The 1950s early-to-mid 1950s
Jacques Fath
The glamorous, self-taught showman of postwar Paris - hourglass curves, plunging necklines and asymmetric drapes - who struck one of the first big couture deals with American ready-to-wear before his death at forty-two in 1954.
Of the three big names of early-1950s Paris - Dior, Balenciaga, and Fath - Fath is the one almost nobody outside fashion history remembers now, which I think is mainly because he died so young. For a few years he was every bit as famous as Dior, and in some ways more modern.
He was largely self-taught, with no formal couture apprenticeship, and he opened his house in 1937 with only a handful of workers. He kept it open through the war and came out of it well placed, and by the late 1940s he was one of the stars of Paris. His clothes were unashamedly sexy by the standards of the time: tight hourglass waists, hip-hugging skirts, plunging necklines, and bold asymmetric draping that spiralled around the body. Where Dior could feel architectural and Balenciaga austere, Fath was flirtatious and fun. He was also a showman - handsome, social, famous for lavish costume balls at his country château - and his wife, Geneviève, a former model, was often the best advertisement for his clothes.
What makes him historically important, though, is business. In 1948 he signed a deal with the American manufacturer Joseph Halpert to design a ready-to-wear line for the US market - clothes made in American factories and sold in department stores at a fraction of couture prices. Other couturiers sold paper patterns or licences, but a Paris designer creating clothes specifically for mass production was new, and it points directly toward the growth of ready-to-wear that would eventually overtake couture.
He also had a good eye for talent: a young Hubert de Givenchy worked for him in the 1940s, before going on to other houses and then opening his own. Sadly, Fath was diagnosed with leukaemia and died in November 1954, at just forty-two. Geneviève kept the house going for a few years, but it never regained its place. I think of Fath as the 1950s' great "what if": the designer most comfortable with both glamour and mass production, who might have bridged couture and ready-to-wear a decade earlier than anyone else managed if he'd lived.