The Dress Thief (57 page)

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CRAPBOOK

Ah … the cloche hat!

One of those images that sum up an age in a single stroke. Cloches had been lurking at the back of every milliner’s shop forever. Country girls liked them in fine straw because they could be pulled down to protect the face and ears from the sun. Fastened with a ribbon, they withstood the briskest wind. In the twenties they came of age, complementing the
new proportions of fashion for short skirts and dropped waists. They fitted snugly over shingled hair and were tight enough not to fly off in an open-top car. They masked the eyes while making the most of bow lips, pixie jaws and swan necks. The cloche finished the brand new look, the age of the boy-woman. In the 1930s, brims came back. Hair was a little fuller, but hats needed a brim to balance the
widening line of the shoulder.

The 1920s chemise style, which evolved into the straight, body-skimming styles of the 1930s, came principally from the sketchbooks of Madeleine Vionnet and Coco Chanel. What French designer Paul Poiret began at the dawn of the twentieth century by releasing women from corsets and trip-me-up skirts, Chanel and Vionnet continued and refined.

The dancer Caryathis started the trend for short bobs and Eton crops, so it seems …

Distressed by a lover’s rejection, she scissored off her long skein of hair, tied a ribbon round it and draped it over the faithless one’s doorknob. That’s a gesture you can only make once. Legend has it she hurried off to an evening party, with no time to cover her head with a turban, entered the room –
to gasps of shock – and the rest is history.

Soupe à l’oignon
de
Natalie Meg Evans

My favourite recipe for onion soup has a roux base. It starts much like a caramelised onion sauce, but the end result is a creamy soup that works well as an evening meal if you serve it with plenty of Gruyère toast and maybe a side salad. I was always taught to use the mild white onions for this because they have a more delicate flavour. However, when
testing this recipe I used the basic ones that come out of Lincolnshire fields and have a coarse, yellowish skin. They were fine. Not sure about red onions, however. Would they make pink soup?

For a generous pan-full, serving 4 people, you’ll need:

2oz (50g) butter
1lb (half a kilo) of onions
2 pints (1.2 litres) of bouillon or good stock – chicken, beef, vegetarian … whatever you prefer. This
soup derives its punch from the stock, so use the one you like the most
1 oz (25 g) plain flour – white or wholemeal
A bay leaf and a stalk of celery
Salt and pepper
A glass of dry white wine

For the Gruyère toast:

1 French baguette loaf
4oz (100g) Gruyère cheese, grated (Cheddar is fine if you can’t get Gruyère)
Plan for two slices of toast per person, more if you like
Paprika for sprinkling

First, melt the butter in a large pan over a gentle heat. Careful not to let it burn.

Peel and finely slice the onions, add to the melted butter and sweat them. Check your heat and keep them moving. Cook till
golden and almost caramelised.

Add the flour and cook it with the buttery onions, stirring until it smells lightly toasted. Now take the pan from the heat, pour in the stock and beat continuously
so that it thickens without lumps. A
birch whisk
is ideal for this but my Labrador ate mine, so I just beat it with a wooden spoon. (The soup, I hasten to add, not the dog.)

Return the pan to the heat, turning up the temperature till the onions are simmering in the stock. Adjust the heat. Your soup should be quite
thick and creamy,
but if you boil it too violently, it will stick to the bottom
of the pan.

Tip in the white wine, the bay leaf and the celery stalk. Add salt if you need it – but take care if using shop-bought stock because this can be
very salty.
Hold off with the pepper for now.

At a gentle simmer, the soup will be ready in twenty minutes or so, but it’s better if you can
slow cook
it for an hour or more.

Start making the toast twenty minutes or so before you want to
eat. Get the grill up to a moderate heat. Slice your French bread diagonally into inch-thick (2.5cm) pieces.

You are aiming to toast the bread slowly so that it is
golden brown
and quite dry. Keep an eye on it and turn it.

When the toast is done, turn up the grill. Sprinkle on the grated cheese. Put under the grill and pull them out as the cheese starts to bubble. Shake on a
bit of paprika.

Taste your soup for seasoning. Remove the bay leaf and celery stalk.
Add your pepper.

To serve, warm your soup bowls, ladle in the soup and float the cheese toasts on top.

Bon appétit!

One of the unexpected side-effects of world war is that it expands opportunities for women. Those inter-war years in Europe and America were often more ‘interesting’ than comfortable, but they widened female horizons in ways unimaginable to a secure, pre-1914 generation. I think of the English Edwardian
age and the French
Belle Epoque
as lush, domestic eras, where feminine culture and manners prevailed, when women were cosseted and corseted. I characterise the 1930s as the hard-nosed ‘manly decade’ that succeeded the ‘boys’ own’ decade of the 1920s. All highly subjective thinking, I admit, but here are images that spring to mind when I contemplate those inter-war years …

Art Deco
is the cover-all
term for 1930s style, with its cool, unemotional lines. Bold, new industry reflecting a world where machines were to be mankind’s saviour. Architects responding with flat-topped, curve-cornered
shapes in everything from factories, railway stations and homes to those temples of popular culture – cinemas. Bright, white rendering promising clean, efficient living and wrap-around metal windows gazing
inscrutably at a world that is far more chaotic than the inside space.

Painting
becomes increasingly abstract: its lines distorted and its forms deconstructed. In art, the principles of machinery are applied to nature, with hardoutlines and geometric shapes predominating. Motor vehicles forget that they evolved from horse-drawn coaches and follow the trend, becoming long and sleek. Furniture
joins in, losing its fuss and grandiosity. Fashion is not far behind.

If the thirties were a masculine era, the 1920s scream ‘boy’ to me. For the first time in recorded history, women leave home with the backs of their necks bare; not because they’ve rolled their luxuriant locks up in a bun, but because they’ve left those coils of hair on the hairdresser’s floor. This new, elfin look syncs perfectly
with post-war reality. Millions of young men have died … who wants to be reminded of those golden days of tight waists, indigestion and heavy hair? A legion of serious young women are stepping forward to fill the void left by their dead brothers. The twenties is the era of the working woman, the dawn of the motor age, of bicycles and cheap transport. Cage doors fly open. Hems rise and short
hair is jammed under a neat, cloche hat.

America sends jazz to Europe to whip the new freedom into a froth. Dancing becomes intimate and very physical, kicking the waltz rhythm out of the door. I’m sure the
time-honoured job of chaperone disappears at this point. How can you keep an eye on your innocent young charge when she’s bunny-hopping from one side of the room to the other? Or when the
young man holding her so indecently doesn’t give a damn for convention, because he’s already seen the worst things that life can throw at him?

No doubt many a parent, governess, vicar and politician tried to slam the cage door shut again in the twenties, but the bird had already flown … in her mind at least. History shows us that you can change laws but rarely can you change thoughts. Did women
embrace the boyish styles of the 1920s because, after four years’ indiscriminate slaughter of young men, they secretly rejected motherhood? Or were they kicking off the trappings of fragile femininity that the men had gone to war to protect? Or because they wanted to replace their brothers? Or because they
had
to replace their brothers? What we do know is that there were not enough men to go around
any more, and many women lived out their lives as unwilling spinsters. Others discovered the freedom of careers and independent earnings. If fashion seeps from the subconscious … what was the female subconscious saying at this point?