The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [93]
On a much later visit to Tokyo, Jiro gave me a small card that he had found: ‘Baron I. Leo Ephrussi begs to announce his association with Dorothy Couteaur Inc. formerly of Molyneux, Paris’. The address is 695 Fifth Avenue and the phone number Eldorado 5-0050. It seems appropriate. Fashion was El Dorado for Iggie: he has dropped the Ignace bit for Leo, but kept the Baron in place.
Iggie’s invitation, 1936
For Dorothy Couteaur Inc. – a name straight out of Nabokov with its mocking, drawling version of couture – Iggie designed ‘The Free-Swinging Coat’, shown ‘posed smartly over a diagonally tucked sheer crêpe frock in beige, with beige also the background color of the novelty silk crêpe coat patterned in brown swallows’. It is very brown indeed. Iggie mostly designed ‘Sophisticated gowns for the smart American woman’, though I did find a reference to ‘Smart Accessories shown for the first time in California. Belts, Bags, Ceramic Jewelry and Compacts’, which shows either his financial straits or his astuteness. In Women’s Wear Daily for 11 March 1937 there was ‘an important type of evening ensemble that makes a point of an interesting fabric alliance, the gown reflecting Grecian influence in mother-of-pearl satin jersey, the coat in the gayest red chiffon, with pin-tucks for surface decoration. The scarf can be worn as a girdle on the coat, giving a redingote suggestion.’
‘An interesting fabric alliance’ is a wonderful phrase. I look at the illustration for a long time for the ‘redingote suggestion’.
It was only when I found his design of cruise-wear based on US Navy signal flags that I realised just how much fun Iggie was having. It shows girls dressed in shorts and skirts being run up the rigging by magnificent swarthy sailors, while the code helpfully informs us that the girls are wearing signals for ‘I need to have personal communication with you’, ‘You are clear of all danger’, ‘I am on fire’ and ‘I cannot hold out any longer’.
New York was full of newly impoverished Russians, Austrians and Germans escaping Europe, and Iggie was one of many. His minute allowance from Vienna had finally petered to nothing and his earnings from his designs were meagre, but he was a happy man. He found his first great love: Robin Curtis, a dealer in antiques, slightly younger, slim and fair. In a domestic picture in their apartment shared with Robin’s sister on the Upper East Side, with both men in pin-striped suits, Iggie perches on the arm of a chair. There are joint family photographs on their mantelpiece behind them. In other pictures they are larking around on a beach in their trunks, in Mexico, in LA: a couple.
Iggie really did get away.
Elisabeth wouldn’t sanction moving back to Vienna. But when the finances became intolerable – clients had let Henk down, promises had not been fulfilled, et cetera – she took the boys off to a farmhouse in Oberbozen, a beautiful village in the Italian Tyrol. The village had its own cacophonous band of drums on feast days, and meadows of gentians. It was beautiful, and the air was marvellous for the children’s complexion, but above all it was very, very cheap with none of the expenses of a Parisian lifestyle. The children went briefly to the local school, before she decided to teach them herself. Henk stayed in Paris and London trying to retrieve the losses of his Trading Company. ‘When he came to see us,’ my father recalled,