Photographed by Cecil Beaton, Vogue, May 10, 19301/15Nothing could keep Charles James, with his streamroller personality, from fashion: not his imposing British father, nor his lack of training. At age twenty, James became a milliner, using the name Charles Boucheron (borrowed from a friend), exciting attention by cutting his hats right on his customers’ heads. His well-heeled clientele, did not, however, include his immediate family, who were forbidden by James senior from patronizing the family’s own “mad hatter.”
In 1930, Cecil Beaton photographed the actress/dancer Tilly Losch, left, and the debutante Marianne Van Rensselaer in Boucheron hats for Vogue.
Photographed by Cecil Beaton, Vogue, November 1, 19362/15Among those posing for Cecil Beaton in James’s “poetic mantles” against a surreal set by fashion artist Christian “Bébé” Bérard, is the actress Ruth Ford. James’s client list, which was disproportionate to his small output, included burlesque performers and royalty, Vogue girls and literati, as well as designers. “I knew Chanel very well,” James would later tell New York magazine. “I gave her my dresses, but Mme Schiaparelli had to pay.”
Photographed by Horst P. Horst, Vogue, June 15, 19373/15This photograph of British actress Joan Fontaine in James’s delicate dress with ribbon bodice (the designer was at this time creating fabrics for the French textile house Colcombet), was published in 1937, the year that the then London-based James gave his first Paris presentation. Seeing the clothes, so the story goes, Paul Poiret, once “the king of fashion,” said to James: “I pass you my crown, wear it well.”
Photographed by Horst P. Horst, Vogue, March 1, 19404/15Vogue would praise James as a “master of color comparatives, of the cut and fold of exceptional cloths.” Here, his “grand-entrance evening cape . . . slit to make sweeping wings.”
René Bouët-Willaumez, Vogue, July 19445/15Obsolescence was not something that preoccupied James, who believed that his clothes were “on different schedules going into eternity.” “1944 or 1928?” quizzed Vogue when it published this sketch of a draped James dress. The answer? It was an updated (i.e. abbreviated) version of his “most famous London dress,” designed in 1928.
Photographed by John Rawlings, Vogue, October 1, 19446/15Kismet actress Marlene Dietrich wears a subtly sexy precision-cut bias dress taken from James’s archive and remade for Elizabeth Arden's fashion salon.
(from left) Illustrated by Cecil Beaton, Vogue, December 15, 1944; Photographed by Cecil Beaton, Vogue, December 15, 19447/15“For years Miss Arden has been tailoring figures and sending them out of her salon to wear current fashion. . . . Now the clothes themselves seem only another part of the goal, which, happily you can achieve at one address,” wrote Vogue, by way of announcing the beauty queen’s new fashion floor. The backstory is less rose-hued, according to Arden’s biographer, Lindy Woodhead, who reports that the competitive Arden brought James on-board in a “ ‘if that woman can do lipsticks, then I’ll do fashion’ ” pique after hearing that the dressmaker Hattie Carnegie was getting into beauty.
Photographed by Cecil Beaton, Vogue, July 19468/15“The personal quality in Charles James’s work is the result of an original sense of cut combined with molded drapery,” Vogue once observed. The placing of each seam is an anatomic accent. . . . ”
(from left) Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photograph by Cecil Beaton/Vogue/Condé Nast Archive; Photographed by Cecil Beaton, Vogue, March 1, 19489/15Charles James (seated) explained Vogue to its readers in 1948, “works now in New York on the same basis as the French couture.”
Photographed by Cecil Beaton, Vogue, June 1, 194810/15(from left) Marilyn Ambrose, Carmen Dell
This Beaton photograph, taken in the eighteenth-century room of New York’s French & Co. antiques dealer, has been likened to Winterhalter’s portrait, The Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her Ladies-in-Waiting. The dresses, with their Ladurée colors and meringue-like poufs express a serene, womanly grandeur that wholly masks the tortured creative process from which they were born.
Photographed by Irving Penn, Vogue, October 15, 194911/15Mary Jane Russell in a “full-length evening coat with its own angles,” from 1949. “So geometrical is Charlie James,” Virginia Woolf once wrote in a letter, “that if a stitch is crooked . . . the whole dress is torn to shreds.”
Image Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photograph by John Rawlings/Vogue/Condé Nast Archive12/15No doubt that James, who considered himself an artist, would have approved of the company his creation was in at William Paley’s Kiluna Farm. The living room alone boasts of a Cézanne, a Rousseau, a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Matisse, and a Picasso, not to mention the striking Babe Paley.
Photographed by Erwin Blumenfeld, Vogue, July 195113/15“Poetry” is the word Christian Dior used to describe James’s work. Here, the latter’s New Look–style suit with 3½ yards of fabric in the skirt.
Photographed by Horst P. Horst, Vogue, November 1, 195114/15“The essence of chic,” James once wrote in Vogue, “is to appear extravagantly lovely.” The designer will later make a version of this knockout frock, known as the “bustle” or “swan” ball gown (modeled here for Vogue by Evelyn Tripp), for his elegant wife, Nancy.
Photographed by Roger Prigent, Vogue, April 1, 195215/15Model Sue Jenks, in James’s aerodynamic gray felt topper, resembles Rolls Royce’s spirit of ecstasy. As she should: James, after all, considered himself to be “the greatest couturier in the western world.”
