Fashion and Flair in 1930s Paris
- Book: The Dress Thief
- Location: Paris
- Author: Natalie Meg Evans
A charming novel that totally transported me to the Paris fashion houses of the late 1930s. This is the story of Alix Gower, who navigates her way into the heart of the fashion industry via a soupçon of subterfuge, charisma and verve. She is a likeable character who charms not only the reader but her male admirers as she carves her niche in the Parisian fashion world. She is tasked early on to steal the designs from Maison Javier, so they can wing their way across the Atlantic to New York, where they can be made up quickly and more cheaply and then appear there before they even really hit the stores of Europe.
Throughout the book is a rumbling backstory: who really killed Alix’s Grandfather, the artist Alfred Lutzman? Their family comes originally from Kirchwiller, Alsace, and in the wings, like a kind of guardian angel lurks the figure of the Jean-Yves, Comte de Charembourg, also with roots in Alsace. Why does he take such an interest in this little family with a Jewish heritage, when he has his own family to take care of?
Alix works as a telephonist but then has the lucky break of starting out as a seamstress for Maison Javier, one of the premier fashion house of Paris. This may not be Hermès, Lanvin or Schiaparelli but it is a company that is initially a means to an end for her – but comes to mean so much more to her, under the principled and caring patronage of Monsieur Javier himself. As she ingratiates herself into the world of Javier she graduates from midinette to mannequin and then to advisor, and is very much part of the creation of the Orodress, the “collision between a star and a comet” the apotheosis of the season’s collection. At every turn Alix is aware her true motives of theft will be discovered….
The romantic elements add a solid backbone to the story, though Alix’s experiences with the men who pass through her life come to test her almost beyond endurance. There is Paul who is struggling with the death of his Mother, and cares for his little sisters on a decrepit house-boat – and is part of the group behind Alix’s thieving of designs. Serge drops top mannequin Solange in favour of Alix, quite the smooth man about town but is he all he seems? And Verrian, heir and cosmopolitan man, is just on the cusp of starting a relationship with Alix when he feels impassioned to take part in the fighting going on in the Basque area of Spain. And leaves her. All her relationships serve to make a woman of her and broaden her experience of the world and what it has to offer, both positive and negative. Apparently the novel was first entitled “A Dark Flowering’ and as Alix grows and blossoms into a competent and sassy young woman, it is evident how apt that early title was.
The story is set against the looming Second World War, in the form of the bombing of Guernica and the fears voiced by her grandmother, Mémé with whom she lives, that Hitler may come for them, even though they are now in Paris. The growing anti Semitism is percolating and things are becoming uneasy.
The author has clearly researched extensively and the result is a weave of good story, time and place. Enjoy!
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