Проектная работа "Французская мода во времена Coco Chanel"

High Fashion:

Life, fate and new look of the fashion genii of 20^th century

Content

1.  My word to readers………………………………………..3

2.  The term «fashion»…………………………………………4

3.  The 20^th century……………………………………………5

4.  Coco Chanel: the woman of the century…………….. 6

5.  Christian Dior: the light at the end of the tunnel…10

6.  And then appeared Yves… the last master of fashion………………………………………………………16

7.  My research work «To observe fashion»………………21

8.  Conclusion………………………………………………….23

9.  References…………………………………………………..24

My word to readers

Fashion is around us. Fashion is in every song, in every cloth, in every book and look. Fashion - another world, where everyone is unique. Peoples` progress has become the greatness of all the times, and fashion is also a perfect progress of people, in which you can find pleasure of the heart and of the mind.

High fashion at least is a pleasure of the designers` hands, it is the art, full of uniqueness and aesthetics.

Why did I choose this topic? - Because I adore the genii of the 20^th century, their talents, their ideas, their unordinary mind, which can create the things that have become classic in those years and even today.

The life of such people is difficult, full of sufferings, black lines and depressions, but their lives are full of pleasure moments too: recognition, glory and new ways of fate. Although genii always finish their lives in bad conditions, because of alcohol, drugs and chaotic way of life, they are happy of the things they have made for the world.

That is why I want to tell you about the tragedies of the main Masters of Fashion. I hope, it will be interesting for you.

Thank you.

The author of the project

 Christine Ulyanenok

Fashion refers to the styles and customs prevalent at a given time. In its most common usage, "fashion" exemplifies the appearances of clothing, but the term encompasses more. Many fashions are popular in many cultures at any given time. Important is the idea that the course of design and fashion will change more rapidly than the culture as a whole.

The terms "fashionable" and "unfashionable" were employed to describe whether someone or something fits in with the current or even not so current, popular mode of expression. The term "fashion" is frequently used in a positive sense, as a synonym for glamour, beauty and style. In this sense, fashions are a sort of communal art, through which a culture examines its notions of beauty and goodness. The term "fashion" is also sometimes used in a negative sense, as a synonym for fads and trends, and materialism. A number of cities are recognized as global fashion centers and are recognized for their fashion weeks, where designers exhibit their new clothing collections to audiences. These cities are Paris, Milan, New York, and London. Other cities, mainly Los Angeles, Berlin, Tokyo, Rome, Miami, Hong Kong, São Paulo, Sydney, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Madrid, Montreal, Mumbai, Vienna, Auckland, Moscow, New Delhi, San Juan, Stockholm, Turin and Dubai also hold fashion weeks and are better recognized every year.

20^th century world of fashion

The 20^th century opened a new era of fashion. It was the time of new thoughts and looks, the time of great projects and talented people, of genii and breaking stereotypes.

1920s

The 1920s was the decade in which fashion entered the modern era. It was the decade in which women first liberated themselves from constricting fashions and began to wear more comfortable clothes (such as short skirts or pants). Men likewise abandoned overly formal clothes and began to wear sport clothes for the first time. The suits which men wear today are still based, for the most part, on those which were worn by men in the late 1920s.

The 1920's were characterized by two distinct periods of fashion. The early 1920s where nature and change progressed slowly as many were reluctant to adopt the new styles. From 1925, the styles that have been associated with the Roaring Twenties were passionately embraced by the public and would continue to characterize fashion until late in 1930.

There was real start of High Fashion was, when Coco Chanel represented herself as a couturier.

Coco Chanel: the woman of the century

She was shrewd, chic and on the cutting edge. The clothes she created changed the way women looked and how they looked at themselves.

Coco Chanel wasn't just ahead of her time. She was ahead of herself. If one looks at the work of contemporary fashion designers as different from one another as Tom Ford, Helmut Lang, Miuccia Prada, Jil Sander and Donatella Versace, one sees that many of their strategies echo what Chanel once did. The way, 75 years ago, she mixed up the vocabulary of male and female clothes and created fashion that offered the wearer a feeling of hidden luxury rather than ostentation are just two examples of how her taste and sense of style overlap with today's fashion.

Chanel would not have defined herself as a feminist — in fact, she consistently spoke of femininity rather than of feminism — yet her work is unquestionably part of the liberation of women. She threw out a life jacket, as it were, to women not once but twice, during two distinct periods decades apart: the 1920s and the '50s. She not only appropriated styles, fabrics and articles of clothing that were worn by men but also, beginning with how she dressed herself, appropriated sports clothes as part of the language of fashion. One can see how her style evolved out of necessity and defiance. She couldn't afford the fashionable clothes of the period — so she rejected them and made her own, using, say, the sports jackets and ties that were everyday male attire around the racetrack, where she was climbing her first social ladders.

It's not by accident that she became associated with the modern movement that included Diaghilev, Picasso, Stravinsky and Cocteau. Like these artistic protagonists, she was determined to break the old formulas and invent a way of expressing herself. Cocteau once said of her that "she has, by a kind of miracle, worked in fashion according to rules that would seem to have value only for painters, musicians, poets."

By the late '60s, Chanel had become part of what she once rebelled against and hated — the Establishment. But if one looks at documentary footage of her from that period, one can still feel the spit and vinegar of the fiery peasant woman who began her fashion revolution against society by aiming at the head, with hats. Her boyish "flapper" creations were in stark contrast to the Belle Epoque millinery that was in vogue at the time, and about which she asked, "How can a brain function under those things?" Something that Chanel can never be accused of is not using her brain. Her sharp mind is apparent in everything she did, from her savvy use of logos to her deep understanding of the power of personality and packaging, even the importance of being copied. And she was always quotable: "Fashion is not simply a matter of clothes. Fashion is in the air, born upon the wind. One intuits it. It is in the sky and on the road."

It is fitting, somehow, that Chanel was often photographed holding a cigarette or standing in front of her famous Art Deco wall of mirrors. Fashion tends to involve a good dose of smoke and mirrors, so it should come as no surprise that Gabrielle Chanel's version of her life involved a multitude of lies, inventions, cover-ups and revisions. But as Prada said to me: "She was really a genius. It's hard to pin down exactly why, but it has something to do with her wanting to be different and wanting to be independent."

Certainly her life was unpredictable. Even her death — in 1971, at the age of 87 in her private quarters at the Ritz Hotel — was a plush ending that probably would not have been predicted for Chanel by the nuns in the Aubazine orphanage, where she spent time as a ward of the state after her mother died and her father ran off. No doubt the sisters at the convent in Moulins, who took her in when she was 17, raised their eyebrows when the young woman left the seamstress job they had helped her get to try for a career as a cabaret singer. This stint as a performer — she was apparently charming but no Piaf — led her to take up with the local swells and become the backup mistress of Etienne Balsan, a playboy who would finance her move to Paris and the opening of her first hat business. That arrangement gave way to a bigger and better deal when she moved on to his friend, Arthur ("Boy") Capel, who is said to have been the love of her life and who backed her expansion from hats to clothes and from Paris to the coastal resorts of Deauville and Biarritz. One of her first successes was the loose-fitting sweater, which she belted and teamed with a skirt. These early victories were similar to the clothes she had been making for herself — women's clothes made out of Everyman materials such as jersey, usually associated with men's undergarments.

Throughout the '20s, Chanel's social, sexual and professional progress continued, and her eminence grew to the status of legend. By the early '30s she'd been courted by Hollywood, gone and come back. She had almost married one of the richest men in Europe, the Duke of Westminster; when she didn't, her explanation was, "There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Chanel." In fact, there were many Coco Chanels, just as her work had many phases and many styles, including Gypsy skirts, over-the-top fake jewelry and glittering evening wear — made of crystal and jet beads laid over black and white georgette crepe — not just the plainer jersey suits and "little black dresses" that made her famous. But probably the single element that most ensured Chanel's being remembered, even when it would have been easier to write her off, is not a piece of clothing but a form of liquid gold — Chanel No. 5, in its Art Deco bottle, which was launched in 1923. It was the first perfume to bear a designer's name.

One could say perfume helped keep Chanel's name pretty throughout the period when her reputation got ugly: World War II. This is when her anti-Semitism, homophobia (even though she herself dabbled in bisexuality) and other base inclinations emerged. She responded to the war by shutting down her fashion business and hooking up with Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a Nazi officer whose favors included permission to reside in her beloved Ritz Hotel. Years later, in 1954, when she decided to make a comeback, her name still had "disgraced" attached to it.

Depending on the source, Chanel's return to the fashion  world has been variously attributed to falling perfume sales, disgust at what she was seeing in the fashion of the day or simple boredom. All these explanations seem plausible, and so does Karl Lagerfeld's theory of why, this time around, the Chanel suit met such phenomenal success. Lagerfeld — who designs Chanel today and who has turned the company into an even bigger, more tuned-in business than it was before — points out, "By the '50s she had the benefit of distance, and so could truly distill the Chanel look. Time and culture had caught up with her." In Europe, her return to fashion was deemed an utter flop at first, but Americans couldn't buy her suits fast enough. Yet again Chanel had put herself into the yolk of the zeitgeist. By the time Katharine Hepburn played her on Broadway in 1969, Chanel had achieved first-name recognition and was simply Coco.

1945-1960s

Women's Fashion from 1945-1960 was dominated by nylon, beehive hairstyles, petticoats, bold femininity, bright lipstick, and often the projection of a 'cheerful, happy' persona.

When the French fashion houses reopened after World War II, Dior introduced the "New Look" silhouette. Because war restrictions on textiles ceased, the New Look silhouette included longer skirts, either full or fitted. Emphasis on the waist and soft shoulder lines also marked Dior's influence at this time. In, until hemlines began to rise and a more futuristic egg-type silhouette began to appear in 1958.

Christian Dior: light at the end of the tunnel

Christian Dior was born in 1905 in Granville, a lively seaside town on the Normandy coast. He was the second of the five children of Alexandre Louis Maurice Dior, a wealthy fertiliser manufacturer. The family lived in a pretty grey and pink house perched high on a cliff with spectacular views over the sea. They moved to Paris in 1910 returning to Granville for holidays each summer. Dior longed to become an architect but, at his father’s insistence, he enrolled at the prestigious Ecole des Sciences Politiques (nicknamed Sciences Po’) in Paris to take a degree in politics which, or so his parents hoped, would prepare him for a diplomatic career.

All Dior wanted was to work in the arts. In 1928, his father gave him enough money to open an art gallery on condition that the family name did not appear above the door. Galerie Jacques Bonjean soon became an avant garde haunt with paintings by Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Max Jacob hanging on walls decorated by Christian Bérard. Disaster struck in 1931 when the death of Dior’s older brother was followed by that of his mother and the collapse of the family firm. The gallery closed. For the next few years Dior scraped a living by selling fashion sketches to haute couture houses. Finally he found a job as an assistant to the couturier, Robert Piquet.

When World War II war began in 1939, Dior served as an officer for the year until France’s surrender. He joined his father and a sister on a farm in Provence until he was offered a job in Paris by the couturier Lucien Lelong, who was lobbying the Germans to revive the couture trade. Dior spent the rest of the War dressing the wives of Nazi officers and French collaborators. France emerged from World War II in ruins. Half a million buildings were destroyed. Clothes, coal and food were in short supply. Yet there were ample opportunities for new business ventures and fashion was no exception. Dior was invited by a childhood friend from Granville to revive Philippe et Gaston, a struggling clothing company owned by Marcel Boussac, the “King of Cotton” with an empire of racing stables, newspapers and textile mills.

Boussac met Dior and listened to his theory that the public was ready for a new style after the War. Dior’s description of a luxurious new look with a sumptuous silhouette and billowing skirts had an obvious appeal to a man who owed his wealth to selling large quantities of fabric. Boussac agreed to launch the new couture house in style with a then-unprecedented budget of FFr60 million. Jacques Rouët, a young civil servant, was appointed as its administrator. The house of Dior and its 85 employees moved into a modest mansion at 30 Avenue Montaigne which was decorated in Dior’s favourite colours of white and grey.

The first Christian Dior couture show was scheduled for 12 February 1947. Clothes were still scarce and women wore the sharp-shouldered suits with knee-length skirts that they had cobbled together as makeshift wartime versions of Elsa Schiaparelli’s slinky 1930s silhouette. The Paris couture trade, which had dominated international fashion since the late 18th century, was in a precarious state. What it needed was excitement and Christian Dior delivered it in a collection of luxurious clothes with soft shoulders, waspy waists and full flowing skirts intended for what he called “flower women”. “It’s quite a revelation dear Christian,” pronounced Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, the US magazine. “Your dresses have such a new look.”

The New Look was absolutely appropriate for the post-war era. Dior was correct in assuming that people wanted something new after years of war, brutality and hardship. His new look was reminiscent of the Belle Epoque ideal of long skirts, tiny waists and beautiful fabrics that his mother had worn in the early 1900s. Such a traditional concept of femininity also suited the political agenda. Women had been mobilised during the war to work on farms and in factories while the men were away fighting. In peacetime those women were expected to return to passive roles as housewives and mothers, leaving their jobs free for the returning soldiers. The official paradigm of post-war womanhood was a capable, caring housewife who created a happy home for her husband and children. Dior’s “flower women” fitted the bill perfectly.

His couture house was inundated with orders. Rita Hayworth picked out an evening gown for the première of her new movie, Gilda. The ballerina, Margot Fonteyn, bought a suit. Dior put Paris back on the fashion map. The US couture clients came back in force for the autumn 1947 collections and Dior was invited to stage a private presentation of that season’s show for the British royal family in London, although King George V forbade the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, from wearing the New Look lest it set a bad example at a time when rationing was still in force for the general public.

Behind the scenes Jacques Rouët built up the Dior business. The old Paris couture houses were small operations making bespoke clothes for private clients. Some couturiers had diversified into other products, notably Chanel and Jean Patou into perfume, and Elsa Schiaparelli into hosiery. Rouët realised that the future lay in diversifying further afield into more products and international markets. Eager to capitalise on the publicity generated by the New Look, he opened a fur subsidiary and a ready-to-wear boutique on New York’s Fifth Avenue as well as launching a Dior perfume, named Miss Dior with the US market in mind.

Christian Dior too had sound commercial instincts. When a US hosiery company offered Rouët the then-enormous fee of $10,000 for the rights to manufacture Dior stockings, the couturier proposed waïving the fee in favour of a percentage of the product’s sales thereby introducing the royalty payment system to fashion. Dior’s approach to design was equally pragmatic. Resisting the temptation to experiment, he adhered to his luxurious look with the structured silhouette of padding, starch and corsets, which was so flattering to his middle-aged clients. So conservative were those clients that when Dior called a suit the “Jean-Paul Sartre” in honour of the radical philosopher, no one bought it and he stuck to ‘safer’ names in future. He even adhered to the same commercial formula for each collection: one third new, one third adaptations of familiar styles and one third proven classics.

The newly wealthy Dior bought an old mill near Fontainebleau outside Paris and a flower farm at Montauroux in the heart of Provence, where he could potter around with Bobby, his dog, and indulge his love of art, antiques and gardening. Still shy, he left socialising to Suzanne Luling, his vivacious sales director, and he grew even more superstitious with age. Every collection included a coat called the “Granville”, named after his birthplace. At least one model wore a bunch of his favourite flower, lily of the valley. And Dior never began a couture show without having consulted his tarot card reader.

Throughout the 1950s Christian Dior was the biggest and best-run haute couture house in Paris. The closest rivals were Pierre Balmain, and the enigmatic Spanish designer, Cristobál Balenciaga. Yet neither had the same support structure as Dior who, as well as Jacques Rouët and Suzanne Luling, had the “three muses” who worked with him on the collections: Raymonde Zehnmacker who ran the studio; Marguerite Carré, head of the workrooms; and Mitza Bricard, the glamorous hat designer and chief stylist.

The house was run along rigidly hierarchical lines. Each of the vendeuses, or sales assistants, had their own clients with whom they were expected to nurture friendly relationships. The ateliers, or workrooms, were staffed by seamstresses, many of whom had worked there since leaving school. During the twice-yearly haute couture shows in late January and early August, some 2,500 people filed in and out of the Dior salons to see the new collections. Each show included up to two hundred outfits and lasted as long as two and a half hours. The models, or mannequins as they were called, came from the same privileged backgrounds as the clients and were hired in different shapes and sizes to show how the clothes would look on different women.

The biggest clients were North American: Hollywood stars, New York socialites and department store buyers who bought the exclusive rights to individual designs to be made up by their own seamstresses. Marshall Fields, the Chicago store, had nine couture workshops and a marble-lined salon, “The 28th Shop”. Discount clothing chains, like Ohrbach’s, were allowed to attend the shows on condition that they bought a minimum number of outfits, which they were then allowed to copy stitch for stitch into “knock-off” lines.

As the most prestigious Paris couture house, Dior attracted the most talented assistants. One was Pierre Cardin, an Italian-born tailor who was Dior’s star assistant in the late 1940s before leaving to begin his own business. Another was Yves Saint Laurent, a gifted young Algeria-born designer who joined in 1955 as the star graduate of the Chambre Syndicale fashion school. As timid as Dior himself, the young Saint Laurent flourished in the feminine atmosphere of the couture house and contributed thirty-five outfits for the autumn 1957 collection. When all the fittings for the collection were finished, Dior took off for a rest cure at his favourite spa town of Montecatini in northern Italy hoping to lose weight in order to impress a young lover.

Ten days later Dior died of a heart attack after choking on a fishbone at dinner. The French newspaper Le Monde hailed him as a man who was “identified with good taste, the art of living and refined culture that epitomises Paris to the outside world”. Marcel Boussac sent his private plane to Montecatini to bring Dior’s body back to Paris. Some 2,500 people attended his funeral including all his staff and famous clients led by the Duchess of Windsor. A fortnight later Jacques Rouët called a press conference to announce the new structure of the house of Christian Dior. “The studio will be run by Madame Zehnmacker, the couture workshops by Madame Marguerite Carré,” he announced. “Mitza Bricard will continue to exercise her good taste over the collections. All the sketches will be the responsibility of Yves Mathieu-Saint-Laurent.”

The first Christian Dior collection after Dior’s death was a sensation. Designed in just nine weeks by the 21 year-old Yves Saint Laurent, as he was called after dropping the ‘Mathieu’, the clothes were as meticulously made and perfectly proportioned as Dior’s in the same exquisite fabrics, but their young designer made them softer, lighter and easier to wear. Saint Laurent was hailed as a national hero. Emboldened by his success, his designs became more daring culminating in the 1960 Beat Look inspired by the existentialists in the Saint-Germain des Près cafés and jazz clubs. Marcel Boussac was furious and, in spring 1960, when Saint Laurent was called up to join the French army, the Dior management raised no objection.

Saint Laurent was conscripted in the army and, after demobilisation, he opened his own couture house. He was replaced at Dior by Marc Bohan, who instilled his conservative style on the collections until 1996 when the iconoclastic young Briton, John Galliano, was appointed chief designer of Christian Dior by the company’s new owner, the LVMH luxury goods group.

And then appeared Yves… the last master of fashion 

France’s World Cup victory was Yves Saint Laurent’s too. For last year he presided over the largest fashion show ever staged. Three hundred mannequins, including his famous Mondrian dresses, Safari jackets and Le Smoking trouser suites were paraded in the Stade de France in Paris in front of an audience of 80,000, illustrating a fashion journey through time.

The remarkable life and times of Yves Saint Laurent began on August 1st 1936, in Oran, Algeria – then a French colony. His mother doted upon him, the oldest of her three children, and encouraged his flair for art. From an early age the young Yves was fascinated by fashion and theatre. He copies the dresses he saw in Vogue – and promptly set about designing his own, submitting an entry to a competition in Paris for which he won third prize. In 1954, after completing his baccalaureate, he moved to the French capital where he enrolled in the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture. He won first prize in three different categories at the International Wool Secretariat competition, while Karl Lagerfeld won a fourth for a coat design. Michel de Brunhoff, the Director of Vogue had no difficulty in recognising that Saint Laurent was extremely talented and arranged to introduce him to the couturier Christian Dior – who promptly hired him as a design assistant. And then, unexpected and unannounced, Saint Laurent suddenly became a legend in his own lifetime, to coin a cliché, when at the age of 21 he took over at Dior, after the designer suddenly died. Within ten weeks of the great Dior’s death, Saint Laurent put on his first show. Introducing the short, swing Trapeze Line – he was immediately hurled into the headlines, becoming an instant success. As Dior had done a decade earlier, Yves Saint Laurent had turned the fashion industry on its head with a new silhouette.  The hour-glass figure and pristine white gloves of middle-aged couture were replace by avant-garde ideas such as the Beat collection in 1960. This was the first haute couture collection which had its origins in clothes being worn on the streets. By designing clothes for his own generation, not his mother’s, Saint Laurent succeeded in outraging the more conservative of Dior’s clientele. Ironically, the Beat Look, his homage to the beatniks of the Left Bank with black leather jackets and turtle-neck sweaters, would later become a fashion classic.

Soon after he took over at Dior, Saint Laurent met his future partner, Pierre Berge, with whom he floated the idea of opening his own fashion house. After suffering a nervous breakdown as a result of poor reviews of his work – combined with the effect of one year’s military conscription – he learned that Marc Bohan had replaced him at Dior. The best thing that could have happened to him, as he would later point out, for his dismissal from Dior was a turning point in his career – one from which he would never look back.

Saint Laurent has been associated with dozens of first in fashion – but the best remembered is undoubtedly the creation of Le Smoking back in the swinging sixties. This revolutionary black trouser suit was based on a man’s dinner jacket – but tailored to flatter a woman’s figure. From that point, trousers won by women were considered chic – and a new generation of designers, including Kalvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan and Giorgio Armani put their own slant onto the trouser suit as sophisticated daywear.

Haute couture has quite been the same since. Ask Monsieur Dupont – the French man in the street – what Saint Laurent has given to fashion and he will undoubtedly inform you that its ‘le fun’. The production of comfortable and yet stylish clothes for an active, modern life. He also recognised the importance of the youth revolution and influence of mass media in his design philosophy. And during the sixties and seventies he found the time to design for the theatre and cinema, including the films Belle de Jour, The Pink Panther – and the ballet Scherezade.

While some late 20th century designers deliberately court controversy, it is easy to forget the effect of Saint Laurent’s transparent blouses when the first appeared on the catwalk 30 years ago. His eye-catching designs owed much to his love of the arts and were seen in collections inspired by Mondrian painting and Pop-Art as well as the Ballet Russes. In particular, the Mondrian dresses inspired a million rag-trade copies and, believing that fashion was no longer the prerogative of the rich, Saint Laurent decided to produce is own read-to-wear line.  

The first couturier to appreciate that there was money to be made from a diffusion of pret-à-porter, Yves Saint Laurent opened a Rive Gauche boutique in Paris in 1966. His objective? To dress the girl in the street. She did not disappoint. For the boutique was an immediate success with trouser suits, chain-belts and mini-skirts being snapped up like petits pains , as they say in the land of fashion. Rive Gauche boutiques were soon opening up all over the world, enabling fashion-conscious women to wear Saint Laurent designs at a fraction of the cost of couture. He also had the business acumen to bring the image of Parisian chic to an international audience through the licensing of products such as accessories and cosmetics. Before you could say Yves Saint Laurent, he was a household name. Not bad from the boy from Oran.

Recent auctions of 20th century couture – such as the ones held by Sotherby’s in New York, see Yves Saint Laurent as a highlight. Tiffany Dubin, fashion specialist at Sotheby’s, explains: "Its because from the beginning his clothes were timeless. At present, they are very much in vogues, with young New Yorkers wearing his early designs from the 1060’s and 70s. His Russian and African collections were especially important and his designs while at the House of Dior have been eagerly acquired by collectors." Sotheby’s achieved high prices for a Saint Laurent cocktail ensemble created in 1958 which sold for US$ 17,250, as well as a day ensemble from the Autumn/Winter 1959 collection which sold for US$43,125 – both purchased for the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, which is scheduled to open soon on the outskirts of Paris.

The costume collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London is the fortunate recipient of six Le Smoking outfits, thanks to the generosity of Jill Ritblat, the wife of one of London’s biggest property developers. Mrs. Ritblat, a faithful client of Saint Laurent for 25 years, cites favourite designs including his Mondrian-inspired-dresses from 1965 and, more recently, his Sunflower embroidered jacket as clothes which imitate art as well as being examples of exquisite workmanship. The Sunflower jacket, inspired by Van Gogh, has 450,000 sequins sewn on by hand. In fact while 150 hours of work are required to produce an haute couture dress, it takes four times as long to make an embroidered garment.  

Saint Laurent’s fragrance launches are as influential – and controversial – as the clothes he designs. The introduction of his first fragrance, Y, was in 1964, but by 1971 he had come to appreciate the power of what might be called provocative photography – outraging many when he decided to pose nude for the launch of YSL Pour Homme. In 1977, Opium was introduced with the slogan ‘Opium – for those addicted to Yves Saint Laurent’. To publicise the perfume, Saint Laurent hosted a party on a Chinese junk on Manhattan’s East River amidst rumours than an opium den was hidden in the hold of the boat. It was the first of the fragrance industry’s mega-launches and the combined scandal of the slogan, party and implied use of drugs only served to boost sales – proving the time-honoured slogan that all publicity is good publicity. More controversy followed with the launch of Champagne in 1993, when French champagne growers successfully campaigned for the withdrawal of the use of the name.

For over 40 years, Saint Laurent has changed the way women dress – and continues to command the respect of his peers, if only for having survived for so long in the jungle of high fashion. In 1968, the late, great Coco Chanel claimed him as her spiritual heir. In 1983, he was the only living designer to be the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, while the 1990s saw numerous designers – Helmut Lang, Christian Lacroix and Marc Jacobs – looking back to Saint Laurent’s hard-edged glamour for inspiration. Today, his street-cred in London and New York has reached new heights. From a sheer, feminine top or a masculine trouser suit, Yves Saint Laurent has led the way in the emancipation of women’s clothing. And thus fully deserves his recognition as the greatest fashion designer of the 20th century – if not the millennium.

My research work «To observe fashion»

My report about great people of fashion make me think about if young people of today want to work in the sphere of fashion. If they want I decided to know: do they think they can create something new and unordinary? And do they understand that world of fashion it is not only beautiful faces on the magazines, but a hard and even dangerous work? These questions excited my mind.

And I decided to make sociological interrogation: to know how many percents of youths want to be the models. I have asked about 70 boys and girls and the results was so: 60% of them want to  be the models abroad, 20% - to be the models in Russia only and 9% want to work in a sphere of fashion: the organizers and secretaries, but not the models.

But a lot of youths don`t understand the gravity of this profession. They think that fashion world it is an easy way to become famous, that the podium and the sound of camera are perfect for them. But there were a lot of occasions which can deny these statements. There were the accidents, when a young girl of about 15-16 years old had a good appearance and decided to be the model, came to the fashion world and suffered there the things such as debauch, violence and mockery. One girl, which is now 28 and she is a respectful director of the advertising company decided to tell me such store:

«When I was 16, I was invited to the model agency for a casting where I was elected for a show. My first show was great and my life changed. I has thrown school and entered the School of Models. Then I was invited to work abroad. My parents allowed me to go to America to work, but after two months f being and working there, I understood tat I couldn’t patient it. Firstly, the loading was great, we worked about 10 hours a day and each two days was a show. Secondly, there were a lot of rich men, who turned around of me and ask to marry. Then they began to solicit and then, one of them tried to steal me, but I managed to save. After that, I tried to return home, but all my attempts to buy ticket to the plane were stopped. And once, I managed to phone my parents. They helped me to come back to Russia and to start a new life. And now, I am a director of an advertising company.»

This story is a good example of how young people can get into a bad society. Of course, I don`t want to make the readers of my report feel hate to the fashion business. I respect it and even adore, but I wanted to show the situations when youths choose a wrong way of life because of their inexperience.

So, don`t throw your school study and be sure in everything you make.

Conclusion

So, the lives of Chanel, Dior and Saint-Laurent were full of events, which always changed it so quickly that they can hardly come round. When they reached a success, in few moments later they lost achievements, but soon it appeared again, and it was more bright, more colorful, more exciting.

Nowadays fashion is a famous word and someone associate it with glamour, something boring and stereotypical, but the world of this glamour is very attractive for youth of today. I have made social interrogation and can say surely: a lot of girls and boys see that the podium and the sound of the camera are perfect for them. So, why? Do they understand that it is not only an easy way to be the face of the magazine, but a hard work which they must be taught several years?

But some of them understand. They know the hard way of the development of High Fashion, of the results of hard work of the genii, that we see today. That was one of the aims of my report – to show the fate of the creators of fashion – the fate of Masters of fashion.

But the finish of the lives is sad… Saint-Laurent used drugs, drunk whisky a lot and liked to smoke and that life led him to the cancer of brains. In last years he was very sick, he could not go by himself, he could not even stand. Dior died suddenly of heart attack. Chanel died silently and easy in the hotel.

The time of genii was over. They passed a great lives and made great things, which can not disappear or be forgotten. All the fashion which prosper today is the result of the creativity of these people, who are adored by everyone and the story of the life of which will never dust on the shelves of the cases, but be the reference book in every house.

Thus, I end my project by these words, and I hope, that my story was useful for you.

References:

1. http://www.time.com/time/time100/artists/profile/chanel.html

2. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,914541-2,00.html

3. http://pro.corbis.com/

4. http://www.designmuseum.org/design/christian-dior

5. http://www.fashion.net/fashion/designers/

6. http://www.wikipedia.org/

7. http://www.osinka.ru/Moda/Designer/YSL.html

8. Enciclopedia. Fashion designers.

9. «Famous people of the 20^th century»