Questions and Answers

It’s fashion week in Paris with runway shows ablaze with the looks for Spring 2010.

Dressing well was an integral part of GertrudeandAlice’s life.  Of the two, being fashionable was Alice’s forte and once she met Gertrude she seems to have become Lovey’s stylist, though it’s hard to believe that Gertrude would have allowed anyone to tell her what to do, let alone what to wear.

When they first met in 1907, hems were still barely above the ankles and extravagant hats were a required accessory. In their honeymoon photo of 1908 in Venice, GertrudeandAlice posed among the pigeons in St. Mark’s square well-covered head to toe.

It’s impossible to tell if there are corsets under those Edwardian dresses – probably not, as supposedly Alice had tossed hers out of the window of a train as she and her friend Harriet Levy were crossing the U.S. on their way to Paris about a year earlier – undoubtedly the equivalent of bra-burning in the late 1960s.

Alice was the hat person and Gertrude the vest person, though Gertrude often wore hats, but I’ve never seen a photograph of Alice in a vest. Alice’s hats got smaller over the years in step with fashion’s dictates, but she always loved feathers on her hats and lots of them.  Gertrude’s clothes including her many brocade vests  looked durable and comfortable.

The fashion designer Pierre Balmain, whom GertrudeandAlice knew from the time he was a young man living with his family in a small village near their country home, once described Gertrude’s guideline for comfortable clothes.  Gertrude insisted that a skirt had to be full enough to allow her to sit with her knees spread apart – now that’s comfort!  Balmain must have complied when creating her clothes as their friendship continued with Alice writing the introductory essay for the printed portfolio that accompanied Balmain’s first haute couture collection in 1946.  (Alice is also buried in a Balmain suit.)

The financial success of  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS allowed GertrudeandAlice to go all out for the 1934-35 U.S. lecture tour wardrobe.  They spent months planning the attire for lectures, receptions, and cross-country travel.  The photograph of their arrival on the S.S. Champlain in New York harbor in the fall of 1934 says it all.

This is how  the New York Times described Gertrude’s appearance:

“Her feet were in thick woolly stockings and round-toed, flat-heeled oxfords. A brownish tweed suit covered a cerise vest of voluminous proportions and a mannish shirt of cream and black stripes. The hat was a Stein hat, a hat as persistent as the repetitions which are a feature of her abstruse writings.

Peaked in front above her candid brown eyes, it roamed backward tightly about the close-cropped head to a fold at the rear; a gay hat which gave her the appearance of having just sprung from Robin Hood’s forest…”

Their tour finery was practical with some fashion highlights, but all in all very conservative. When they visited the offices of the publisher Random House, their look must have been so bland since the elevator operator, not recognizing these media stars, dropped them off in the offices of an employment agency for maids and cooks rather than on the floor where they were to meet Bennett Cerf.

There are many anecdotes pertaining to GertrudeandAlice and their relationship to art.  One of them recounts a conversation Gertrude had with, I believe, Hemingway, in which she said that one needs to decide whether to buy clothes or art.  It appears that GertrudeandAlice were able to do both and do both quite nicely.

What they would think of Balmain’s spring/summer 2010 collection is another matter – buy art!

Tagged Alice B. Toklas, Bennett Cerf, Gertrude Stein, Harriet Levy, Pierre Balmain