The Art of Fashion
Uploaded by dannables13 on Nov 21, 2007
The Art in Fashion
“Charles James is not only the most eminent American Couturier, but also the best, and the only one who has raised Haute Couture from applied art form to pure art form.”
Balenciaga(Glamour Years)
Fashion can be classified into two categories: the people who design it and the people who wear it. Wearing fashion is something that everyone does just by putting on clothes. For some people, fashion is the gold in life. It’s what can separate you from others and make you feel like you are in control. This is the same with designers. The styles they design are tangible images of their personality and emotions. No two designers are the same which causes art to be created with each sketch and idea the designer constructs in his or her brain. “Charles James was a structural genius, a maker of the most complex dresses of the century; a man who would spend years on a single sleeve, months on a seam (Watson 25).” The divergence between the designs of Charles James and several other designers of his time were the differences of cut, style, fabric, shape, color, source of creativity and the state of his personal and business life.
Charles was born in Sandhurst, England in 1906 to a British father and an America mother (History of Fashion). He attended Harrow, one of England’s most prominent public schools. There he met many soon to be famous people such as Evelyn Waugh, Francis Rose, and Cecil Beaton, who became a longstanding associate. He was expelled quite soon after enrolling for committing a “sexual escapade” (Glamour Years) and was sent to Chicago by his parents to work for a utilities magnate in architectural design. Charles quit instantaneously for lack of interest (History of Fashion). His introduction into fashion came through a curiosity in the art of millinery. He opened a hat shop in Chicago called “Charles Boucheron” (Watson 25). Though as much as he enjoyed creating hats, his ideas and imagination led him to dabble in a world much grander and colorful then of a hat shop. Dresses(Glamour Years).
He moved to New York in 1928 where he first started drawing his designs (Watson 25). His lack of business intelligence caused many money struggles but that did not dampen his climb to the top of the fashion industry (Kent State).
Highly sensitive to beauty and guided by uncompromising idealism, Charles James...