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“Making Mainbocher,” a new exhibition opening in Chicago tomorrow, is a long-overdue hometown homage to an autodidactic designer, Main Rousseau Bocher, who created exquisite designs for the crème de la crème. If his outlook wasn’t particularly democratic, Bocher’s life was a rather splendid example of the American dream, which we are hearing so much about this election season, and bears a brief retelling.
Main Rousseau Bocher (Main was his mother’s maiden name) was born in 1890 in the Windy City. His father’s early death required the young man to give up full- for part-time art studies and work. (His job in Sears’s customer-complaint department might go some way toward explaining his later exactitude.) In 1909 he moved to New York, where he lived at the YWCA in Brooklyn, took art classes, and designed cigar bands; within two years he was pursuing his studies in Munich.
After volunteering with an American ambulance unit in France, Bocher moved to Paris to study opera and made his living by selling his fashion illustrations. On the day of his long-awaited debut, in 1921, the expatriate Chicagoan lost his voice. His stage dreams dashed, Bocher soon joined French Vogue, writing, editing, and illustrating for the magazine. He was also a contributor to the American edition, to which, we can reveal for the first time, he contributed the famous drawing of Chanel’s fashion “Ford” (a trim LBD). Bocher’s assistant in Paris was a future Mrs. Ernest Hemingway, Pauline Pfeiffer.
We recently discovered in the Archive that this famous illustration of Chanel’s fashion ‘Ford,’ was drawn by Main Bocher.
Illustration by Main Bocher, Vogue, October 1926
In the months preceding the crash of 1929, Bocher abandoned his editorial position so that he could teach himself how to design clothing. Madeleine Vionnet was the couturier he most admired, and his preference for draping nods to her mastery of the technique. Bocher opened his own maison de couture in 1930—he was the first American to do so—and called it Mainbocher. How to pronounce this name is a subject of debate and has inspired the Chicago History Museum to include a name aggregator in its exhibition. The designer’s given name is generally pronounced as Maine Bocker; but his brand was Frenchified into something approximating Manboshay. In an interview with Vogue.com, curator Petra Slinkard said this name game was one of the “most controversial topics” she tackled when putting the show together. Having found sound files in which Horst. P. Horst, Cole Porter, and clients C. Z. Guest and Jean Harvey Vanderbilt use the latter pronunciation, the institution went with it.Mainbocher’s rise was meteoric; by 1932 Vogue was writing that the designer was “a new star in the firmament of the Paris couture.” From the start, Mainbocher was clear about who he wanted to dress and how he wanted his work to be presented. He demanded, and got, double-page spreads. His approach, he would tell Vogue, was to make clothes that were “a friend to woman—the kind of friend you can see again and again and not get sick of.” They were, he said, “intensely wearable, but have great gaiety and mystery, too.” Though unafraid of prints or color, it was his elevation of the humble in the form of decorative cardigans for evening and his concealment of luxury à la fur-lined coats that made signature statements. Mainbocher wasn’t a minimalist, at least not in the sense that the word is used today, though he can be placed on a continuum that includes designers such as Norman Norell, Halston, and perhaps Bottega Veneta’s Tomas Maier. “Severely elegant” is the phrase client Jean Harvey Vanderbilt used to describe Mainbocher’s spare, sharply edited designs.
He left Paris before the war and reestablished his business in New York in 1940. At the request of Josephine Ogden Forrestal, wife of the Navy undersecretary and a onetime Vogue editor, he designed uniforms for the WAVES. (Later he’d do the same for the U.S. Women’s Marine Corps and the Girl Scouts.)
Details of Mainbocher designs in the Chicago History Museum exhibition
Left: Off-white evening dress with “apron” in front, Spring 1947; Gift of Peggy Stanley; 1979. Right: Tulle evening dress with shell trim, Fall 1946; Gift of Mrs. Clive Runnells; 1967.
Photo: Details of Mainbocher designs in the Chicago History Museum exhibit
In the course of his 41-year career in design, Mainbocher would be credited with inventing or popularizing the short(er) evening dress (1931), the strapless dress (1934), a cinched-waist silhouette that predated the New Look (1939), the evening cardigan (1941), and the sheath (1946). These were worn by clients including Diana Vreeland, Guest, Babe Paley, and Wallis Simpson, who donned a custom Mainbocher when she married her prince. He was also admired by Christian Dior and Isabella Blow, but not by Charles James. “Mainbocher,” James railed against his rival in The New York Times, “represents a rich, artificial, and purse-proud exclusivity.” (Ironically, businessman Arnaud de Lummen is said to have bought the rights to both the Mainbocher and Charles James brands.)
Mainbocher was, undoubtedly, a snob, but one who inspired loyalty and devotion among his well-heeled clients. These women found pleasure, utility, comfort, and even value in clothes that were costly, built to last, and trend-free. As Vogue put it: “Mainbocher sees fashion as simple, easy, unpretentious. It has a low voice. Fits in. Does not sniff at last season. Yet it is completely contemporary.”
Let’s hear it for the Main.
“Making Mainbocher: The First American Couturier” is on view at the Chicago History Museum from October 22 to August 20, 2017.
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