The Last Word

Scrawled across the folded-over pages of the old magazine were the words:

“Le Dernier Cri de l’an ... crois-tu?

Avec mes amitiés

Tante Berthe.”

Facing, on the left hand page, was a faded but very elegant picture of a tall, willowy woman modelling a full length, exquisitely patterned silk-soft gown that clung to and emphasised the part-turned, leant-back pose of the model whose foot showed, toe-pointed, clad glove-like in an intricately tooled, soft leather confection, dainty as any Cinderella slipper. All elements of her attire highlighted the slender curve of body and gown, her sideways extended arms accenting not only the femininity of her pose, as mannered as any Ascot Gavotte scene, but showing to perfection the diaphanous shawl lightly draping her shoulders, attached daintily and delicately as patterned wings to the gown’s long, narrow sleeves. She had merely to flap arms, one felt, and she would launch, a gorgeous butterfly, into flight.

It was a stunning ensemble, its ‘air de hauteur’ underlined by the model’s thrown-back head, elevated chin, and the closely fitted cap-like hat adorned with a curving, jewelled ornament. It was altogether wonderful in its exquisitely extravagant restraint: “and that”, some of my arty friends would say, “is exactly what we call taste, dahling!”

“Le Dernier Cri indeed,” I thought.

I turned to the cover of the magazine and read the title:

“L’Officiel ........... no 89, 1929.”

But of course! No wonder that this magazine should be here, should bear that scrawled inscription, should have been kept all these years. Our family (or what remained of it), this house, and this copy of the high-fashion French magazine belonged together.

My great aunt Lucille, whose gracious old house I was now making ready for sale after a long-drawn out probate, further delayed by a unanimous family reluctance to sell, would have been in her early twenties in 1929. I had so many times heard her recount her wonderful young years in Paris and even tell of this Tante Berthe, a family favourite, and recall the fashionable life of 1920’s Paris, a Paris eager to forget the horrors of the un-great Great War, striving to recapture the elegance of those wonderful pre-War years.

House, family and fashion – there was a story!

That story had all begun so many years ago now in Paris in the late 1840’s, when Charles Worth, a Lincolnshire lad, met and married a fellow-worker, Marie Vernet, in the atelier of Maison Gagelin where he was already establishing himself as a very talented dress designer. A few years later he and Marie went on to set up, initially with Otto Bobergh, what was to become in 1871 the House of Worth, the first of the recognised Haute Couture Fashion Houses. And what famous names had come there as clients: the Empress Eugenie, one of his most important clients before the 1870 disaster; the beautiful, extravagant and scandalous Cora Pearl; the notorious Countess di Castiglioni, the famous actress, ‘the Divine’ Sarah Bernhardt, and our own Australian diva, Dame Nellie Melba.

He had two sons, Gaston and Jean Pierre, who took over the Fashion House when Charles died in 1885. Gaston it was who founded the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, destined to become so influential in Fashion that in 1945 it was responsible for establishing the guidelines determining which French fashion firms would be eligible to carry the prestigious ‘Haute Couture’ label: as exclusionist in its field as is the literary Académie Française.

His grand-daughter, our grand-mother, had married a well-to-do English merchant and migrated to Australia, setting up a department store in Sydney and building this house in which I now stood, in the then fashionable suburb of Burwood Heights. They prospered and had several children, most of whom had travelled ‘back home’ to England and then to France, ‘our continent home’, so keeping alive the family ties. We were a very family-conscious lot so that, even almost a century later, most of us older ones had met, on over-seas journeys, our distant relations. So much so, I sometimes thought that we never really considered ourselves truly Australian. Be that as it may, several of us formed as close a friendship with our “overseas cousins” as had Tante Berthe and Aunt Lucille. True, I have never seen any copies of “L’Officiel” lying around my Australian cousins’ homes with, or without, those wonderful “Avec mes amitiés” words scrawled across their pages; there certainly were copies of “Vogue”, “Vanity Fair” and even occasionally a “Harper’s”. Obviously, interest in Fashion still ran in the blood and a cousin’s youngest daughter, a model, was now studying Fashion, with an eye to taking up a position with a very well-know Australian designer whose attention she had caught.

So here I was with this wonderful old magazine, in this house which had been so long in the family. Great-aunt Lucille had never married, had been something of the ‘grande dame de famille’, managing also to be a great favourite (as had been Tante Berthe). All of us had been mentioned in her will and so, here I was (I like to think one of her special favourites) with the responsibility of cleaning up the old home, at times overcome by momentary emotion or by the chance finding of some item, like this old magazine and its message, and trying to determine which of us would most treasure it. This magazine with its splendid “Dernier Cri de l’an de 1929” would certainly go to the young niece whose heart was set on fashion design. She would treasure it and the family history it recalled, I felt sure.

The house? Well, unfortunately, none of us could now afford it. Who knows? Perhaps that same young niece, head in clouds with the fashion industry, just might, one of these days, have the money and the sentimentality to bring it back into the family.