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Camilla Blois
"Nothing but the white heat of passion can forget the spark of genius."
-Lucy Duff Gordon
Originally published in 1932, A Woman of Temperament was far ahead of its time and it's going to be a joy for you to read from start to finish, complete with its notable foreword by our friend featured from Curve on Whom You Know, Camilla Blois, great-great-granddaughter of Lucy Duff Gordon and founder of Lucile and Co. (https://twitter.com/LucileLondon). This edition was published in 2012 by Attica Books, and it is the epitome of fashion history. Lucy created the first fashion show with her live mannequins and introduced sheer lingerie to the shocked ladies and gentlemen of the 1900's! She must be smiling down at her great-great-granddaughter with great pride today.
Known for creating bespoke "personality dresses" for her clients, Lucy is to be admired for her fearlessness, talent and perseverance and even was in Jersey during the time of Lillie, for whom the venue in Times Square we reviewed is named for. "We were always hearing of what she had worn at the opera, of how she had set a new fashion in hats, and of how often the Prince of Wales had danced with her at the Devonshire House ball." (p. 19).
Lucy worked with everyone from the Queen of Spain, to Mary Pickford and the Duchess of York, and when she was in New York, she dined at The Waldorf=Astoria with Elsie deWolfe. We are highly amused by her White House visit to President Roosevelt (see p. 102) and keep in mind when you read this passage, it is long before the days when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis gave the White House all the history, style and panache that it so needed. However, Lucy also experienced some great lows in her life punctuated by her divorce, losing her father as a child and being on the Titanic when it sunk.
"Fundamentally I believe that the cocktail-drinking, cigarette-smoking girls of today are no better and no worse than the demure little creatures who used to accompany their mothers to my salons in Hanover Square to choose their presentation dresses...But I do think that the young girl of today has an infinitely better time in many ways..."(page 78)-so you can just imagine what she would think now! Remember, she is writing in 1932. Her outlook on color (p. 214-15) is quite interesting so keep your eyes open to that part especially.
We were further amused by her outlook on publicity in America; see page 107: "The one thing that counts in America is self-advertisement of the most blatant sort. Publicity which we would set down as incredibly bad taste is taken as a matter of course there, and one simply has to realise from the start that the louder you blow your own trumpet the more likely it is to be heard above the noise of your neighbour's, so I would advise those whose lungs are not strong enough for a contest of this sort to keep out of it altogether." Camilla, allow us to help you blow your trumpet a bit louder over here-A Woman of Temperament is Highly Recommended by Whom You Know!
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In her own words, the story of a remarkable woman who built an international fashion empire, survived the sinking of the Titanic, and invented the catwalk show.
Left a near-penniless single mother and divorcée by the collapse of her first marriage, Lucile Duff Gordon began her fashion career cutting out dresses on the floor of her house and ended it as proprietor of Maison Lucile, an internationally famous brand of its day. Now all but forgotten, she invented the catwalk show, ‘diffusion’ lines for department stores, and the cult of the professional model, taking young women from anonymity in the suburbs of London to international stardom. She designed theatrical costumes for the stars of the day, wrote a fashion column, and became confidante to the famous names of her day on both sides of the Atlantic – and yet she is now known principally for the scandal surrounding her escape from the Titanic in an almost empty lifeboat.
Formerly published as Discretions and Indiscretions in 1932, Lucile’s autobiography is reissued on the centennial commemoration of the Titanic disaster with a foreword by her great-great-granddaughter Camilla Blois. A Woman of Temperament is a fascinating glimpse into a remarkable woman, the vanished, glittering world she moved in, and the birth of modern fashion.
