Word: 30s
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Manhattan--the one in the Rodgers and Hart song, the city of dreams in '30s movies, the old apogee of swank--has become a figment of Woody Allen's imagination. Thank heavens. Reclamation of the borough's tattered image could be in no better hands. In Annie Hall, Manhattan and this beguiling new comedy, the penthouses have been replaced by SoHo lofts West Side labyrinths, but the preoccupations are pretty much the same as those faced by romantic New Yorkers from Fred and Ginger to Kate and Cary. Smart people with sin-deep problems walk through a muggerless Central Park...
...fills a real need. Very little of substance has been written about couturiers. Most of the best commentary on their work is squirreled away in novels: Proust's chronicling of the shift from Belle Epoque bustles to the more natural silhouette, Fitzgerald's and Waugh's pointillist evocations of '30s glamour, Mary McCarthy's accurate, often satiric eye for all feminine strategies...
There are several entries on fashion's sublime kooks. Elsa Schiaparelli, a blithe and irreverent spirit, jazzed up the '30s with her whimsical lambchop hats and red-apple purses. Roberto Capucci still does what he has always insisted on doing, creating one outrageously intricate gown and never replicating it. Charles James, the most brilliant American designer ever, was shackled by paranoia and notorious business dealings. He died broke and nearly forgotten in 1978, but the influence of his fabulous ball gowns remains, whether they are executed in a Paris atelier or a Hollywood costume department...
...social comment. Her heart may belong to purists like Madeleine Vionnet or wits like Lagerfeld, but who are the most influential designers? High on her list would be Molyneux, Adrian, Givenchy and Lauren--because of the way they dressed show-biz stars. Molyneux popularized the slinky chic of the '30s with his costumes for Gertrude Lawrence in Private Lives. Adrian, a West Coast designer snubbed by the fashion establishment, camouflaged Joan Crawford's broad shoulders by exaggerating them and produced the dominant look of the '40s. When Jacqueline Kennedy brought elegant dressing to the White House...
...inherited content of expressionism--its obsession with the mystical, the vast, the unconsciously collective and the charismatic, and its magnification of an inbuilt weakness for kitschy spirituality into a noxious rhetoric of state power--we will not fully understand its grip on the minds of Germans in the '30s...