Robin Givhan’s New Book: A Night Fashion Stumbled Into Racial Progress
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American conversations on race tend to cluster around singular events: The Emancipation Proclamation, Brown vs. The Board of Education, the election of Barack Obama. They become historical signposts used to demonstrate how race—here black vs. white—has progressed in the country. Robin Givhan’s book The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History (Flatiron Books) questions if the 1973 show at the Palace of Versailles that pitted American designers versus French designers was indeed such a moment for the fashion world. The stage was presented as America vs. France, but the spotlight was seized by American blackness.
Held on November 28, 1973, the evening in question was a created to help restore the ornate Palace of Versailles, home of the French government under Louis XIV, which needed substantial renovations. Fundraisers Gérald and Florence van der Kemp along with American fashion champion Eleanor Lambert came up with this idea of hosting a fashion show that brought together five American designers (Bill Blass, Stephen Burrows, Roy Halston Frowick, Anne Klein and Oscar de la Renta) and five French designers (Marc Bohan, Pierre Cardin, Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro). Lambert saw an opportunity to display the skill of new American designers versus the French establishment, but in her book, Givhan isn’t quite so enamored with the need to prove American might. Instead, her focus is on the ten black models of the thirty-six American models chosen, and the young upstart black designer Stephen Burrows.
Givhan, the current fashion critic for The Washington Post, won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2006, and season after season writes some of the most insightful fashion writing there is. Her critical eye comes through in the book in that she never shies away from the faults of the designers, on or off the runway. Of Anne Klein, the only woman designer in the mix, Givhan writes, “She wasn’t a fragile artist struggling to turn out one collection after another.” Then a sportswear designer—a still-stigmatized genre in those days—Klein was disrespected not only by the French, but also her American peers. A singular uplifting narrative arc might have been easier to manage, but Givhan doesn’t gloss over such tensions.
Through Steven Burrows and the handful of black models at the Versailles battle, however, Givhan finds her real subject. She writes of Burrows, the youngest and of course the only black designer, that “he wasn’t trying to prove himself to the kings of couture, he just wanted to put on a show in a new place, to try something he’d never tried before.” Barely 30 when he made the trip to Paris, he wasn’t so swept up by the opportunity as his peers. His style took from the New York environment he lived in day-to-day, not the couture legacy of Paris.