CHINA AT BLOOMINGDALE'S AND THE MET: VREELAND'S ALLURE AND REAGAN'S POLITICAL CULTURE
Silverman, Debora
This article forms the first chapter of Debora Silverman's Selling Culture. In her introduction, Silverman writes that she wishes to depict a broad "movement of aristocratic invocation in 1980s...
...We regret that we can here offer only one chapter of this fascinating book.—Ens...
...The sense that hard work should be rewarded was the theme expressed by other women attending the ball...
...Vreeland approached the Chinese robes with the declaration, "I'm looking for the most farfetched perfection . . . and I'm terrible on facts...
...Splashed across the Sunday magazine was a huge color photo of the rich and elegant designer couple, she in a blazing gold tunic and a collar six strands thick with pearls...
...Mrs...
...q 436...
...Sadism and violence appeared in Allure, in the service of Vreeland's commitment to shock...
...One clear theme of Allure was aristocratic revival and its contemporary aesthetic emulation...
...The "Empress of Clothes" pressed the Chinese artifacts into the service of a new fad for gilded and glossy outfits befitting a new American cult of visible wealth and power...
...All the proclamations of distinction, of noble heritage, and of ritual use collapsed...
...The devotees of Diana Vreeland and the contemporary cult of opulence surfaced at a grand celebration at the Met two weeks before the opening of the Chinese robes exhibition...
...And in display cases, placards identified the "ancient craft of lacquer" and the "timeless weavers' art...
...Gone were the days when China was inseparable from Maoist uniforms, the monochrome caps and jackets beloved of the 1960s American counterculture...
...they were filled with the sense that the world could be shaped and reshaped in the cutting hands and bizarre eyes of its Vreelandian maker...
...Faces were always missing from these spreads, which made Vogue notorious in the 1960s...
...Her violent artificing led her to "put arms and legs and everything else together" in a single layout, the composite photo...
...Yet the Bloomingdale's China spectator was assaulted by the sheer volume of the items and soon became anesthetized, as in all department stores, by the number and variety of the objects for sale...
...But I always have an idea...
...the only guiding principle was the emphasis on the long reign of luxury and opulence signified by the rulers' magnificent clothes and elegant furniture...
...The first was in the use of mannequins...
...Fashion's big night at the Met" used China as a backdrop...
...in Bloomingdale's one can experience the "sights, sounds, smells and scents of China...
...only the borders of the brightly colored robes were ever visible on the emperor...
...coats and robes modeled on the magnificent handmade robes worn by the emperors...
...Vreeland glorified the "stature," "inner exaltation," "bones," and "strength" of the Duchesse de Gramont, the beauty of Russian noblewoman Princess Yousoupoff, and the visible royalty of Princess Bebar, wife of the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire...
...This, then, was the origin of the "authentic" Chinese imports, envisioned in New York by Bloomingdale's designers and then custom-made, in China, with labels stating in both English and Chinese, "Made in China for Bloomingdale's...
...The designers sponsoring the Chinese evening at the Met were longtime associates of Diana Vreeland, among them Yves Saint Laurent, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, Adolfo, and Halston...
...Nancy represented this woman's values...
...Although the items were at least partly handmade, they were hardly the fruits of a single, patient, and skilled artisan who worked as had those under imperial tutelage...
...In 1980-1981, "Living well is the best revenge" has gone from being associated with the anguished withdrawal of postwar hedonists to being tied to the raucous centrality of elite Reagan supporters...
...The "timeless artisans" who supplied Bloomingdale's shelves and racks worked at repetitive, painstaking tasks in which scores of skilled laborers contributed a monotonous small part in the creation of a single craft product...
...The attempt to reconstitute Chinese court life and clothes was mired in a thick layer of Western fantasy, specifically the fantasy of the fashion show designer and promoter...
...A startling contrast to the rich Reagan revelers was seen in one telling incident, when the Washington city derelicts and bag ladies made their way into Union Station, crashing the party reserved for those who had bought the one-thousand-dollar entry tickets...
...This elite, according to Stanfill, was different from previous ones...
...Bloomingdale's handicraft China was part of this broader change in merchandising over the past decade...
...This absorption of the artisanal into the centers of consumer emporiums marks the ultimate reversal of the 1960s back-to-nature, back-to-the-homemadecrafts impulse...
...This was no "leisure jet set," nor a society filled with bearers of old money and old family names...
...428 If their production by sweated craft labor belied the handmade character of the Chinese items, their supposed "rare" and "unique" qualities were subverted by their very plethora...
...Reagan's appeal to ordinary Americans to aspire to free434 dom, self-reliance, moral rectitude, and individual diligence is a masterful exercise of the "politics of symbolism...
...Inside, the store placards promised the "most spectacular dynasty of dazzlers this side of Peking...
...There was another visible distortion in the Met's China show, which sapped the Chinese robes of their primary significance and function...
...Much of Vreeland's book aspired to define the meaning of true "elegance" and "allure...
...the real show was in the array of new clothes designed by the party's sponsors and paraded on the partygoers...
...If you have an idea, you're well ahead...
...The theme of the Met exhibition was the celebration of China as a timeless, aristocratic culture devoted to artistic crafts...
...Vreeland had a long history of insidious statements, from the time in her 1930s columns that she recommended "Why don't you wear bare knees and long white knitted socks as Unity Mitford does when she takes tea with Hitler at the Carlton in Munich...
...informal suit, silk damask topped with sequined scarf," and so forth...
...In all the labels, the anachronistic jargon of fashion talk like "informal suits," "at-home wear," and "summer dress...
...female aristocracies of the spirit could be cultivated through style and taste, manifested in the ineffable qualities of "elegance" and "allure...
...That means people only expect from you what they think they'll get...
...At one of the gala inaugural events the Reagans and the Bushes were treated to an evening of Hollywood entertainment, taped live for television...
...The New York Times characterized the christening party as "Fashion's Big Night at the Met...
...The fortune of Dominican-born Oscar de la Renta (ne Renta) had been made in the mid-1970s, "not by shrewd marketing or even avant-garde designing, but by an unerring taste, and, to a great extent, a familiarity with his affluent clientele...
...you Germans are so busy—such busy-bodies...
...Yet despite the presumed difference between the consumerist and high cultural versions of China, the 1980 Met museum show shared the themes and selectivity of the Bloomingdale's packaging of China...
...The dynastic dazzlers included woven rugs, "prerevolutionary pieces, each and every one...
...Fashion is transient...
...Louis...
...In 1979 and 1980 China embarked on a new program, the "four modernizations," to help stimulate its much-needed economic development...
...Bush sat shimmering in an embroidered Chinese robe...
...the fashion council created its version to echo the luxury and exoticism captured in the exhibition's dazzling displays...
...Allure is "something that holds you...
...The Reagan inauguration set the tone for a full-fledged cult of visible luxury and unrestrained flaunting of wealth...
...The New York Times and other papers indicated that a new kind of woman had arrived in the train of Nancy Reagan and her sumptuous adornments...
...The use of the motto "Living well is the best revenge" in relation to the unchecked pursuit of wealth, as symbolized by the de la Rentas, has undergone a telling transformation...
...I think laying out a beautiful picture in a beautiful way is a bloody bore...
...Stately Nancy Kissinger arrived in an original by Adolfo, the exclusive designer who was busy preparing Nancy Reagan's first inaugural suit...
...Historical specificity was entirely lacking from the exhibition displays...
...The quintessentially Vreelandian perspective imposed on Chinese civilization emerged at the Met show in two ways...
...The dedication of Nancy Reagan to display brought new attention to the elite fashion designers...
...We're proud and we're not afraid to show it...
...While these luxury fashions had been the preserve of a small coterie of the wealthy for a decade, a new clientele and public presence now focused on the de la Rentas...
...Josephine Baker, the music hall performer, as "a total Parisienne, even though she was a laundress's daughter from St...
...Nancy had been, for over twenty years, a "professional lady" who spent her days with Betsy Bloomingdale, Jean Smith, Mary Jane Wick, and Marion Jorgenson on the complex work of maintaining a youthful and elegant appearance...
...Bloomingdale's glorification of China in the guise of a timeless, aristocratic civilization dedicated to the handicrafts revealed two fundamental contradictions...
...Reagan's December 1980 trip to New York, where they were joined at private dinners by fashion moguls Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta...
...The text of Allure revealed that Vreeland nourished fantasies not only of opulent nobilities of the past but of cruelty and decadence in the present...
...The Bloomingdale's China wares had a claim on being handmade in that they were not made by machines...
...According to all reports, the splendor of China soon paled when compared to the lavish opulence exhibited by the party's American participants...
...A Spanish proverb, the phrase originated as a statement of philosophical resignation to fate: God was cruel, the world was difficult and painful, and one had to bear it with the understanding of an individual's limited power to control it...
...The article, by Francesca Stanfill, was titled "Living Well Is Still the Best Revenge...
...and objects like the "Double Happiness Ginger Jar," Bloomingdale's "reproduction of a T'ang dynasty treasure...
...427 Bloomingdale's acted quickly on the new United States-China trade agreement and set to work establishing ties with Chinese craft manufacturers who would fill their orders...
...Fashion designers were a central part of this new elite, as managers of international licensing empires and as media celebrities binding their products to their personal identities...
...In this way Vreeland aspired to transport the viewer into the authentic atmosphere of Chinese imperial culture...
...In Diana Vreeland's hands, the links between surface, symbol, meaning, and social function so central to the Chinese imperial garments were eliminated...
...Nancy Reagan provided these women with a "lift": "Now we know it's all right to buy grand clothes again without looking out of place...
...Stanfill associated the de la Rentas with a shift in American high society, a shift she predicted would be expressed in the Reagan White House...
...From the "warehouses, back alleys, and small markets" in China, Bloomingdale's had rescued the essence of Chinese culture and was offering it as booty to gentrified New Yorkers...
...the Times noted in January that "their business is booming, despite the recession...
...And few members of Reagan's inner circle of friends and advisers—Alfred Bloomingdale, Justin Dart, William French Smith, or Charles Wick—owed their wealth and position to the operations of isolated individuals striving in the free market...
...The tags on the artifacts identified the robes, the materials out of which they were made, and their historical provenance, usually generalized as the "Ch'ing dynasty," which thus placed it some429 where between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries...
...Opium, Schell continues, had been the traditional source of conflict between China and the West, for it epitomized the unequal and humiliating character of foreign treaties and actions...
...Never would a Chinese wife or courtesan of the emperor have worn an "outfit" like the ones created by Vreeland...
...The profits from the Bloomingdale's sales of simulated noble China would be used to pay the advisers from the Conoco, Fluor, and American Steel corporations that the Chinese had invited to help with its communist goal of the "four modernizations...
...The stated sacred and imperial legacies of the objects dissolved in the kingdom of the commodity...
...Born in France and brought up in England, Mrs...
...The imperial robes had as their insignia the fivefingered dragon, a symbol exclusively reserved for the ruler...
...DV did talk once about poverty in Allure, explaining that when Elsa Maxwell lost all her money, she took it in style—when her piano and furniture were repossessed, she "performed an entire opera" for Vreeland, "slapping it out on those big, fat thighs of hers...
...Encased in the robe, the ruler's body symbolized the axis and his head the apex of the universe...
...The president never liked to work, and he prospered less from individual effort than from a combination of luck, corporate power, and the uncanny ability to please...
...Allure published this photo spread, which Vogue had censored, illustrating with magnified camera lenses all phases of the cutting, lifting, and grafting of the eye skin...
...Stanfill celebrated the "rarefied taste" and powerful wealth of the couple, "distinguished," she stated, by their "sense of luxury" and the fact that "they have no fear of ostentation, nor are they inhibited by the pressure of discretion that often characterizes those with old fortunes...
...The motto was popularized in America through its association with the F. Scott Fitzgerald circle in the 1920s...
...Two weeks after the Met party, the New York Times Magazine devoted its cover story to Francoise and Oscar de la Renta...
...Reagan justified the inaugural luxury as evidence of the riches that were obtainable in American society through hard work and talent...
...Thus, the clothes at the Met show all originally expressed the membership of their bearer in a caste system, and the signs and designs on the outer garb were emblems of position in the hierarchy of man and nature...
...Since the time of Marco Polo, China had struck a bargain with the West, ransoming off the rich, exotic artifacts of its imperial culture in exchange for the tools of modernization...
...And we mustn't be afraid of luxury—there are no pictures of poverty here...
...Frank Sinatra organized the evening, and the performers' stage was set directly opposite a platform on which four plush winged chairs were arranged...
...The meaning of "allure" was ambiguous in Vreeland's account...
...all types of natural forces were splayed across the robe— fire and water, sky and air—summarizing all of creation on the body of the emperor...
...In another section Vreeland distinguished fashion from elegance...
...In one tiny corner near the imperial boudoir appeared a glimpse of the China beyond the ruler...
...The imagemakers of aristocratic privilege in clothes and interior design were not only associates of curator Diana Vreeland but friends of Nancy and Ron...
...For although the Chinese plates, robes, coats, and jewelry at "Bloomie's" were surrounded by placards proclaiming their "rare," "original," and "handcrafted" character, the number and variety of items suggested their very lack of uniqueness...
...In her introduction, Silverman writes that she wishes to depict a broad "movement of aristocratic invocation in 1980s American culture, whose participants combined representatives from the worlds of the museum, the department store, fashion design, and the media...
...Diana Vreeland cultivated detachment and disengagement...
...Eager to increase its exports abroad, China signed a 1979 trade agreement with the United States in which the Chinese offered to manufacture consumer and luxury items in China to the desired specifications of the American client...
...To be published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc...
...Cutting up and mixing body parts of different models on a page, Vreeland declared, "I want arms...
...Vreeland claimed that "you've got to blow the picture right across the page and down the side, crop it, cut it in half, do something with it...
...Department stores have welcomed the craftsmen, reflecting and expressing Americans' attraction to the signed, individually rendered item...
...The essence of the Chinese robe was not on its surface, but in the deep symbolic meaning that it expressed...
...The artifacts of Chinese civilization were subjected to the antihistorical drama of a woman who had invented the "composite photo" for shock effect...
...In addition, Reif indicated that Vreeland had mixed and matched Chinese raiment indiscriminately...
...A few months before the opening of the Met China show Vreeland published a book called Allure...
...I want hands...
...At one point she discussed the German spas and chuckled about her German doctor's prediction of mass murder: At the Kurhaus, in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Reed and I would take baths and massages in the Black Forest...
...The tables were laid with black tablecloths and red napkins, and enlivened by red glazed vases filled with yellow lilies and sprays of quince...
...The artifacts for sale at the Chinese Bloomingdale's were consistently presented as "precious and original...
...She was "upwardly mobile, suburban, with a sensibility founded on buying power and an unabashed appreciation of luxury...
...Led by Blass, they created a party theme a la chinoise to capture the "proper air of mystery" intrinsic to China...
...Embark on the journey to the East Side, urged the ads in the New York Times...
...the Met show focused only on the rare, authentic robes, lifting them out of the marketplace into the citadel of scholarship, connoisseurship, and historical explication...
...they were draped on mannequins' bodies and set in rooms reproducing the palace and temple settings in which the robes were originally worn...
...At the time of the Chinese robes exhibition, reviewers like Rita Reif commented that "there was more fantasy than fact in these displays...
...Rigid codes governed the symbolism of all garments, and each person in the Chinese social system, from bureaucrat and palace guard to scholar and soldier, had a particular outer sign to mark his rank...
...he in a sleek black suit...
...she unleashed a new era of style, a style that melded the nouveau riche values of the de la Rentas and Blasses with the rugged individualism of western entrepreneurs and their wives...
...Advertisements declared that now consumers could travel to China without a passport...
...her nose was vulgar...
...He was drafted into gubernatorial politics by millionaire California conservatives Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel in 1964...
...The de la Rentas were at the center of a "phalanx" of the "working uppercrust," a nouveau riche group that represented the fusion of society with big business...
...She had the best taste in people...
...Not only wool tabby and gold thread adorned the emperor's robes, but symbols of his authority and of his place in a sacred hierarchy binding the gods and their earthly representatives...
...And the ethos of the Metropolitan's curator, Diana Vreeland, was closer to a marketing strategy than to the task of historical education...
...Vreeland's Allure and Reagan's Political Culture, 1980 THE "NEW WOMAN" AT THE INAUGURAL BALLS expressed in fashion the ethos of Reagan's politics of rugged, venturesome individualism and its ideology of deserved rewards...
...The Reagan Inauguration: Opulence and Chinoiseries THE INAUGURATION OF RONALD REAGAN in January 1981 channeled the celebration of luxury, and its presumed historical carriers, from the salons of the New York fashion designers to the chambers of state...
...Like the contradictions in the Bloomingdale's project, the Met's presentation of China as timeless, aristocratic, and artisanal was subverted by the visibility of very timely elements in the exhibition...
...The outside of Bloomingdale's was bedecked with the banners representing the ancient Chinese martial arts: sabers and their exquisitely crafted blade cases...
...In the coming war they were going to release it and everyone in sight would be dead— they'd tell you all this...
...she exclaimed...
...Each of the three characteristics reflected the peculiar selectivity with which Bloomingdale's marketers fashioned their image of the People's Republic...
...it is something around you like a perfume or a scent...
...Copyright ® 1986 by Debora Silverman...
...turning the open space into a multiplicity of small, intimate compartments resembling a maze of shiny black boxes...
...Nancy and Ron looked like the king and queen observing their many jesters...
...The ironic overtones of such a "red China" seemed to bother no one...
...The emperor's robe was a microcosm of the heavenly macrocosm...
...A new line of costumes was launched at the Met— "luxurious dresses" that "overshadowed the grandeur of the imperial robes...
...If the production of handmade use objects once expressed cultural rebellion, now department stores offer signed, individually crafted items, from chocolate to underwear, as purchasers' status symbols...
...Less amusing and more pernicious themes surfaced in Allure, articulated in scathing and sadistic tones, suggesting the underside of the aristocratic revival...
...Vreeland acknowledged that aristocracies of the blood were gone...
...In the center of one of the exhibition halls, Vreeland re-created a royal boudoir, framed by a carved-wood pagoda top and bright red silk linens across the bed...
...elegance is innate...
...A peculiar paradox enabled the Communist Chinese to cooperate with the center of consumer capitalism...
...And the cult of visible wealth expressed in culture and merchandising was transposed into the policies of social repudiation pursued by the Reagan White House...
...426 The metahistorical quality of Chinese civilization came through in the Bloomingdale's ads celebrating the "country steeped in forty centuries of opulence and ritual," whose "richness, mystery, and romance were barely touched since Marco Polo's journey seven hundred years ago...
...We've worked for this," the wife of a Texas real estate developer at the inaugural ball was quoted as saying...
...The $16 million inaugural extravaganza witnessed the arrival of the millionaire Californians and Hollywood stars in Washington, where they inched their way through a crush of limousines and gorged on endless delicacies...
...The labeling of the objects in the show focused exclusively on their exquisite surfaces...
...On the evening of December 8, 1980, the Council of Fashion Designers sponsored a lavish gala to greet the show and pay tribute to its artificer, Vreeland...
...The Met exhibition extended Bloomingdale's vision of China as a timeless world "steeped in forty centuries of ritual and opulence...
...In December 1980 the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened an exhibition at its Costume Institute, "The Manchu Dragon: Costumes of China, the Ch'ing Dynasty, 1644-1912...
...Reif claimed that the mannequins displayed the "layered look" of 1970s fashion designers rather than the style of any Chinese historical period...
...Vreeland said these pictures captured the fact that "I adore artifice...
...The costume show covered the entire span of the Manchu reign, a period of almost three hundred years...
...One can learn a hell of a lot from the demimondaine...
...The Reagan politics of theater and of elitist individualism received a striking cultural expression in the work and writings of Diana Vreeland...
...By her own admission, her world was a stage: "Performance is all I cared about as a child and it's all I care about now...
...Vreeland had drenched the room in a fragrance that she explained as capturing the essence of China—her friend Yves Saint Laurent's new perfume, called Opium...
...Whatever their origin, the mannequins embodied an extension of the pages of an elite fashion magazine rather than representative types who might have worn Chinese courtly vestments...
...The Met party and its glorification of aristocratic Chinese culture coincided with PresidentElect and Mrs...
...These craft objects and a multitude of others—"each one a work of art"—testified to what Bloomingdale's promoters called the special Chinese "concern for utmost quality and artistic merit...
...Bloomingdale's tried very hard to envelop the many objects on display in a distinction suggested by their history and lineage...
...underwear with "Made in China" labels, cinnabar coasters, miniature horse sculptures modeled on those of the emperors, and reprocessed imperial robes—all blurred into one mesmerizing imperative: How much does it cost...
...Reif went on to note one glaring inaccuracy in the show, which altered the meaning and function of the imperial robes: they were not worn for public display, but for private worship...
...The aristocratic and artisanal character of the Bloomingdale's China show also reappeared as the organizing themes at the Met...
...In the nineteenth century, when the department store was born, it was perceived as the enemy of the handmade item...
...One claimed that the beautiful handmade Chinese sweaters knit for Bloomingdale's were "developed one-onone with the Chinese . . . to our standards, our American taste, with the Chinese attentiveness to quality and detail...
...The Times article concluded that in some ways these women were the Cinderella wives of Horatio Alger husbands, who offered visible proof to everyone beneath them on the social scale that "they can do it too...
...She looks like a cook on her day off . . . of course, she no doubt had just been dining with a king—always kings...
...cloisonné jewelry that reproduced the styles of the Ch'ing dynasty...
...A large folio volume with huge black-and-white fashion photos interspersed with textual comments by Vreeland, the book collected Vreeland's favorite fashion photographers, from the Baron de Meyer to Irving Penn, and her favorite beautiful women, among them the Vicomtesse de Ribes, Greta Garbo, Evita Peron, Gertrude Stein, Marilyn Monroe, and the Duchess of Windsor...
...According to Jesse Kornbluth, Vreeland never had any formal education to speak of, trained briefly with the Ziegfeld Follies chorus girls as a dancer, and then ran a lingerie shop in London that specialized in black underwear...
...Bloomingdale's explicitly celebrated its own responsibility for creating China in its image...
...Every morning Dr...
...And they look so marvelous in jewels...
...In 1982 it received the Annual Rodeo Drive Gala Award in Los Angeles...
...This strategy resembled the descriptions used at fashion shows, where the dress paraded is complemented by the stated explanation of its contents...
...Red carpets graced all the floors of the party chambers, which were lit from above by red spotlights...
...Vreeland (nee Diana Hoffman Dalziel) recalled that the coronation of George V in 1911 was a central event in her early life...
...Diana Vreeland wore a shimmering gold jacket set off by a black skirt...
...The labels delineated, in great detail, the richness and variety of the materials that went into the creation of the robes and other court costumes...
...Ooo," I'd say, "I can hardly wait...
...and, in the inverse, Vreeland remarked of Elsa Maxwell that "she looked vulgar...
...It is a quality, according to Vreeland, possessed by certain animals, like gazelles, and women like Audrey Hepburn...
...Nancy Reagan's gowns, gloves, embroidered handbags, hand-sewn shoes, and floor-length minks changed constantly before the eyes of the public...
...The "four modernizations" included science, technology, industry, and technical education, which government officials stated would also provide the required components for a "new decade of socialist construction...
...Thus, as we have seen, scores of "Double Happiness Ginger Jars" were associated with the dynasty of their origin, and other items were labeled as reproductions of statues and relics of religious shrines...
...When and whether she ever had real contact with European royalty and nobility is unclear...
...Many writers have pointed out the anachronisms and ironies of Reagan's free-enterprise ideology: the rough-and-tough individualist idealized by the rancher-president has little basis in either the marketplace of advanced corporate capitalism or the personal success story of the president himself...
...Seven hundred people paid three hundred dollars apiece to dine on the obligatory coquilles Saint-Jacques and fillet of beef, to watch Chinese fireworks, and to get an exclusive preview of the show...
...In America, since the late 1970s, this assumption of a life-and-death struggle between the big department store and the individual artisan has been dramatically altered...
...Such cultural projects, she continues, "are tied to the big business of illusion-making and are perfectly suited to the politics of theater practiced in the White House...
...The Chinese imports offered at the re-created Bloomingdale's were presented in the store's display information and in ads in three ways: as timeless, aristocratic, and rare...
...The influence of Diana Vreeland brought about the suspension of the normal categories of scholarly accuracy, historical erudition, and artistic connoisseurship with which museum shows are normally mounted...
...The China show clarified a contradiction underlying the general trend of promoting "original" craft items in the department store...
...Thus Bloomingdale's image of China was fashioned on the basis of a double artifice: the objects that captured the "essence" of China were themselves first sketched out on Lexington Avenue, and then they were made in China exclusively for Bloomingdale's in manufactories set up especially for American export...
...That to me isn't the Big Time...
...The items commissioned were designed by Bloomingdale's artists in New York, who projected their fantasies of the opulent, mysterious empire and ordered accordingly...
...The Met's Great Hall and dining area were transformed 431 into a "Red Palace...
...We mustn't be afraid of snobbism and absurdity...
...Allure depicted the shoe-polish-sprayed model and the dismembered elements of composite fashion photos...
...Commentators like R. Williams, Laurence Learner, and Michael Kinsley noted the "staggering splendor" and coronation tone to the affair...
...De la Renta's speciality was extravagance, which usually took the form of massive ruffles attached to flamboyant skirts and evening gowns...
...Vreeland began writing for Harper's Bazaar, she established a column, "Why Don't You . . . ?" which amused Depression readers with bits of advice like "Why don't you convert your ermine coat into a bathrobe...
...But a true black hand, however black, would have been . . . banal...
...The buyers' "tireless tracking," patient "sifting," and relentless efforts had led to the rediscovery of Chinese craft treasures, hidden from the public in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution...
...Kornbluth characterized Vreeland as a shrewd individualist and ambitious businesswoman who had to work hard to 435 subsidize her aristocratic affectations: "Though fated to be remembered as a highsociety fashion oracle, Diana Vreeland has, all these years, been one of our greatest actresses, systematically parading her precariously luxurious life as a way of earning her daily madeleine...
...Stanfill went on to describe how the de la Rentas cloaked their ambition in elegant, opulent surroundings in a series of country and city residences whose overstuffed, cozy interiors were filled with refined luxury items...
...During the previous ten years Bloomingdale's had participated in a more general marketing movement, the arrival of the handcrafted item in the department store...
...She loved the "correctness and perfect design" of the horses, carriages, and military men in procession and lamented that such grace "survives today only in the army, the navy, the church, and in royalty...
...masses of Rothschild lilies, flocked red velvet walls edged in faux marbre, silk upholstered Second Empire chairs, mother-of-pearl cabinets, windows swagged in heavy, fringed silk": these were some of the vessels of the de la Rentas' ineffable taste...
...The grand reflecting pool around which the dinner guests sat was surrounded by huge banners hung from the ceiling...
...She identified the de la Rentas as part of a "new professional elite": "the very rich, the very powerful," the representatives of "current talent and current fame...
...Inside the store's capacious halls, numerous veneered black and red screens were erected, From the forthcoming book Selling Culture by Debora Silverman...
...Outfitting Nancy were her longtime friends, designers Bill Blass, Adolfo, and Galanos, who garbed the First Lady in their new concept of the "sybaritic outfit...
...Indeed, the Chinese imports were the first fruits of a new commercial agreement between the United States and China, which Bloomingdale's was among the first to cash in on...
...and "Why don't you wash your hair with champagne...
...The Chinese robes operated in a cosmological system where all material objects were redolent with meaning...
...The mannequins had elongated features, especially marked in their faces, hands, ears, and feet...
...In 1980 Diana Vreeland sprinkled Allure with her memoirs of the 1930s...
...In 1980 China was again eager to "export its cultural legacy," which had been prohibited under Mao as the domain of the "four olds" (language, art, customs, and clothes...
...The tags on the Chinese items leveled them into a single category, that of price...
...The mingling of the super rich and 433 the street people under the iron-and-glass sheds of Union Station offered a startling juxtaposition of the two worlds...
...Along the Beverly Hills street, the home of the exclusive boutiques where Nancy Reagan had shopped for her first inaugural wardrobe, Vreeland's book was displayed in every window, with costly jewels, scarves, shoes, and clothes wrapped around it...
...Tall and ungainly, the "Chinese" mannequins in costume had faces painted in different color schemes— brown, pink, yellow, red, and black...
...Francoise de la Renta, renowned for her talents as a 432 decorator, arranged her rooms as "sybaritic backdrops" for her weekly salons...
...Perhaps this was the fantasy of poverty that the Rodeo Drive merchants wished to nurture...
...And a third explained that the Bloomingdale's representatives on location in Beijing made sure that the Chinese objects "looked crafted, not made...
...The uniformity of Mao's blues was replaced by the extravagant irregularity of ancient nobilities...
...The sights of China immediately greeted the viewer who had just recovered from the sounds and smells...
...Bloomingdale's China was a prerevolutionary and preindustrial China, whose luxury artisans practiced the traditions, unbroken, of the emperors...
...The dust jacket characterized as "by turns witty, sharp, extravagant, and cruel," the "Vreelandian perspective" which took the reader through a "luxurious, gossip-ridden world that DV knows so well...
...Govens would apply the Grenz ray to my sinuses...
...One thing that is very noticeable in Balzac is the demimondaine...
...It's like memory—it pervades...
...Here the glistening "baubles, bangles, and bedazzling things" of China, as they were called, were displayed...
...In a dimly lit room, one heard highpitched ancient Chinese music, and one's senses were assaulted by a very powerful smell...
...Vreeland's main message in Allure, that "elegance is refusal," had not only sexual but social implications...
...He got his start in both economic and political life as the "corporate ambassador" for General Electric in the 1950s...
...Lacquer screens, carved jade jewelry, celadon porcelains, pen quills and inkstands studded with precious stones, ivory and cinnabar miniature sculptures carved into women's hair combs—these were some of the objects crafted to the standards of the rulers...
...The triumph of fashion illusionism over Chinese history appeared in a second way...
...Rather than having to do with wreaking revenge on a world that has exposed moral ideals as illusions, the slogan now implies revenge on the poor, who are considered undeserving...
...Vreeland's "witty, sharp, extravagant" tone, and her snobbish celebration of old and new aristocracies, had long been her trademarks...
...Nancy's cult of snobbism in appearance also legitimized lavish ornamental femininity...
...The packaging of China as timeless and aristocratic was complemented by the theme of its special devotion to the rare and handcrafted...
...it projected fantasies of wealth, power, and leisure attached to an ancient imperial civilization and displayed them in the form of a fashion show...
...The promotion literature also stressed that Bloomingdale's buyers, who spent months in China looking for merchandise, had performed an invaluable service for the Chinese people...
...It was a civilization construed as particularly gifted in the creation of delicate, artistic objects for intimate pleasures...
...The Reagan presidential inaugural festivities trumpeted the arrival of opulence at the highest levels of state...
...For Vreeland then, as now, all of this was grand posturing and playacting...
...The entire premises of the Lexington Avenue store were transformed into a vision of an opulent, hieratic China, land of emperors, mystery, and dazzling artisans feeding the emperors' relentless needs for magnificence...
...At the department store the real Chinese robes had been difficult to distinguish from the panoply of reproductions offered for sale in close proximity...
...Vreeland was identified in the article as another figure in this new elite: "Now everything is power and money and how to use them both," Vreeland declared...
...Allure was a mixture of memoirs and oracles from the queen of the elite fashion world, whose taste and sense of style had been nurtured in over thirty years of editing Vogue and Harper's Bazaar...
...In other places in the book Vreeland hinted at the many members of the upper crust that she knew personally...
...The second contradiction intrinsic to the presentation of China at Bloomingdale's emerged in relation to the "handmade" and "original" qualities attached to the merchandise...
...Vreeland thought it would be amusing, and shocking, to photograph an eye-lift operation...
...I want legs...
...The 1980 Saint Laurent Opium fragrance drenching the Ch'ing dynasty Chinese emperors' robes recreated the historical license of Western misappropriation of China and added a startling new irony to the record of Western representations of the East...
...President Reagan requested that invitees don the formal morning "stroller" suit, popular at the time of the Prince of Wales, for the swearing-in ceremony...
...Their pointy faces and ears gave them the strange look of Mister Spock in "Star Trek...
...Francoise told the Times reporter that she had developed her style as a decorator by studying great works of French literature, especially Balzac...
...Significantly, in the months before the Met show opened, many of the same precious Chinese robes to be exhibited at the Met had been on display at Bloomingdale's, where a special museum had been established for the duration of the China sales campaign...
...The Metropolitan's Chinese robes show emerged as a perfect pendant to the Bloomingdale's presentation of China preceding it...
...From the beginning of his administration, Reagan was relentless in his declaration of the need for a return to the old American values of individual effort and risk-taking, and the upward mobility to follow from both...
...First, the dazzling artifacts from the People's Republic were not authentic vessels of ancient mysteries but rather the simulated products of a shrewd business alliance between the Bloomingdale's managers and the Communist Chinese government...
...The imperial tone was set by the sabers adorning the outer walls of the store...
...Nancy Reagan collected Chinese porcelains and lacquer tables, and revealed that her initial project as First Lady would be the redecoration of the White House private quarters to accommodate her exquisite Chinese decorative pieces...
...An omnipotence fantasy ruled these illusions...
...The exquisitely crafted stuffs of the emperors filled the Met halls with the original "dynastic dazzlers" celebrated in simulated form at Bloomie's...
...Another of her innovations for Vogue was painting a white model shiny black with shoe polish and studding her eyes, breasts, and arms with diamonds, as testimony to the fact that "there's no place in the world where there's a vein of precious stone that doesn't belong to people of color...
...The emperors' presence was felt throughout in the shimmering surfaces of their multicolored robes, and in the costumes worn by their wives and concubines...
...1 n September 1980 Bloomingdale's announced it had "unleashed the largest merchandising venture ever in the history of the store" by transporting the riches of China to New York...
...This was not an eastern woman but a Sunbelt beauty, who "cared about style and did not want to look unobtrusive...
...Immediately on entering the gallery, the spectator was thrown into a bizarre underworld closer to the more extreme pages of Vogue than to Chinese imperial courts...
...China at the Metropolitan Museum, 1980 No SOONER HAD THE BLOOMINGDALE'S CHINA project begun to wind down than a new celebration of China as the crucible of luxury, aristocracy, and rare artistic crafts was born...
...It also included a huge five-page insert that Vreeland had commissioned, though it was too barbaric even for Vogue...
...Gerald Murphy, an American expatriate in France who socialized with the Fitzgeralds and Ernest Hemingway, invoked the saying in the context of the bohemianism, nonconformity, and bitterness that followed the devastation of World War I. Murphy and his coterie proposed a life of license in isolation as a reaction to the shattering of all ideals by the war...
...Two representatives from Bonwit Teller's in "glittering dresses" promoted the sumptuous look of the new season's fashions...
...But the craft objects imported from China were produced at human assembly lines, where massive orders for hand-painted fans, bowls, plates, and clothes were filled by intense division of labor and specialization...
...Other ads credited Bloomingdale's own buyers for ensuring the standards and quality of Chinese products...
...She recounted how she discovered the composite photo for Vogue as a capstone to her career objective of not being boring or predictable...
...Protected for centuries in China behind the walls of the emperors' quarters, the "Forbidden City," the opulence, refinement, and delicacy of what Vreeland called "the land of jade" were now exposed to public view...
...A Bloomingdale's executive arrived at the party in a multicolored, embroidered Chinese robe...
...Reif remarked that the magnificent robes were always worn underneath a long, plain black overcoat...
...The robes were not suspended in cases as in other costume exhibits...
...This was a group marked by "the energy, incentive, fearlessness, and aggressiveness of the ambitious...
...She smiles...
...A "Chinese coolie" was displayed, standing on a stepped platform, dressed entirely in a simple white shroud and hat...
...was matched by the obsessive attentiveness to the expensive materials quite clearly visible on the surface of the imperial garments...
...Among the varied objects bombarding the spectator-buyer with their shimmering surfaces were gold and jade bracelets, cinnabar bowls and plates, multicolored woven shawls, coral and garnet boxes, and short jackets and long robes shot through with gold threads, silks, and sequins...
...The white simplicity of the designated coolie contrasted sharply with the breathtaking colors of the imperial clothes and interiors by which it was quickly overwhelmed...
...The exhibit lacked basic information to enable the viewer to differentiate the various rulers and their historical contexts...
...In Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames, for example, the department store is presented as a ruthless, voracious monster, whose commitment to volume and fast turnover signaled the death of the small retail shop and the individual artisans who supplied it...
...The hungry poor, whom Reagan aides were soon to dub wily cheaters, helped themselves to the "lobster bisque, shrimp merlin, escargots, and vitello alla geatano" heaped on forty tables...
...The clearest definition Vreeland arrived at was "Elegance is refusal...
...At the Met's China show the spectator was endlessly bombarded with tags stating "embroidered wool tabby, highlighted with gold silk threads and brocaded velvet...
...Allure was a big seller in 1980, and has been since...
...How could scores of rugs and bins overflowing with cloisonné stickpins be seen as "each and every one a work of art...
...Opium may have been the essence of China to Vreeland, but, as Orville Schell reminds us, the drug had been originally imported into China by Western merchants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where, in contravention of Chinese law, they had traded the drug "at enormous profit for silk, tea, and silver...
...Display shelves in the store were filled with "hand-painted porcelain underglaze bowls," "hand-carved cinnabar coasters," and "handwoven rugs," whose "rare and original" qualities could be found "exclusively at Bloomingdale's...
...Not 430 only was explanation of historical provenance missing, but the exhibit labels offered no sense of the meaning and function of the Chinese robes and decorative arts within their national context...
...In a long row stood, in varying languorous poses, ten female mannequins bedecked in court robes and ceremonial costumes...
...Another rhapsodized, "Oh, the artisans we guided so carefully to bring you . . . everything that so eloquently speaks of the elegance and grace indigenous to China...
...As in other times in its history, China proposed to pave the roads of modern construction with the proceeds from the sale of its feudal heritage...
...A New Yorker cartoon that showed Chinese factory managers stating that they had "to wait for Bloomingdale's instructions to begin production" was used by the store in its own ad campaign to illustrate its "newest expansion in China...
...the meaning and substance of her statements and her photos were always subordinated to the creation of effect, as long as it was not a bore...
...Invoking no less an authority than Marcel Proust, one of her favorite authors, she passed scathing comments on other people's social backgrounds: she described Maria Callas as "common as mud...
...cinnabar tableware and boxes advertised as originally made for palace use...
...Organized and installed by Diana Vreeland and her assistants, the Met show displayed magnificent Chinese imperial robes...
...The most boring thing on earth is to be of the world of what you do...
...The Metropolitan exhibition was on the surface very different from the Bloomingdale's project...
...Bedecked in ruffled satin gowns by Blass, de la Renta, and Galanos, and gleaming in egg-shaped rubies, diamonds, ostrich feathers, and ermine capes, these women noted how they were "tired of having to apologize for ourselves...
...In the 1930s, when Mrs...
Vol. 33 • September 1986 • No. 4
