MOHAI fashion exhibit offers glimpse into the history of postwar Paris

They were pale and wire-thin, these ghostly ladies of Parisian haute couture.

All the better to display the draping silks, the smartly tucked woolens, the dazzling jewels and feathered hats stitched together by defiant French designers who had just escaped the Nazi yoke.

Even by themselves, the nearly 200 mannequins were remarkable: An army of hope whose foot soldiers were but 27 inches high, with bodies of twisted wire and sensitive, expressive heads of sculpted plaster.

Equally dazzling were their backdrops: a dozen theatrical sets by Paris' top tastemakers and stage designers, including creative masters such as filmmaker Jean Cocteau.

Titled "Theatre de la Mode," the 1945 exhibition sent a message: that Paris, starved and threadbare after four years of Nazi occupation, was not about to surrender its lead in the world of high fashion.

"These miniatures were intended to be a celebration of renewal, of coming back," said Lorraine C. McConaghy, historian at the Museum of History and Industry, which is hosting the exhibition's first Seattle appearance.

The "Theatre" has since become a celebration of its own renewal, decades after its sets were destroyed and the figurines nearly lost to the world.

Today it draws students of fashion, theater and film -- not to mention doll collectors -- to its unlikely home at the Maryhill Museum of Art in Goldendale, overlooking the Columbia Gorge.

Much of what we know about "Theatre de la Mode" comes from oral history, said Betty Long-Schleif, Maryhill's longtime curator of the exhibit.

Fortunately, many of those memories were captured in a 1990 video (viewable at the MOHAI show) and in a $30 collection of essays and photographs titled "Theatre de la Mode -- Fashion Dolls: The Survival of Haute Couture," available at the museum gift shop.

The romantic saga began in autumn 1944 as a newly liberated Paris struggled to rebuild. Millions were homeless, and cold and hunger were rampant.

New fashions? It is to laugh. Parisians had gone four years without new underwear. Rationing was so strict and illogical -- rather like today's Medicare prescription-drug plan -- that people were forced to improvise. If madame desired a new suit, newspaper patterns would help her sew one from her husband's castoffs.

Small scale, big impact

From this hope and despair, publicist Robert Ricci, son of couturiere Nina Ricci, spearheaded an audacious exhibition to raise money for war victims and herald the survival of French fashion, the country's second-largest prewar industry.

In the end, well over 50 designers -- some of them cutthroat competitors in fatter times -- collaborated on the show that became "Theatre de la Mode."

They included Balenciaga (whose house had been shut down briefly by the Germans for fabric-ration violations), Hermes, Jeanne Lanvin, Pacquin, Jean Patou, Shiaparelli and Worth.

With fabric still scarce, the "Theatre's" displays were necessarily small in scale, harking back to the 18th-century tradition of introducing new styles through traveling fashion dolls. In other respects, the Lilliputian gowns were painstakingly authentic.

"I think that the real story of this show are these exquisite dresses that are so detailed," said MOHAI's McConaghy. "The zippers work, the buttonholes were sewn by hand. If a shoe has a strap, it buckles. If it's a handbag, it has a wallet in it.

"People were hungry and cold but they were able to create this beautiful art."

For the mannequins' design, Robert Ricci turned to 20-year-old Eliane Bonabel, already a longtime illustrator, who conceived the transparent, wire shapes.

"It occurred to me the designs should not be solid," she recalled in the 1990 video, "because then they would resemble dolls or toys."

Spanish-born sculptor Joan Rebull, a friend of Picasso, created the figurines' plaster heads, while a bearded bohemian named Christian Berard oversaw the show and assembled the talent.

"The artists and couturiers were given complete freedom to create the sets and the clothes they pleased," wrote American historian Stanley Garfinkel, who helped rescue the show decades later.

MOHAI has re-creations of five of the original sets -- an enchanted grotto, two Paris street scenes, an ornate opera house that originally stood 15 feet high, and a surreal, war-ravaged scene that Cocteau titled "Tribute to (filmmaker) Rene Clair: I Married a Witch."

The Cocteau set reveals the Paris skyline through a bombed-out garret as a sorceress in tulle flies over frightened and fainting damsels.

"Fashion bores me," Cocteau wrote, "but I am amused by the set and fashion placed together."

A reverent debut

When it debuted in March 1945, "Theatre de la Mode" drew 100,000 visitors to the Louvre's Museum of Decorative Arts. Designer Andre Beaurepaire later recalled the night as "a really smashing affair."

The "Theatre de la Mode," he said later, was "a universe of enchantment" in an immense gallery draped in red velvet.

"People walked from set to set talking in whispers," he said. "It was almost like a church, a chapel."

The exhibit later traveled to London, Barcelona, Vienna and Stockholm, drawing royals and just plain folks alike.

In preparation for its 1946 American debut in New York and San Francisco, designers added a 13th set and dressed the figurines in new fashions, presumably repurposing fabric from the 1945 creations.

"Nobody really knows what happened to the (original) clothes," Long-Schleif said.

It's the 1946 dresses visitors will see at MOHAI -- pencil-thin suits and beaded opera gowns topped with mink and ermine wraps. Some even sported real jewels (later replaced by imitations) supplied by Cartier and other top jewelers.

The collection includes a polka-dot frock believed to be the work of Christian Dior, who later launched the cinch-waisted "New Look" of 1947.

"The seeds of the real French, postwar ascendancy are in this show," McConaghy said. "You just have to have the eye to see it."

Sadly, San Francisco was the end of the line for the "Theatre." It was disbanded and stored until 1952 in the basement of, fittingly, the City of Paris department store. By then, French fashions were booming again, and the designers who had labored so hard on the "Theatre" abandoned it.

The sets were destroyed, but the figurines were rescued by an art patron with ties to the Maryhill Museum, which acquired them and displayed them under glass for several decades.

The tale took another twist in 1988, when Kent State University historian Garfinkel learned of the mannequins' existence.

Prodded in part by his excitement, Maryhill sent the collection to Paris for documentation and restoration, a two-year joint effort of the museum, the French government, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Hanae Mori salon in Japan.

By 1990, nine of the sets were rebuilt, and the restored "Theatre de la Mode" opened at its original venue at the Louvre. Since then, it has traveled from Maryhill to New York, Tokyo, Baltimore, London, Portland and Honolulu.

"It went to Hawaii right after 9/11," said Long-Schleif, who found the show's theme of hope and renewal especially timely in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

In the video that accompanies the show, contemporary designer Christian Lacroix says the "Theatre de la Mode" is precious today because it captures the "last glowing embers" of something typically Parisian.

"These were, after all, the last flames of a haute couture based on hand-craftsmanship," he says. "Skills have been lost and techniques have been forgotten.

"I believe all of that is gone," Lacroix concludes with a rueful smile, "and that is why one looks at 'La Theatre de la Mode' with nostalgia."

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