he wrote, ‘was that we do not use even a small part of our powers and forces. We have in us, a very big and very fine organisation, only we do not know how to use it.’ The idea, then, was to study oneself, following Ouspensky’s guidance.
This ranged from the mundane to the enlightening to the foolish. ‘We are divided,’ he claimed, ‘into hundreds and thousands of different “I”s. At one moment when I say “I”, one part of me is speaking, at another moment when I say “I” it is quite another “I” speaking. We do not know that we have not one “I”, but many different “I”s connected with our feelings and desires and have no controlling “I”. These “I”s change all the time; one suppresses another, one replaces another, and all this struggle makes up our inner life.’
To a young, impressionable woman who felt herself torn between the material and spiritual parts of her life, such ideas appeared attractive. She had already realised that she had two apparently contradictory impulses pushing her forward. One was the outgoing, fun-loving, meet-any-challenge, sporty side that was now drawing her to modelling. The other – a legacy, she was sure, from her Welsh ancestors – was driven by a solitary, contemplative, inward-looking instinct that made her want to run away from the world, curl up in a ball and search through books and thought for an answer to why Erica had died in such a tragic way. Ouspensky helped her at least to recognise these two faces within herself and gave her clues as to their origins.
When later he talked about the ‘negative emotions’ bequeathed by childhood and parents and the need to confront these in order to move to a higher level of consciousness, Ouspensky was speaking directly to Bronwen’s own experience, but it would be a mistake to imagine that she became any sort of convert to his cult. She was enthusiastic about her introduction to psychology and to discussions of levels of consciousness – Ouspensky declared there were four – and she was heartened to know that others too were struggling with the sort of questions she had hitherto tackled in secret and largely alone, but Ouspensky was simply a starting point.
In the light of her subsequent determination to combine psychological insights with organised religion – though of course at this time she was a lapsed Anglican – Ouspensky’s antipathy to belief should be noted. Despite borrowing from eastern and western religious creeds, Ouspensky boasted that his system ‘teaches people to believe in absolutely nothing. You must verify everything that you see, hear or feel.’ And some of the conclusions to which he took initially attractive ideas appeared ridiculous, even to one as inexperienced and naive as Bronwen at that stage. His theories about the effect of earthly vibrations on the mind and his peculiar mathematical tangle, ‘the ray of Creation’, ascribing numerically quantified ‘forces’ to a series of worlds (which themselves were listed from one to ninety-six) must have been difficult for even the most avid follower to swallow.
Yet Ouspensky and Gurdjieff initiated a search for a complementary psychological and spiritual framework that has since dominated Bronwen’s life. In her student days and as she took her first faltering steps into the adult world of work, the two principal elements within her and hence in her story began to unravel – the spiritual and the material. At the same time as she was setting her sights on the flimsy, fun and throwaway world of model girls, with their jetset lifestyles, headline-grabbing antics and aristocratic suitors, she embarked on a lonely and often painful journey to understand her own psyche and soul.
* In a recent similar case in Egypt, reported in British medical journals, a sixteen-year-old builder went to see his doctor with severe stomach pains. An X-ray revealed a swollen sac pressing against his kidneys and containing his unborn twin, a seven-inch long foetus, weighing more than four pounds. It had a head, an arm, a tongue and teeth. Like an incubus it had been surviving inside the sixteen-year-old, feeding off him.
One of the many reasons why it is difficult to make a start as a model is that, although the photographers and fashion houses are crying out for new faces, when it comes to the point none of them want to take the risk of trying out a new girl while she is still green.
Jean Dawnay, Model Girl (1956)
The fashion world recovered more quickly than most industries from the dislocation of the war. In Paris in February 1947 Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ thrilled critics, buyers and public alike. ‘It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian,’ remarked Carmel Snow, reporting for Harper’s Bazaar, at the unveiling of Dior’s dramatic, narrow-waisted, low-cut, very feminine and distinctly nostalgic collection, harking back, some experts said, to the hour-glass silhouette of the 1890s. ‘Your dresses have such a new look. They’re quite wonderful.’
Snow had coined a phrase to emphasise Dior’s break with the drab, austere and utilitarian style of the war years, symbolised by his abundant use of material after a period in which it had been severely rationed. Dior, Snow claimed with some truth, had done more, however, than simply create a style. ‘He has saved Paris as Paris was saved in the Battle of the Marne.’
For there had been doubts expressed about the French capital’s ability to regain its pre-war dominance of the fashion industry, notably with American buyers. Certainly during the war years Paris had lost its crown when Hollywood brought together fashion and film to make New York’s Seventh Avenue the place to be, but the transatlantic clamour that followed the launch of the New Look – Olivia de Havilland and Rita Hayworth were amongst the Hollywood stars who rushed to place orders – ensured that Paris was back at the top of the tree. Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath and Cristobal Balenciaga all contributed to this pre-eminence; by 1950 they had been joined by Pierre Cardin, two years later by Hubert de Givenchy. But it was Dior who reigned supreme.
In so far as Paris entertained any European rivals, they were Rome and Florence, where designers like Capucci, Pucci, Simonetta, Fabiani and Galitzine were admired, if not held in quite such global high esteem as Dior and his near neighbours. In the fashion industry, London remained something of an enigma. It considered itself as good as, if not better than, Paris and certainly looked down on the Italians. Throughout the 1950s the universal penchant amongst Europe’s designers for classically English tailored evening dresses and tweed suits as part of an exaggeratedly aristocratic look contributed to London’s self-assuredness. But the irony was that the driving force behind this English look was Paris, which took the safe lines coming out of London – ‘knights’ wives clothes’, as they were sometimes unkindly labelled – and turned them into something special.
The traffic was, in reality, two-way. London had been touched by the shock waves that issued forth from Paris with the New Look. Like the rest of the fashion world, it followed Dior’s lead. Yet it did so in moderation, sticking to its own particular style and developing its own innovations – like coloured furs. Jean Dawnay, who worked with the top designers on both sides of the English Channel before she retired as a model girl in 1956, sums up the subleties of the battle with an anecdote. While working at Dior, she was sent as one of a small team to show some of the house’s latest designs at the French embassy in London. The clothes had a strongly English look. To acknowledge his design debt to his hosts, Dior decided that his designs should be made up in British tweeds and worsteds. According to Dawnay, the gesture backfired when the flowing dresses she had worn in Paris overnight became stiff and ungainly when made from home-spun cloth. They did not move with her body but stood out in counterpoint to it. Only the most formal suits and evening dresses translated well. ‘The English designers catered almost exclusively for the smart English families,’ says Dawnay. ‘If they were having a ball or a coming-out party, they would go to Hardy Amies for a dress and so on. It was very insular, had its own standards and was rather dismissive of anywhere else.’
The global commercial reality,
