinated look.
The ideal family has a total look consisting, for example, of a child
tailored by Rowes of Bond Street, a father with the unmistakable seal
of Huntsman of Savile Row and a mother stitched together by
Mainbocher. Or a fillette in a Dorothee Bis Bis mini-knit with a
maman in a Christiane Bailly jersey from Dorothée Bis and a papa with
a suit from the prêt-à-porter department at Pierre Cardin. In the
absence of suitable parents, the child may be coordinated to the
family that his would like to be. Would anyone ask a 4-year-old with
a blue Y on his sweater if his father really went to Yale?
Even if their parents are inept about style, the Sixties generation
of kids has its own idols. Caroline and John F. Kennedy, Jr., are
perennial leaders of the Best-Dressed Children's List, an unofficial
register that has never been formally published because there is no
need to. There are more than enough Kennedy cousins to fill the
places. The three children of John Vliet Lindsay are their potential
rivals. "We've got another little John," exulted a press photographer
after Lindsay's election in 1965. He was referring to the mayor's
son, then 5,
same age as John Kennedy. What with their skiing, horseback riding
and private school attendance, the Lindsays are just the sort of
children who enrapture socially conscious editors. Their parents,
however, have an old-fashioned reluctance to use them as props,
except in the dire need of a campaign.
The Kennedys, then, have to bear the brunt of the mass media's
attention. Women's Wear Daily photographers have caught young John
leaving the Colony Restaurant after lunch with his mother and snapped
Caroline en route from her Fifth Avenue apartment to the Convent of
the Sacred Heart. Unfazed by Caroline's uniform, Women's Wear managed
to run up a trend in her monogrammed schoolbag.
"We are all people who like to identify," says Joseph Miller,
president of the Miller Harness Company, an emporium for horse and
rider that hasn't been hurt one bit by the Kennedys' patronage and
by the widespread dissemination of photographs of Caroline and her
mother in the saddle. "When you see those pictures, they look so
nice. They look as though they were the chosen people. Naturally,
mothers feel that whatever people like that want for their children,
they want it too."
John Kennedy lacks his sister's enthusiasm for horses, but he
shows every sign of being a regular guy, according to the Central
Park playground benchwarmers who have observed him in chinos and
turtle neck. Nevertheless, he is piling up negative points from his
peers because of the sissy styles his mother foists upon him for
state occasions when the photographers are on hand. He managed to
come undone from the white silk shirt with ruffled front, blue satin
cummerbund, white shorts and black patent slippers that he wore as a
page in a Newport wedding. But the harm that just such outfits and
his hairdo have done to other boys his age is incalculable. "Young
John Kennedy, in his red shoes and the way his mother keeps him so
impeccably dressed have had a lot of influence on children's
fashion," said Bill Blass as he started designing for little boys.
John's haircut may have-brought adverse criticism from around the
country into the White House when he lived there, but. since then it
has become epidemic. The impact of his sister's blond hair drawn to
the side with a barrette when she was his age was minor by comparison.
Before John was born. the mophead coiffure was called the "English
cut" or the "Prince Charles" and it was a struggle for a mother to
refuse it for her son if she patronized chic children's barber
shops like Michael's or Paul Mole's on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
In those neighborhoods, England has always been the mother country
and the crew cut the mark of the American peasant. When Prince
Charles was a small boy, his hair was worn parted to one side with
moderate bangs that left half the forehead bare, high sideburns and
a clean-shaven neck. But then the heir to the British throne faded
away to Gordonstoun, America gained its own royal family and little
John Kennedy became the trend setter in young male fashion. Under his
leadership, the coiffure thickened into a thatch with a pronounced
bulge at the back. The bangs grew into the eyes. The "John-John cut,"
as it came to be known, was conferred even on boys who go to public
or private progressive schools rather than traditional,
English-accented institutions. They liked it, though, because it
reminded them of the Beatles.
The Kennedy children's look is, unquestionably, a form of
Anglophilic fashion with a touch of the ancien régime as practiced
by the international set. It's a look of gentility and security, of
knowing one's place right at the top in a world where children were
not beard, but, when they were seen, they looked exquisite. It
presupposes a British nanny up to the age of six or thereabouts when,
as the avid Kennedy-watchers noted, one changes to a Swiss-French
governess.
I am saying, little girl, I think you are a real human being. I want to dress you with dignity. In other words, I want to give the child presence without gimmicks or gadgets. I think back to the time I was a child, and how I felt when I wore my pretty dresses. Designers should do this for adult fashions, too.
That was in 1964, the watershed of the pop Sixties, and Miss Lee,
a grandmother, was already sounding quaint.
British mass manufacturers are updating the classics by
translating them into machine-washable fabrics and livelier colors.
Unfortunately, some of them feel obliged to inject something of
Carnaby Street and the Kings Road and when they come up with blinding
prints and hip-hugger belts for toddlers (don't they know that
toddlers don't have hips?) the consequences are depressing. Restraint,
one of the most admirable British characteristics, is, however, the
enemy of forced obsolescence, as the English merchants who are trying
to memorize their American mass merchandising lessons have caught
onto.
American fashion editors are even more ambivalent and that's why
the world of children as depicted in a fashion magazine is such a
slick, sick fantasy. Trying to perpetuate the dying life style of the
British aristocracy and attempting to whet consumer appetites under
the pretense of disseminating news are irreconcilable objectives. The
biggest advertisers in their publications are the producers of
Kodel, Orion, Fortrel and other fibers that go into mass-produced,
mass-priced clothes by manufacturers whose taste often affronts the
editors' refined sensibilities.
And so the fashion editor takes the $6 synthetic knit suit she
despises and sticks it on a child model whose hair is brushed into
his eyes, and whose sausagy thighs will protrude from the short
pants. Heavy English knee socks and sturdy brogues provide the
subliminal message. Depending on the publication that employs her,
she may put him in a group photograph with a Eurasian boy (straight
black hair completely obscuring his forehead), a Negro girl and a
child of either sex who has the map of Lodz on its face. But all of
them are English from the knees down with identical heavy cuffed
socks and brogues. "That's fashion's melting pot.
Fashion editors have U stubborn sense of mission about lifting
the taste level of the masses that survives any amount of commercial
compromise they are obliged to make. And so, in the same issue in
which they "take care of the musts" (feature merchandise by big
advertisers) they try to garner some space for the crusade.
The editorial pages that are the quid pro quo for the
advertisements have captions that carefully enunciate the name of
the manufacturer and the fiber that makes the fabric in the garment
so attractive to nanny-less, laundress-less mothers, as well as the
price of the garment, which is usually sensible, too. The advertiser
is supposed to be kept happy by seeing his name in print and by the
flood of orders that will result. Unless, of course, the readers are
baffled by the presentation.
Take the December 1966 issue of Harper's Bazaar, which contains
two pages of advertising in the front of the magazine for Kate
Green-away dresses in Kodel and cotton, and Dacron and cotton fabric.
Toward the back of the magazine are four pages of photographs of
Kate Greenaway dresses in Dacron and cotton, size 7 to 12 (usually
worn by girls from 6 to 10 years old). The model is a ballet dancer
of indeterminate age and melancholy mien. She stands barefoot amid
deep grass and leafy trees, clad in a simple lace-banded shift that
would have ended in a proper length for a child, halfway up the
thigh, were it not for a lace ruffle under the hemline. The caption
reads:
Lace-trimmed pantalets peeping from under the refreshing simplicity of a pale chocolate brown shift with encirlings of lace--a perfect treat to wear on a visit to the Palace of Sweetmeats in the Forest of Christmas. The pantalets, our concoction. Dress by Kate Greenaway, in Dacron and cotton. About $11. At Bonwit Teller; Wanamaker's, Philadelphia; Frost Brothers, San Antonio. . . .
Translation: The pantalets are not for sale because the
manufacturer didn't make them, but the fashion editor believes in
them. Could it be because Pierre Cardin and Jacques Tiffeau were
making them for mini-skirted adults?
So much for expediency. Now onward to the articles of faith.
In the same issue are four pages of color photographs, entitled
"Rhymes in an English Nursery," depicting what might as well be dear
Queen Victoria's children making merry while mama confers with
Disraeli in another part of the palace:
TWINKLE. TWINKLE, LITTLE STAR? HOW I WONDER WHAT YOU ARE! Peeping out between the curtains of the night nursery, Edwina Hicks questions the Little Star while Master Ashley rides carelessly by on an antique toy-horse tricycle. Edwina wears a turquoise poplin pinafore tucked over a bright green poplin dress. Master Ashley companions her in a poplin shirt, a jerkin, knee breeches of corduroy. The children are the son and daughter of Mr. David Hicks and Lady Pamela Hicks. Mr. Hicks is the prominent interior decorator; Lady Pamela, the-daughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten and a cousin of the Queen. Their home, decorated by Mr. Hicks, is the brick, early Georgian, Britwell Salome, in Oxford.
LITTLE POLLY FLINDERS? SAT AMONG THE CINDERS. Nestled in her nursery fireplace at Hampstead, 4-year-old Lady Cosina Vane Tempest-Stewart, daughter of the Marquis and Marchioness of Londonderry. Locks tucked in a mob cap, Lady Cosina wears pink corduroy. The fashions on these pages were designed by Jinnie Spencer for Mary-Louise of London.
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