Frills and Thrills

On the evening of 6 October 1933, the foyer of London’s Adelphi theatre was buzzing. The audience, which included Somerset Maugham and Cecil Beaton, had just seen the first night of Cole Porter’s new musical, Nymph Errant. This rather risqué tale of a young woman determined to lose her virginity – played by the rather worldly Broadway and West End star Gertrude Lawrence – was a wild and instant success.

The audience may not have known that the eponymous book, on which the play was based, had been written by James Laver, a young man employed in the Department of Engraving, Illustration and Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum (a job which made him, in those days, a civil servant). And they could not possibly have known that the author would go on to become the leading British authority on the history of costume, playing a pivotal role in making fashion a subject worthy of academic study instead of, as one obituary put it, a ‘rather unholy by-product of the textile industry’. There was in his day still immense snobbery about the decorative arts as opposed to Art with a capital A. Laver was prolific, writing poetry, novels and books about art history as well as nearly twenty titles on clothing-related matters. One of these is still part of the staple diet of fashion students today – though again they may not know it. When they reach for the black spine of Costume and Fashion: A Concise History (1995), in Thames & Hudson’s authoritative World of Art series, they are about to grasp Laver’s 1968 A Concise History of Costume – retitled and with two chapters added to bring it up to date. From head to toe, from ancient civilizations to the twenty-first century, with plenty of illustrations, it covers the major shifts in dress in the Western world. Although his writings established him, in his own words, as ‘something of an “Authority” on costume’ – indeed he co-presented the first television programme on the subject in 1937 – Laver explained that his interest had never been in the clothes themselves. His expertise lay in the fact that he had realized, in the course of his museum work, that the best way to date a piece of art was by looking at what the people in it were wearing. So when someone brought him a portrait of their ‘great-great-aunt Augusta who danced at the Waterloo Ball’, he was able to say, ‘I’m sorry, but it’s a girl of about 20, and she’s wearing the clothes of 1840. So, whatever she did, she couldn’t have danced at the Waterloo Ball.’ Having studied what he called ‘the What and the When’ of costume, Laver began to wonder about ‘the How and the Why’. He evolved various theories about the cyclical nature of fashion and the relationship between it and the socio-historical context in which it appeared, taking a long view of the twists and turns of fashion and joining the dots to show how they are always a response to their era. He believed that all clothes are, inevitably, a reflection of the age. He drew parallels between stovepipe hats and the chimneys of the early industrial era; he showed how the medieval steepled headdresses and pointy shoes (known as poulaines because they came from Poland) echoed the Gothic arch, and how these gave way to headgear shaped like Tudor windows and squarer footwear when the more horizontal aesthetic of that period came in. The connections he made were not restricted to the visual. He noticed that ‘during periods following great social upheavals, women threw away their corsets, put their waists in the wrong place and cut off their hair’ – witness the Empire line after the French Revolution, and the flappers after the First World War. He noted that the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought from France, where Charles II had spent some of his exile, a new extravagance in dress and a format for men’s clothing that led, ultimately, to the three-piece suit. He spotted that in patriarchal periods ‘the clothes of the two sexes are as clearly differentiated as possible’. One of the theories he evolved, known as Laver’s Law, charts the way in which the perception of a garment changes with the passage of time, going from ‘indecent’ (ten years before its time), through ‘outré’ (one year before its time) and ‘smart’ (current fashion), then becoming ‘dowdy’ (one year after its time) before eventually reaching ‘beautiful’ (a hundred and fifty years after its time). Nowadays the cycle has speeded up considerably, but it is still a useful and pertinent observation of how fashion works. And it attests to the humour of a knowledgeable man who – when he died in a house fire aged 76 – was remembered by his numerous friends as kind and modest and witty. In his 1964 autobiography, Museum Piece, Laver wrote that, at the time Nymph Errant was on stage, he found himself leading a double life.

To my colleagues at [the V&A] I had become a cigar-smoking, Savoy-supping, enviable but slightly disreputable character, hobnobbing with chorus girls and hanging round stage doors. To Gertrude Lawrence and her friends I was something ‘in a museum’, engaged in mysterious and apparently useless activities quite outside their comprehension; a character out of The Old Curiosity Shop, hardly fit to be let out alone.

He enjoyed playing up to both parts. Laver’s early life was not an obvious predictor of either of these parts. He was born in 1899 in Liverpool into a family of strict Nonconformists who did not use wheeled transport on Sundays and for whom the theatre was ‘altogether taboo’. His father was a printer who believed that God only allowed him to make a 5 per cent profit (when an employee worked out a way to make 10 per cent, he was told not to do it again). There was an awful lot of chapel-going, and his father was an occasional preacher. Laver remembered him weeping in the pulpit as he prayed for ‘those in peril on the sea’: the news had just arrived of the sinking of the Titanic. The man who wrote the tale of a young woman trying to lose her virginity did not know the facts of life until he went into the army aged 18. He arrived in France as a soldier the day before the war ended and wept with disappointment when he heard the news of the Armistice. Earlier, at school, one of the governors had spotted his ability and taken an interest in him in a way which today safeguarding would probably not allow. This man, identified only as LDH, told him ‘I’m going to give you a thousand pounds – on condition you use it to go to Oxford.’ And so, after his military service, he did – winning a poetry prize as his social life gradually moved from hanging out with ‘the hearties’ to hobnobbing with ‘the aesthetes’. He was clearly immensely likeable and, once installed in London at the V&A, the concentric circles of his social life widened from artistic to literary to theatrical – his autobiography drops an endless procession of famous names with great humility, if that is not a contradiction in terms. In 1927 his A Stitch in Time, a pastiche of The Rape of the Lock, was published. It was well-reviewed – Arnold Bennett devoted most of his Evening Standard column to it – and it made him a fixture on the arty-bohemian party scene. The following year he married Veronica Turleigh, an actress, and they went on to have two children. He became friendly with Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, who was about to make his first film and asked Laver to be technical adviser on questions of costume and social history. This, Laver realized, was a position of great power because words ‘out of period’ could bring the whole production to a halt. He told Fairbanks that his moustache was out of period for 1812, when the film was set, but it stayed firmly on his face. Laver advised on several other films, including The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965), and during his thirty-seven years at the V&A he encouraged filmmakers to use the museum as a free resource to help with historical accuracy. His mother had died soon after giving birth to her third child, a still-born baby boy. Laver was 4 at the time and he and his sister were from then on raised by his grandparents. Most people, he noted,

when they are grown up realize that they passed their childhood in an interior décor thirty years behind their mature taste. Owing to my mother’s death, my décor of childhood was sixty years out of date. Nothing much had been changed since my grandmother’s marriage in the middle ’Sixties.

He was talking about the 1860s – High Victorian style was the backdrop to his childhood. He and his sister would play at being ladies by ‘undoing the necks of our night-dresses and pushing them down over our shoulders – an idea borrowed, no doubt, from some chance picture in an illustrated ’Sixties’ magazine’. He went from feigning the dress of the 1860s to writing, at the end of A Concise History of Costume, about the 1960s – about Mary Quant and Carnaby Street and mini-skirts. With his usual perspicacity he correctly identified, even as it was happening, the end of gentility as a sartorial aspiration and the beginning of classless dressing. Perhaps the fact that his own life bestrode a century, style-wise, gave him the ability to zoom right out and set the sweeps of fashion in their broadest historical context. It is tempting to think so, and certainly it was a fitting span for this man of many parts who became known, somewhat reluctantly, as the father of fashion history.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Rebecca Willis 2025