Charles James

Charles James is the designer I'd send anyone to who thinks 1950s ball gowns are just pretty frocks. His dresses are closer to engineering than dressmaking - heavy, complex, built on their own internal structures - and I find them endlessly fascinating, even if I'd never want to work for him.

He was born in England in 1906 to a British father and an American mother, and started out as a milliner in Chicago in the 1920s before working in London and Paris through the 1930s. He settled in New York around 1940, and it's his work there, especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that he's remembered for. He had no interest in seasonal collections or fast production. He would work on a single design for years, reworking its seams and pattern pieces over and over, and he treated each gown as a piece of sculpture.

The most famous is the Four-Leaf Clover ball gown of 1953. Seen from above, its skirt is shaped like a clover leaf, and it's built over layers of stiffened underskirts and internal structure so that it holds that shape with no help from the wearer. Other gowns, like the Swan and the Butterfly, used huge volumes of silk taffeta, satin, and tulle, but they were carefully weighted and balanced so they moved. He understood the inside of a dress better than almost anyone, with boned bodices and supporting layers designed as carefully as the visible surface. His clients were rich, patient, and devoted - women like Millicent Rogers and Austine Hearst who were willing to wait, pay, and put up with his famously difficult temperament.

Other designers admired him enormously. Balenciaga is said to have called him the world's best and only dressmaker to have raised the craft from an applied art to a pure art form, and Dior reportedly credited him as an inspiration for the New Look. Commercially, though, he struggled. He fell out with clients, partners, and manufacturers, sued people often, and his business never became stable; by the end of the decade he had largely stopped producing couture. His reputation had to be rescued by museums, especially the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2014 exhibition of his work. I think he's the clearest example of the 1950s ideal of a structured, sculpted silhouette taken to its absolute limit.