When, in the 1860s, the dashing Princess Metternich danced at one of the great Tuileries balls wearing a startlingly beautiful dress of white tulle sequined with silver, an entirely new material that was sewn with fresh daisies, Eugénie asked her who had made it. ‘An Englishman, madame, a rising star,’ answered Pauline. ‘What is his name, pray?’ ‘Worth, madame.’ ‘Such a star should have some satelites,’ said the empress. ‘Tell him to come and see me at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’
When the ‘man-milliner’ (a term coined by Charles Dickens) arrived at the Tuileries, as a test Eugénie asked him to make a ballgown, and to choose the material and style. He returned the same day with a dress of beige brocade. She sniffed, saying, ‘I hate brocade – it looks like curtain material.’ The emperor came in and Worth told him that wearing brocades would please the silk-weavers of Lyons, notorious republicans. Napoleon and Eugénie took the point. Soon Worth became dressmaker to the empress, and by the end of the year his dresses were being ordered in London and New York.
Eugénie had reason to patronise Worth and ignore his being a man – until now male couturiers had been unknown. He measured and cut his patterns with such skill that a dress needed only one fitting instead of half a dozen. Employing teams of seamstresses (who toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week), later supplemented by the new sewing machines, he delivered a garment to the Tuileries the morning after Eugénie had ordered it, faster in an emergency – once he made her a dress in under four hours. His materials – tulles and muslins woven with fine silver or gold wire, failles, chiffons and taffetas, satins, velvets and brocades, laces and embroideries – all save the lace specially manufactured for him at Lyons – were exquisite, his design and workmanship superb. He always ensured that no one else anticipated what the empress would wear. She ordered hundreds of outfits from him, because he knew what would suit her.
The magic of these marvellous dresses, enhanced by the frou-frou of silk petticoats and the gleam of wonderful jewellery, is almost impossible to imagine today. (‘We heard the rustle of silk and satin, the soft jangle of swinging bracelets and chains’, Filon recalls, remembering a door opening on a certain evening at Compiègne. ‘It was the empress.’) Only Winterhalter can give us a faint inkling, as he does in his portraits, especially in those of the Duchesse de Morny, Princess Rimsky-Korsakov and Princess Metternich, transformed into a beauty.
Worth was more than a gifted dress designer. In a few years he changed the way in which women of even modest means dressed throughout the world. In 1863 at Eugénie’s request he designed a ‘walking crinoline’ with skirts 10 centimetres shorter than usual so that she could go for country walks without getting muddy. She made her ladies wear the skirts first, to prepare public opinion, then wore them herself. Five years later he summoned up the courage to make a dress without a crinoline, which Pauline Metternich promptly introduced at court. Basically, a narrow skirt of very thick satin with no hoops or stiffened petticoat and falling straight to the ground, this caused a sensation as wide skirts had been in vogue since the 1820s. It was immediately copied by Eugénie, condemning her once beloved ‘cage’ to extinction. He revived the alluring bustle, which had not been seen since the seventeenth century and among his other innovations were jackets (with or without sleeves), and shirts with skirts.
However, Worth was not entirely responsible for ending the bonnet’s long tyranny. Eugénie had worn broad-brimmed ‘Vandyke’ hats with plumes before she was even aware of his existence – Viel Castel recorded that in July 1857 she and her ladies rode through Paris in them. But he introduced other types of hat that finally killed off the bonnet. In 1860 he persuaded Princess Metternich to wear a little pillbox toque he had designed, and soon the empress could be seen in one, and then even in a bowler (derby) hat. The ubiquitous shawl was replaced by a scarf or a mantilla, a fashion pioneered by Pauline, who appeared without a shawl at the Longchamps race meeting.
The empress’s patronage made Worth’s clothes not merely popular but essential for every rich lady who wanted to be fashionable. In consequence the Maison Worth in the rue de la Paix was besieged daily by the smartest women in Paris, especially on days before the balls at the Tuileries. While each lady sat with her maid in one of its luxurious fitting rooms, waiting for the great man to give a dress his finishing touches or to suggest yet another, she was regaled with a lavish helping of foie-gras and a glass or two of Sauternes.
‘The men believe in the Bourse and the women believe in Worth’, observed Felix Whitehurst. ‘I confess that, opposed as I am to the “unbridled extravagance of women”, I look on with supreme pleasure at a luxury which, while reminding me of the decadence of Rome, now indicates only the wealth of France.’ The ‘master of the robes’, as some courtiers called him sardonically, became indispensable. Eugénie showed her appreciation by inviting his wife to all the Tuileries balls while Princess Metternich asked her to all the receptions at the Austrian embassy – both made a point of talking ostentatiously to Mme Worth, so that no one dared to snub her.
Worth’s prices soared, and, understandably, his name was loathed by husbands or fathers who had to foot the bills. Some people saw the funny side, however. ‘I am informed that the last thing in dress is a “puff-petticoat”, which sticks out like a bunch, and causes the female form divine to look rather like the Gnathod or Dodo’, Whitehurst reported irreverently in the Daily Telegraph in March 1868 after the bustle had made its appearance. ‘It is said to have routed sleep from the couch of oft-recorded Worth, who laboured night and day at its invention. When this truly great man is composing, he reclines on a sofa, and one of the young ladies of the establishment plays “Verdi” to him; he composes chiefly in the evening and says that the rays of the setting sun gild his conceptions.’
It has to be admitted that success turned Mr Worth’s head. He liked to pose as one of history’s more memorable artists, wearing floppy cravats and enormous velvet berets that scarcely suited his walrus moustache and bottle nose. Taine heard that the dressmaker was comparing himself to Delacroix and Ingres, even to the first Emperor Napoleon. Yet never for one moment did he forget that he owed his success and his millions to Eugénie’s patronage. As long as he lived, he sent her Bonapartist violets every year on her birthday and when the Second Empire fell he continued to insist that she was still his empress, stubbornly displaying the imperial warrant over the main entrance to the Maison Worth and ignoring the risk of having his windows broken. When he died in 1895 Eugénie sent a telegram to his widow – ‘In my prosperity and in my sorrow, he was always my most devoted friend.’
Republicans and even royalists claimed, wrongly, that Eugénie’s expenditure on clothes during her reign rivalled Marie-Antoinette’s, that she was a symbol of unbridled luxury, ignoring the prestige she gave to French fashion. Yet any fair-minded observer realised that she could not afford to dress cheaply – had she done so, the opposition would have been the first to criticise. ‘The empress’s taste for luxury was wildly exaggerated’, writes Mme Carette indignantly. ‘Luxury is an attribute of monarchs – beautiful and intelligent women are supposed to dress well.’ And what other imperial or royal lady of 1860 would have dared to be the first to patronise a ‘man-milliner’?