Who started the first fashion show?
The first FASHION Snow was mounted in 1899 by the couturier Lucile (Mrs James Wallace), sister of the popular novelist Elinor Glyn at the Maison Lucile, Henover Square, London. As there were no fashion models in London at the time, Lucile had to recruit and train them from scratch. And since no respectable girl would nave deigned to make a spectacle of herself in this way, she sought what she described as ‘glorious, goddess-like girls’ in the mean streets of Bermondsey and Balham. The salon in which the show was held was an elegant Adam room with an Angelica Kauffman ceiling. The models appeared first on a stage, then walked down a short flight of steps and paraded the length of the room and back. Amongst those in the distinguished audience where Princess Alice of Hesse, Ellen Terry, Lily Langtry and a very young Margot Asquith.
The first fashion show and the first fashion models were not the only innovations Lucile made on this occasion. She also introduced the idea of giving the creations special names, a practice which survives amongst leading couturiers today. The show collection was called Gowns of Emotion and individual dresses were labelled with rather gushing names which might have been the titles of her sister’s novels: ‘Give Me Your Heart’, ‘When Passion’s Thrall is O’er’ (layers of transparent grey chiffon) and ‘Do You Love Me? Lucile’s ’emotional’ frocks were a huge success and the show established her as the most sought-after dressmaker in London. The girls from Balham and Bermondsey also came out of it well. Heralded with newspaper headlines such as ‘Lucile’s mysterious beauties’, the silent ones found themselves famous overnight and courted by young sprigs of the aristocracy normally to be found hanging around outside stage doors. They were founder members of a new and glamorous profession, one destined, as Lucile herself remarked, `to survive as long as there are dressmakers whose purpose it is to lure women into buying more dresses than they can afford’.
