Contextualizing Maxwell Shieff: Hollywood’s Forgotten Fashion Designer
Maxwell Shieff’s place in fashion history has remained undetermined for the past half-century. Since his death in 1977, the innovation, artistry, and remarkable sartorial prescience he demonstrated during his career has been completely overlooked. Overshadowed by the Diors, the Balenciagas, and the Balmains, the name “Maxwell Shieff” became buried within a metaphorical fashion-Pompeii of once-famous midcentury designers. Objects which are buried, however, have an uncanny way of coming back to the surface.
Some entities gently resurface with the passage of time while others are dug up, dusted off, and forced back into the sunlight. Maxwell Shieff came back by both means—a fossil of fate and fortune. Characteristically elegant, Shieff reemerged in swooping cursive script not into sunlight but rather into rain. I found Maxwell Shieff’s name inscribed within a book in my college’s library on a rainy October day during my freshman year in 2016. This discovery marked the beginning of a research project which would span the rest of my collegiate career. Now nearing the end of my senior year, I have uncovered more information than I ever imagined possible regarding the man behind the mysterious signature.
In this article, I seek to understand Maxwell Shieff’s identity as a fashion designer in relation to the careers of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. I aim to historically contextualize Maxwell Shieff and locate a place for him to exist where his legacy can be acknowledged, critically analyzed, and duly acclaimed within the history of twentieth century fashion. I provide such contextualization with the aid of four print sources courtesy of the Davidson College Library.
Material culture experts Valerie Mendes and Amy de la Haye combine forces in Fashion since 1900, a comprehensive survey of fashion history since beginning of the twentieth century. In chapters five and six which detail emerging fashion trends from the end of the second World War to the end of the sixties, Mendes and de la Haye craft a narrative timeline of designers and trends which evolved in response to women’s shifting societal roles. Referencing the new aesthetic potential of the late 1940s, Mendes and de la Haye write, “the end of the war brought the gradual resumption of weekend activities and holidays[3]…designers understood the psychological need for change and were beginning to move away from the boxy wartime profile towards softer, longer lines. Two courtiers were dominant during this period: Christian Dior and Cristobel Balenciaga.”[4] Mendes and de la Haye assert the magnitude of Dior’s debut, writing, “On February 12th 1947 he launched his first—and now legendary—Spring collection.”[5] Mendes and de la Haye offer a vivid description of the show’s exaggerated floral silhouettes: “shoulders were narrow, with gentle, sloping profiles, waists were tiny, pulled in by an undergarment known as a waspie or guepiêre, skirts were enormously full and reached low down the calves.”[6]
The earliest primary source artifact concerning Shieff’s career is a fifteen-minute-long color film recording of a fashion show which took place in Winnipeg in 1946, a year before Dior exhibited his legendary collection to the public. Though blurry, the footage depicts models walking down spot lit runway twirling back and forth in original Shieff-designed garments which bear striking similarities to the garments modelled in Dior’s Spring 1947 collection, which at the time of the Winnipeg show were not yet in existence. With the central goal of establishing a new style of women’s wear in mind, many designers during this period were likely experimenting with similar silhouettes without realizing it. While this is a plausible explanation for the similarities present between Shieff’s 1946 and Dior’s 1947 collections, Shieff’s conception and execution of many elements central to Dior’s “New Look” destabilizes the originality, innovation, and acclaim of Christian Dior and his label. Questions concerning integrity also come into play.
In her essay, “Paul Poiret’s Minaret Style: Originality, Reproduction, and Art in Fashion,” Nancy Troy examines the problem of dishonest reproduction which ran rampant in the fashion industry of the early twentieth century. While major fashion businesses were just beginning to take hold in North America, Paris maintained its status as the fashion capital of the world. Fashion designers and their assistants often functioned as liaisons of inspiration during this time and travelled back and forth between North America and Europe, attending fashion shows and recording notes, photographs, film footage and other bits of inspiration intended to boost their own businesses in their home countries. Hattie Carnegie, with whom Maxwell Shieff worked as an apprentice in New York City during the 1930’s[7], was one such liaison. According to Mendes and de la Haye, who offer a scant history on the elusive accessory-designer, Carnegie employed Norman Norell as an assistant in the late 1930’s, possibly at the same time at which she was working with Shieff. Norell traveled to Paris with Carnegie and gleaned a comprehensive knowledge of French haute couture before strategically leaving Carnegie in 1940 to start his own label.[8]
It is both likely that Norell and Shieff crossed paths while working for Carnegie in the 1930s and that Shieff, just as Norell had done, might have travelled with Carnegie to conduct fashion-research in Paris. While no travel records exist for verification, it is just as likely to consider the possibility that apprentices who worked for major Parisian labels likely travelled from France to North America for the purpose of gathering—pseudo-stealing—inspiration from smaller labels. Frenzied by the optimism of the postwar years, the desire to take inspiration without giving credit to victimized designers would have been pressurized by commercial escalation and the hope of economic prosperity. Thus, larger labels with bigger travel budgets had an upper hand in the stealing-process and were able to scour the world in search of easily replicable silhouettes to which they could quickly attach notoriety.
A key question arises which cannot be ignored: was a Dior-scout sitting in the audience of Maxwell Shieff’s Winnipeg show in 1946, furiously sketching silhouettes to deliver to Christian Dior himself?
Although this seems like a stretch, the question’s irrationality is undermined by its plausibility. One of the blurry-faced men and women sitting in the audience could very well be a Parisian liaison sent 4,000 miles across the sea to Winnipeg, the furthest thing from a fashion capital, to search for a silhouette born from the mind of a burgeoning yet generally unknown designer, which if stolen would presumably never be able to be tracked down—until now. The possibility is not only compelling, but also feasible and backed by visual evidence. Maxwell Shieff, the toupeed numerologist behind that silhouette, very likely spent his life knowing that he had invented the “New Look” at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers[9] approximately 365 days before it ever reached the Sienne.
Troy’s examination of Paul Poiret’s disillusionment with the dishonesty of the early-twentieth century fashion industry is especially notable given Shieff’s interest in Poirot early in his own career. The library book which hatched this research project and bears Shieff’s signature happens to be King of Fashion, the autobiography of Paul Poiret. As evidenced by the date scrawled below Shieff’s signature—1937—the book was in Shieff’s possession during the early part of his career. The location scrawled below the date—78 W 85th St.—indicates that Shieff read the book while working as a fabric cutter for Hattie Carnegie in New York City.[10] Born in 1911, Shieff was only twenty-six when he signed the book. The way in which Shieff carefully signed the book indicates that he thought of it not simply as just another piece of reading material, but rather as a cherished possession. Its tattered binding suggests that it had been regularly handled, its binding cracked open time after time, and its pages studied and scoured for inspiration. By penning his own name into the front page of the book, Maxwell Shieff writes himself into fashion history. Harnessing the dimming light of Paul Poiret, who would die in poverty eight years later, Shieff silently mobilizes his career through literature. He identifies himself within his predecessor. At the age of twenty-six, Shieff already found a clever way to ensure that his name, if lost, would come return to the world. What he never imagined when signing the book is that his name would not reemerge typed on a Met Museum placard nor listed in the index of the Smithsonian’s 500-page illustrated fashion encyclopedia, but rather shoved haphazardly in the Art section of a library in a tiny North Carolinian town.
“Poiret,” writes Troy, “appealed to the Romantic notion of the artist not as a mere artisan, or someone who had to hawk his own wares, but instead as a creator and a dreamer.”[11] Troy contends that Poiret thought of fashion as an art form and of himself as an artist. As such, Poiret “openly incorporated the visual arts…into his efforts to sell expensive dresses.”[12] Shieff similarly assumed the role of an artist during his career and “was always sketching”[13] on scrap paper and on the backs of photographs.[14] Troy describes the way in which Poiret payed special attention to the setting surrounding the garments he exhibited to the public by turning his own home, which he called his “hôtel de couture,” into a fashion-show-space—a domestic runway of sorts—to ensure that he would maintain maximum control over the presentation of his collections. It “was a business setting that often functioned more like a domestic space, as it did when he hosted extravagant costume parties where his wife circulated like a mannequin and his friends tried out his latest Orientalist styles, thus insuring that the difference between commercial and private activities would always be ambiguous.”[15] Likely inspired by this unique exhibition method, Shieff used his own Beverly Hills home as a fashion-show-space during the pinnacle of his career in the 1950s and 60s.[16] Photos from the Shieff family archives show smiling models strutting down corridors and posing in the backyard of Shieff’s Mies-van-der-Rohe-style home. In several photos Shieff appears confidently presenting a model to a cocktail-clasping audience of friends and potential customers. Shieff’s wife Ethel, cited as the brainy businesswoman and chief salesperson behind Shieff’s operation, also appears in a few of these photos looking proudly into the sunlight with squinted, discerning eyes as if tuning into a psychic glimpse of the label’s future.
Poiret further cultivated his image as an artist by commending originality, a quality which he believed to be inherent within the artistry of his designs. Troy writes that Poiret once intoned, “’Women must wear something simple, but personal or individual…It can be personal without extravagance. Simple things prove most original.’”[17] In this way, Poiret describes his clothing as a simplified and refined artform. Shieff disclosed similar intonations via Dear-Abbey-like interviews within American and Canadian newspapers both as a method of advertising and as a manner of describing his latest collections as fresh, highly anticipated art exhibits. Shieff garnered more publicity by traveling across the country to meet clients and admirers and showcase his collections in various hotels and event venues.[18] So too did Paul Poiret, several decades prior. Troy describes Poiret’s short though imperative trips to America: “during those few short weeks of his stay in the United States, where he was the guest of one department-store magnate after the next, he…addressed thousands of potential clients…in hotel ballrooms and department store theaters.”[19] “Poiret’s spectacular marketing campaign,” writes Troy, “proved to be enormously effective.”[20] Poiret furthered his already successful marketing campaign by landing full-page advertisements and mentions in the most circulated women’s publications of the time—Women’s Wear Daily and Vogue.[21] Taking a cue from his most revered predecessor, Shieff followed suit and worked his way into full-page advertisements and citations within the same publications throughout the fifties and sixties.[22]
Maureen Turim touches upon the proliferation and influence of women’s magazines during the golden age of Hollywood in her essay, “Fashion Shapes: Film, the Fashion Industry, and the Image of Women.” Shieff, who became a household name in Hollywood during late fifties and early sixties, functions as a unique lens through which to examine the relationship between women’s fashion-centric publications and fashion’s relationship with femininity in the film industry. Turim contends, “In the United States the fashion industry’s power to shape the image and self-images of women has been closely tied to the growth of the film industry and its use of fashion. Hollywood films, coupled with the wide distribution of women’s magazines, have colluded with the garment and advertising industries to mold who are and who we can become.”[23] Shieff employed both women’s magazines and his role as a Hollywood costume designer to establish a sizeable, off-set celebrity clientele over the span of two decades which ranged from Hitchcock-blondes (Psycho’s Janet Leigh) to Hungarian heiresses (Zsa Zsa Gabour and her socialite sisters).[24] On set, Shieff worked as a costumer for The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and was thus able to subtly advertise his designs on a television show which reached thousands of viewers throughout the nation. Turim offers analysis on the notion of fashion as a form of communication to which Shieff subscribed: “Fashion molds human beings into visual designs which communicate consciously and unconsciously specific attitudes, values, and desires.”[25] Turim argues that the American fashion industry grew as a direct result of growing visibility and degree of widespread visual communication which accompanied the rise of Hollywood during the beginning and middle of the century. Maxwell Shieff accordingly played a direct role in the growth of the American fashion industry.
The film industry’s growth in turn marked the beginning of a midcentury economic swell accompanied by a shift in popular psychology similar to the post-WW2 shift described by Mendes and de la Haye.[26] Just as he responded to the postwar shift by crafting the original “New Look,” Shieff played upon the psychological shift induced by the Hollywood boom by participating in what Turim calls “the narrative of fashion.”[27] “This means more than the association of a style with a given story or fiction,” Turim argues, “it is a process that fuses the unconscious effects of film experience with the very lines and colors of clothing designs.”[28] Peering through microscope of feminism, Turim concludes that film-fashion ultimately “encourages women to displace their desires for self-hood onto the visual, onto images created through the use of commodities.”[29] Turim’s interpretation of fashion as a commodity evokes a degree of mass production characteristically absent from the practice of couture which upheld the slow, careful production of garments crafted by hand as made-to-order limited-edition pieces.
The presence of the human hand becomes a crucial component in differentiating between couture (art according to Poiret and Shieff) and what is referenced in contemporary culture as “fast fashion.” In her analysis of the physicality of the fashion narrative Turim references “the very lines and colors and colors of clothing design” and neglects to acknowledge the moments in which the human hand plays a vital role in the production of a garment. In this way Turim’s analysis undercuts the notion of fashion design as art. While Turim is busy with the task of undercutting a concept, Italian art historian Germano Celant is blissfully fixated by the magnitude of the act of cutting a garment. In his essay, “To Cut is to Think,” Celant makes a case for the psychological importance of the act of cutting: “to cut is to think and to see.”[30]Celant offers a brief history on Cubist techniques of cutting various materials to create collages which formed “new relationships with the object seen and experienced.”[31] Celant writes, “the thinking spawned by the Cubist cut opened up an infinite universe…it ignores the world’s hardness and absoluteness so that it can make and unmake representation.”[32] The young Maxwell Shieff, in his occupation working as a cutter in post-Cubism New York, assumed the role of a Cubist artist of sorts. Each time he picked up a pair of scissors in the earliest days of his career, Shieff took advantage of the infinite universe created by the Cubists of yesteryear. In declaring the cut as an act of artmaking and the cutter an artist, Celant elevates Shieff’s seemingly humble origins. Celant writes about the seemingly mundane act of cutting with the same degree of romanticism Paul Poiret attached to his view of himself[33]:
“If the artistic process involves cleaving and delimiting appearances so that they may be read, then the cut is its soul. It becomes the intimate, sensitive interpreter that can concretely define reality. The cut is the soul of the clothing. It severs the endless thread of a garment as the simple container and portrait of the human figure and transforms it into a creative act, a language that builds on new objects.”[34]
Celant exhibits Neruda-like concern with the potency inherent within an ostensibly humdrum human act.[35] He goes so far as to invoke Greek mythology’s Clotho, the muse spinning the thread of life—“the endless thread of a garment”—to emphasize the longstanding historical tradition of the act of fabric-cutting. Celant heightens the act of cutting to supernatural extremes: “The magical instance of the cut that makes the garment…passed through all the various thresholds of artistic creativity…the stroke of the blade…on the cloth is a dialectic between space and energy.”[36]Enmeshed in the tumult of urban life and the engrossed in early professional experience, Shieff likely wasn’t interested in the metaphysicality of his job as one of the thousands of young cutters in New York City hoping to make a name for themselves in the beginning of the century.[37] Remarkably, Shieff would demonstrate a profound interested in the metaphysical and occult much later in his career during the years spanning the rise and eventual decline of his business in Beverly Hills.[38]
Maxwell Shieff was an original artist. He was a revolutionary fashion designer. He was a direct proponent of growth of the American film Industry. He is a resurfaced piece of forgotten history. Maxwell Shieff, whose other identities include numerologist, father, husband, entrepreneur, friend, and the grand title “coutourier to the stars,”[39]deserves long-overdue recognition and acclaim. Evident within this literature review is Shieff’s significance as a historical figure. Maxwell Shieff will be paid his belated acclaim.
It’s written in the cursive.
[1] Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family.
[2] Online Oxford English Dictionary
[3] Mendes 126
[4] Mendes 128
[5] Mendes 128
[6] Mendes 128
[7] Newspaper Database article which has been lost but is in the process of being digitally recovered.
[8] Mendes 149
[9] These famous Manitoban rivers merge in Winnipeg.
[10] Newspaper database article which is lost but is in the process of being digitally recovered.
[11] Troy 249
[12] Troy 243
[13] Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family.
[14] Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family.
[15] Troy 243
[16] Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family.
[17] Turim 248
[18] Proquest
[19] Troy 249
[20] Troy 250
[21] Troy 251
[22] Proquest
[23] Turim 150
[24] Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family.
[25] Turim 149
[26] Mendes 128
[27] Turim 154
[28] Turim 154
[29] Turim 154
[30] Celant 187
[31] Celant 187
[32] Celant 187
[33] Troy 249
[34] Celant 188
[35] Reference to the Spanish poet Pablo Neruda who became known for his use of sensual imagery.
[36] Celant 191, 192
[37] George Burns of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, with whom Shieff would later become a client and close friend was also working as a cutter in NYC during the 1930s. Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family.
[38] Information courtesy of interview with Shieff family.
[39] Proquest
Works Cited
Celant, Germano. “To Cut is to Think.” Fashion: critical and primary sources: The Twentieth
Century to Today, edited by Peter McNeil, 1st ed., vol. 4, Berg, 2009, pp. 187-192.
Mendes, Valerie, and Amy De la Haye. “Chapter 5: 1946-1956 Femininity and
Conformity.” Fashion since 1900, second edition, Thames & Hudson, 1999, pp. 126-158.
Troy, Nancy. “Paul Poiret’s Minaret Style: Originality, Reproduction, and Art in
Fashion.” Fashion: critical and primary sources: The Twentieth Century to Today, edited
by Peter McNeil, 1st ed., vol. 4, Berg, 2009, pp. 244-257.
Turim, Maureen. “Fashion Shapes: Film, the Fashion Industry, and the Image of
Women.” Fashion: critical and primary sources: The Twentieth Century to Today, edited
by Peter McNeil, 1st ed., vol. 4, Berg, 2009, pp. 149-162.
