Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (24 page)

The clergy ranted from the pulpit about the licentiousness of the dancing youth (though Victor Sylvester, the undisputed king of the Black Bottom, was a vicar’s son); organizations such as the London Council for the Promotion of Public Morality warned of the growing influence of the uncensored cinema; and the influential Temperance Movement urged even stricter licensing laws. Most of the young people in question took absolutely no notice. All they wanted to do was dance. But as far as officialdom was concerned, dancing went hand in hand with drinking. While Lloyd George and Nancy Astor, the country’s first woman MP, who both loathed ‘the demon drink’, would have been delighted to see alcohol banned in Great Britain – as it had been in America to disastrous effect – they had to rely on DORA instead. The wartime law was dusted off and made more stringent still. It became illegal to get a drink anywhere after 10 p.m. without food, and anywhere at all after midnight. Such absurdities only succeeded in driving dozens of flourishing nightclubs underground – quite literally, as most of them were in dank cellars.

Such attempts to enforce a new morality had little effect. Everyone converged on club-land. Rich war profiteers, the
jeunesse dorée
up from Oxford and Cambridge, the young British royal princes, a clutch of their dispossessed European royal cousins – all sat side by side with newly rich provincials up from the suburbs, dancing and drinking till dawn, their night out all the more thrilling because it might end in a police raid.

Before the war, apart from the odd glass of sherry or a celebratory glass of champagne, pre-dinner drinking had hardly existed. Wine was drunk with food, never on its own, women would rarely drink spirits and men passed round the port. Then cocktails arrived. ‘Cocktail time’ seemed to begin anywhere from 12 noon to 5 p.m., with people giving cocktail parties, eagerly exchanging recipes for the perfect Martini, and praising barmen who made a great White Lady.

Not everyone approved. The distinguished restaurateur Monsieur Boulestin said: ‘Cocktails are the most romantic expression of modern life, but the cocktail habit as practised in England is now a vice.’ It was a vice to which even the otherwise fairly abstemious Harry Selfridge took. Pre-war he would nurse a glass of champagne for an entire evening. During the war, he joined the King who declared Buckingham Palace a ‘dry zone’ and gave up drinking altogether. But post-war, Harry took to having ‘a cocktail or two’ before dinner. He also took to eating a prodigious amount of food while dining which resulted – as was noticed by one of his inner-sanctum office staff – in him taking to wearing a corset. Selfridge’s meanwhile joined in the craze for cocktails by selling shakers, fancy ice trays, cocktail napkins, recipe books, martini glasses, gold swizzle sticks, olives and all the paraphernalia of the drinker – right down to the white mess jackets that the barmen wore.

It wasn’t just the fashion in drink that changed. Clothes were changing too. The influence of the once great Paul Poiret was waning. He was still making sumptuous clothes and was still surrounded by an eccentric coterie – the poet Max Jacob, a gifted amateur astrologer, liked to advise his friend on the colours he should wear so as to be in conjunction with the planets – but his style was about to be eclipsed. When fashion revived in Paris after the war, the look was distinctly less dramatic. Coco Chanel, poised to become the defining leader of style, declared: ‘I make fashions women can live in, breathe in and look younger in.’ The latter effect made her clothes irresistible. Everyone wanted to look younger, including Harry Selfridge. Now 64, he seemed utterly determined to push back time, travelling to Vienna for treatments with Serge Voronoff, whose anti-ageing experiments with monkey glands were exciting other youth-conscious luminaries such as George Bernard Shaw, Helena Rubinstein, Augustus John and Winston Churchill.

Thousands of women had found war work and the utility clothing that went with it a liberating experience. The watchwords in fashion were ‘simplicity’, ‘modernity’ and ‘freedom’. Many women now
widowed or without much prospect of marriage were having to become self-supporting through need as much as choice. They wanted clothes for work rather than for leisure, but above all they needed clothes that worked for them – less ornate, less contrived and certainly less expensive. Mechanical methods originally devised to cut material for military uniforms were quickly adapted to produce ready-to-wear clothing – chiefly coats and suits – which transformed not just the clothing industry but also the jobs of many women working in it, as unskilled and semi-skilled machinists took over what had previously been made by hand.

The lean, short shift dress of the quintessential Twenties flapper was actually a mid-decade innovation. Its precursor was a low-waisted combination of droop and drape in soft fabrics such as lamé, panne velvet and crêpe de Chine, often tied with a deep sash at the hip. All those lush, Edwardian curves were now out, and as corset sales slumped by two-thirds, the underpinnings industry had hastily to reinvent itself. Although Dorothy Parker famously quipped ‘that brevity is the soul of lingerie’, there was still quite a lot going on underneath. To flatten the bosom, women bought Symington’s side-lacer camisole-style bra, wore a straight-cut camisole or, in an emergency, simply taped their bosom down with a crêpe bandage. The more mature, used to some support and still priding themselves in standing up straight, wore the longer-line corset pioneered for the pre-war straighter skirts, while the young and more athletic favoured a lighter-weight ‘corselette’ and even took to wearing garter belts. The cotton industry was in disarray as layers of servant-starched petticoats were discarded in favour of a simple petticoat shift – usually in satin or silk. Then, in 1924, there arrived the working girl’s greatest saviour, rayon.

At the beginning of the Twenties hemlines moved up by about eight inches, revealing gleaming silk stockings, coloured kid-leather shoes, the hitherto unseen shape of a lady’s leg and, in the case of Lady Londonderry, the grand political hostess of the day, the surprising fact that she had a snake tattoo from her ankle to her knee.

Stockings were no longer just black or white. With the introduction
of synthetics, artificial silk stockings also came in skin-tones of flesh and beige. They weren’t as nice to wear as silk, but they were less than half the price and very practical. Selfridge’s was actually prosecuted for falsely selling synthetic stockings as ‘real silk’. The store vigorously protested that it was the fault of the supplier but agreed to refund disgruntled customers nevertheless. This incident was one of the rare occasions when anyone in the office saw ‘the Chief’ lose his temper. He loathed confrontation and hated arguments, thinking them a waste of energy, but any misrepresentation of goods ran against his entire business philosophy. He prided himself on accuracy and his copywriters were never allowed to put a false spin on store promotions or use misleading price promotion tricks.

Selfridge himself may have been an early adopter of ethical advertising in respect of price and value, but his creative team was part of the swelling army of copywriters and image engineers who helped to build an ideology of consumerism. The seductive hum of shopping was in the air. Women were wearing make-up (no more lipsticks under the counter), flashing their powder compacts in public, using moisturizer and worrying about wrinkles, smoking cigarettes and gargling with Listerine, listening to all the latest records at home instead of playing the piano, and going out unchaperoned. They still wore hats –
everyone
still wore hats – but the hats were getting much, much smaller, and the hair underneath them was changing.

Long hair was out. Short waved hair, as pioneered by the film star Gloria Swanson, was in. At Selfridge’s, the hairdressing department (now seating fifty clients at a time) was busy all day using the latest waving machines – price 3 guineas for shingled hair, 4 guineas for long. Hairdressing had by now become big business. Most of the original stylists from Selfridge’s early, innovative department had left to open their own salons, ‘colour, cut and curl’ then as now being a profitable business. But even in a smaller salon, marcel waving cost at least 2 guineas, so anyone who couldn’t afford a week’s wages to wave their hair did it at home with tongs heated on a tiny spirit stove.

Women’s magazines were settling into their stride.
Harper’s Bazaar
,
Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Queen, The Lady, Tatler
and
Woman Magazine
– the latter edited at one stage by Arnold Bennett – were essential reading and always available at the best hairdressers. Who ever was making or selling something fashionable was starting to advertise it seriously, although full stand-alone pages were still rare. Most stores ran quarter-pages, crammed with copy and cluttered with a multitude of different typefaces, usually accompanied by a deadly dull sketch produced by an art-agency draughtsman struggling to show the projected bestseller at Arding & Hobbs or Pontings.

High-style fashion illustration on the other hand had become recognized as an art in its own right – at its peak exemplified by the Russian émigré Erte’s glorious work for
Harper’s Bazaar
. Erte, Tamara de Lempicka and George Barbier, whose inspired work for the pre-war
Journal des Dames et des Modes
had helped establish the trend, were at the height of their powers. It didn’t last. The illustrators would soon be eclipsed by photographers, with Baron de Meyer, Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene dominating the field.

Selfridge’s advertising was aimed at the high-circulation daily newspapers, but when the store did place advertisements in magazines, Harry Selfridge made sure the pages were uncluttered and the message was clear. One early page in
Vogue
typifies the style:

Vogue
is a beautifully-printed Journal and this typographical beauty lies in the excellence of its type and composition … its paper,
its every detail.
Selfridge’s endeavours to be an admirable Store by striving for excellence in its many departments, by insisting on variety and newness and novelty in its merchandise … on charming courtesy and delightful service … by studying every one of the thousands of details which go to produce the great 20th Century Store.

The establishment, on the other hand, was rather wary about all this newness. Old habits and grand manners died hard, and the old guard were disconcerted to find their racy daughters borrowing their motor-cars, footmen whistling in the corridors and their maids
‘dressed to the nines’ rushing off to Selfridge’s or Swan & Edgar’s on their afternoon off. That the latter did so was hardly surprising. Maids could now afford to go shopping, for their wages had more than doubled since the war and a good maid could earn £2 10s. a week plus her keep. Chauffeurs, much in demand as the rich changed their carriages for cars, earned £4 10s. a week, their accommodation provided in the stable mews above what were now garages.

The great landed families were feeling the pinch as death duties and taxation on unearned income took their toll. The profligate Duke of Manchester was declared bankrupt; the Duke of Portland threatened to close up his huge Nottinghamshire mansion, Welbeck Abbey; and even the fabulously rich Duke of Westminster was realizing assets, selling Gainsborough’s exquisite
Blue Boy
and several other important pieces to Joseph Duveen. The sale, which caused an outcry among art experts and the public alike, netted ‘Bendor’ a useful £200,000 to go towards maintaining his yachts, horses, houses, wives and Coco Chanel, one of his more famous mistresses. Duveen stated firmly that the painting was not going to America: ‘I have bought it for myself. It is my wish the picture should remain in this country.’ He had in fact pre-sold it to the American railway magnate Henry E. Huntington and his wife Arabella for $620,000, reassuring her that the picture would clean up well when she expressed concern that the subject of the painting ‘wasn’t
quite
as blue as she had thought’. The Duke of Devonshire moved from his vast London palace, Devonshire House on Piccadilly – where developers were planning a ‘super-cinema-restaurant’ complex – to a mere mansion in Carlton Gardens, while his father-in-law the fifth Marquis of Lansdowne rented out his magnificent London house which came with twenty servants, including a nightwatchman who guarded the private passage that ran through to Berkeley Square. News that Lord Lansdowne’s tenant was none other than Harry Selfridge raised eyebrows among London’s élite. ‘Think of it,’ said Sir Gilbert Parker, ‘Selfridge in Lansdowne House. It’s
appalling
.’

It was certainly intriguing. The cost of renting and maintaining one of London’s largest houses was phenomenal. At a time when an
average family could live reasonably well on £500 a year, Selfridge was paying £5,000 to rent his new London home, plus £5,000 a year for his lease on Highcliffe. On top of that there were servants’ wages and his high living expenses, covering everything from food to flowers, travel and, last but not least, generous entertaining. All this supposedly came out of the £40,000 that Harry earned each year, but in reality, the store provided a lot more. What wasn’t charged to ‘the Chief’s’ personal account was set against ‘public relations and entertainment’, which neatly covered food, wines and the dozens of boxes of Corona cigars, specially imported from Havana for Selfridge and distributed to grateful friends such as Ralph Blumenfeld. Selfridge enjoyed living like a lord. Now he lived in a lord’s mansion.

Like the estate at Highcliffe, Lansdowne House had originally been owned by the Marquis of Bute, though he never actually lived there. In 1765 he sold the partly finished Robert Adam property to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Shelburne. Shelburne – later the first Marquis of Lansdowne – had battled valiantly to conciliate the American colonists during the War of Independence. Having failed in the task, he resigned from government and consoled himself in the time-honoured way by travelling through Italy and, advised by the antiquities dealer Gavin Hamilton, acquiring beautiful things. By 1782, he was back in power as Prime Minister, and the second Treaty of Paris, which conceded America’s independence, was drawn up for signature by Benjamin Franklin in Robert Adam’s exquisite Round Room at Lansdowne House.