Lucien Lelong: Christian Dior’s Mentor Before The New Look

In 1943, when “The New Look,” Apple TV’s latest dramatic series begins, Paris was occupied by Nazis, and Lucien Lelong was doing all he could to keep haute couture alive and to preserve the jobs of some 20,000 Parisians. The new episodic series is focused on the beginning of Christian Dior’s eponymous Paris Maison, which he opened in 1947, which is about the same time that his mentor, Lucien Lelong, played by John Malkovich on the show, retired.

From the moment WWII ended, up until Dior debuted his first collection, Carolle in 1947, the world was not certain that haute couture would remain the arbiter of western style as it had once been. After years of wartime austerity and government imposed restrictions on the use of all materials used to make clothing, and the shortages of raw materials to make them, Carolle’s joyful, ultra feminine designs were the equivalent of a glass of cool water on the hottest summer day.

Full skirts accented by nipped “wasp” waists, rounded shoulders; the volume of fabric used in 1947 was opulent by comparison to what was possible even a year earlier. Haute couture wasn’t just offering pretty clothes, the French fashion industry was proving that it could, once again, offer a fantasy. Aspiration is another way to pronounce “hope for the future,” and the collection gave women permission to once more aspire to greater things, it encouraged anyone who saw it to dream about possibilities and to think about what they could do to make things better.

When the Nazis marched on Paris in June of 1940, Lelong was president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, a position he was elected to in 1937, taking over from Pierre Gerber, son of Marie Callot of Callot Sœurs. The Chambre Syndicale is an organization created to support the needs of the haute couture community, and when the Nazi invaders arrived in Paris in June of 1940 there were 139 registered houses.

One of the Nazi’s overarching goals was to subjugate the cultures of other nations that they deemed excessive or frivolous, to replace anything found wanting with their own version. Shortly after Paris was occupied, the Chambre Syndicale’s offices were taken over, its files seized, and it was soon understood that the intention was to relocate the global fashion center to Berlin, or Vienna, where there were existing fashion industries already seen by the Nazis as culturally superior. By moving houses and the body which organized them, the Nazis assumed they could force the designers to train the next generation of Germans to create work of the same caliber, thinking they could demand the same reverence from the rest of the world.

Understandably, Lelong was horrified by the plan, and began a subtle campaign to prove that such a thing was untenable. He also found ways to communicate that it was in everyone’s best interest for Paris’ Maisons to remain open and in business. Negotiating with the enemy meant working in a lot of grey areas, but throughout the four years of occupation nothing that Lelong did rose to the level of collaboration with the Nazi party.

There would be rumors, later, that he had been a collaborator, but he was quite thoroughly tried and acquitted. The judge who oversaw the case would rule that his cooperation had been minimal, and that it had been done to save his industry’s workers, Jewish lives, and to protect the cultural heritage of France. With the government split, the occupied (collaborationist) French government worked out of Vichy, under the thumb of the German military, while General Charles de Gaulle managed the Free France government-in-exile out of London. In Paris, Lelong’s position of leadership in French fashion was of great interest to the Germans, and was in many ways the last barrier between what was and what might have become. The Second World War was economically devastating to France, and haute couture was lucrative and international business, thought of by many as “the jewel in the crown of French culture.”

Lelong had studied political science before earning a business degree at the Hautes Etudes de Commerciales, and he never received any formal training in fashion design. Throughout his career he employed designers who worked under him, and who could turn his ideas into actual garments. This is not an unusual practice, as many fashion designers do not know how to sew, drape or draw, and the output of many a collection is, and was, a collaborative effort regardless of the name on a label.

Born in Paris in 1889, it has been said that Lelong was destined to work in fashion. His parents, Éléonore Marie Lambelet and Arthur Camille Joseph Lelong, ran a small haute couture firm, A.E. Lelong, which had opened its doors in the late 19th century. Lucien began working with them when he was 18. Lelong’s career in haute couture was initially delayed by World War One, when he served France as intelligence officer, spent time in the trenches, and sustained injuries to his face when he was wounded by shrapnel.

After WWI, Lelong returned home, and he took over the creative direction of his parent’s brand in 1920, the same year his daughter Nicole was born. The business did well, Lelong always knew how to hire designers who could bring his ideas to life, he excelled at recognizing and promoting talent. The work his house produced drew acclaim, and his talent for business meant that success followed him. Early on Leong made a practice of offering a discount to society ladies who would wear, and agree to be photographed, in his designs. In 1926 he relocated his atelier and showrooms to a fashionable address at 16 L'avenue Matignon, just off Champs-Elysées.

In 1927, Lelong divorced his first wife, Anne-Marie Audoy, the mother of his daughter. Later that same year he married Romanov Princess Natalie Paley, no relation to Babe, daughter of the Russian Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich. Paley had been working as a salesperson in Lelong’s perfume department when the couple met. Paley became his muse, and in the years after the Wall Street Crash, when American dollars became more scarce in Paris ateliers, she became the face of his house for the 1930s, years when the house employed some 1,200 workers. They divorced in 1936.

When WWII began on September 3, 1939, there was an immediate effect on Paris fashion. Some houses, like Mainboucher, Charles James and Schiaparelli, closed their doors and the namesake designers fled for the United States to wait out the conflict. Molyneux and Creed returned to London, which would soon have troubles of its own. Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel closed the fashion side of her brand, but continued to sell perfumes and cosmetics, and lived in Paris’ Ritz Hotel.

Otto Abetz, the German Ambassador to France during the occupation, reveled in his work to prosecute, deport, and ultimately murder French Jewish citizens, and innumerable Jewish people generally. Abetz, who had been recruited personally by Adolf Hitler and who would be convicted of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity at the Nuremberg Trials, can not have been an easy person to find compromise with. Lelong was the mediator between his fellow designers and the occupiers, and attended some 14 official conferences about the state of fashion during the long years of occupation. Though he married three times, many have speculated that Lelong was homosexual, which gives the negotiation he went through with Nazi officials all the more terror and poignance.

Lelong was persuasive in his argument that any attempt to relocate fashion’s center would kill the industry, that the already damaged supply chain could not survive any more monumental shifts. There were concessions, of course, like the deal Lelong brokered which brought about a card system for couture clients. Cards were issued to those who had obtained German permission to purchase haute couture from houses approved to operate. Unsurprisingly, the majority of cards issued were to Germans, as the city was rife with the wives and daughters of Nazis, like Susanne Abetz, wife of the German Ambassador to Paris.

The people of Paris, like much of France and the other occupied nations, were suffering greatly from a devastating rate of inflation, in addition to the travesties inflicted on Jews and the Gentiles who tried to help them. While this meant that there were fewer French clients for haute couture than ever before, and remaining in business meant that the French citizens employed by the fashion industry kept their jobs, which allowed them to make money they needed desperately to buy food, when it was available, as well as the supplies required for daily life. It is estimated that Lucien Lelong’s efforts saved close to 20,000 jobs.

Not every house could or wanted to continue operating, under the controlling German leadership, but those who did were closely watched and perceived infractions were harshly dealt with by Paris’ temporary oppressors. Refusing to dress the wives of German officers was reason enough to have an atelier shut down.

Madame Grès, a Jewish couturier, openly defied the rules set by the Nazis, creating displays in her windows which mirrored the colors and proportions of the French flag. When she refused to dress the wives of German officers, and refused to let them browbeat her into designing bleak, utilitarian apparel instead of the pleated ball gowns she was known for. At least one garment designed by Grès from the early 1940s was later found to have two tiny Stars of David hidden within the seams inside. Arguing that her work violated wartime restrictions, her atelier was closed, and the designer fled to the Pyrenees mountains where she stayed out of sight until Paris was liberated. Being Jewish, Grès could have been executed or sent to a camp, and it is a bit of a mystery as to how she avoided that fate. It is possible that Lelong had a hand in allowing her to escape unharmed. I like to think that he did.

In late August of 1944, after receiving news of uprisings by citizens against the invaders, some 16,000 soldiers from the Allied Nations met with Georges Bidault (head of France’s Conseil national de la Résistance) and André Tollet (Commander of Comité parisien de la Libération) and entered Paris. There was less fighting than the Allies expected, and though some lives were tragically lost, before noon the French flag was once again flying above the Eiffel Tower. After four years, two months and 15 days, the city was liberated.

On May 7, 1945, at close to 3:00 am, a representative of the Third Reich unilaterally surrendered to Lt. General Walter Smith on behalf of President Eisenhower, then to the allied nations, in a makeshift war room, the Reims Room, which before and after the war was a children's school. When WWII finally ended, there were a smaller number of haute couture Maisons, fewer workers and fewer clients, but the industry itself and its institutions survived.

The first haute couture shows after WWII were a collaborative effort by many creatives from a variety of industries, a traveling exhibition which was called the Theatre de la Mode. Under Lucien Lelong’s leadership, assisted by Nina Ricci’s son and business partner Robert, a plan came together to reintroduce Paris once again to the world as the center of fashion and style. Still recovering from shortages of every supply imaginable, and without the resources required to stage a fashion show for every house, a team of artists and craftsmen created miniature mannequins. Made of iron wire, one of the only materials in large supply, with plaster of Paris heads, nearly 200 fashion dolls were created, one third human size, to showcase the newest designs from Paris.

Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard designed “sets” for the dolls to be posed against in a miniature theater. Each tiny lady wore real shoes and carried miniature handbags and other accessories, all designed in Paris, with human hair wigs styled by the city’s best hairdressers. The collection of dolls opened as an exhibition at the Louvre in March, 1945 where it attracted more than 100,000 visitors and raised about 1,000,000 francs to be used for French war relief. The set of dolls then began a trip around the world, from London to Copenhagen, eventually crossing the Atlantic to show in both New York and San Francisco.

There’s a straight through-line here, after the Theatre de la Mode there was the New Look, which in turn was followed by the Golden Era of Hollywood, America’s first real period of influence on what women wore globally. Lucien Lelong is connected to all of it. Under his leadership, and because of his commitment to French fashion surviving occupation and the war, seemingly impossible things happened, and the haute couture fashion industry lived on.

Leong continued to work until Christian Dior left (1946) his house to launch his own brand. In addition to Dior, Pierre Balmain, Hubert de Givenchy, Nadine Robinson, and Jean Ebel, all worked for Lelong in their early careers. Without his mentoring and support, without the world he worked so hard to protect and preserve, it is possible that today would have looked very different than it does.

In 1947 Lelong’s health was beginning to rapidly deteriorate. It seems likely that on top of his 30-year career, the years spent negotiating to save the industry he spent his entire life in had taken their toll.

He closed his atelier and retired near Biarritz, France, a resort town near the border with Spain. He lived there for a decade before dying from complications related to a stroke while visiting Anglet, France on May 10, 1958, about six months following the death of Christian Dior.