The Magazine: The Fashionable Woman History Forgot
We’re a mere six weeks away from launch, so come behind the covers and see what inspired ASTRID BRICARD. Let’s also meet the remarkable Anne Klein, go to Versailles, the movies, and more!
How did we get to August! Didn’t I just start writing a new book in January, which was, like, a month ago?! But if it’s August, that means I can now say my new book is out next month - in fact, it’s out in exactly six weeks, so I’d say that also means we can officially start counting down!
Like all of my books, The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard wasn’t inspired by one thing but by three seemingly disconnected ideas coming together in my mind and convincing me I could some how make them into a book. One of the ideas was the fraught, fabulous and little-known Battle of Versailles, which took place at the Palace of Versailles in November 1973. So that’s just one of the things I’m going to tell you more about in this month’s magazine.
As well as that, I’ve just returned from a long weekend holiday with two of my close friends to celebrate my birthday. I’m not big on celebrating my own birthday but this weekend might have changed my mind!
There’s something very recharging about talking non-stop for three days to people who aren’t your family, going out for lunch and dinner, eating enormous plates of delicious cheese, going for strolls on the beach, sleeping in and not caring for anyone except yourself. Needless to say, I didn’t do any work - and that felt good too!
Here’s what else I’ve been doing this month in the way of watching, reading and buying. And come with me to Versailles a little further down the page and find out why I thought it would make the perfect backdrop for my soon-to-be-released book.
Before I went away, my daughters and I went to see Oppenheimer. Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy were fabulous as the Oppenheimers, and I enjoyed the movie. But …
A few things irked me. Florence Pugh’s nipples, for starters. I don’t have a problem with sex - I write sex scenes in my books! But there was something very gratituous and the Florence Pugh nipple shots. I’m sure her breasts are gorgeous, but I’m not even sure her character was needed in the story, let alone her naked character.
That whole subplot with her as the mistress gave me the feeling that there were two movies happening here - one, a portrait of the man who orchestrated the development of the atom bomb, and a second that ticked off the Hollywood checklist.
For example, sections of the end, where we see the “villain” explain why he was so dastardly, felt contrived and also unnecessary. We were shown what happened by the excellent actors, shown how they felt about the events, how their opinions and allegiances changed - but then we had it all explained to us too, just in case we’d fallen asleep by the two hour mark.
I would have loved to have seen more of Oppenheimer before the Manhattan Project - his early years were fascinating. I would also have liked to see more of Emily Blunt. She wowed me in The English and she wowed me again here. If there’s ever a movie made of one of my books, I want her in one of the roles! But the movie was worth seeing, despite the slightly irritating Hollywoodisation of the storyline. Have you seen it? What did you think?
Reading-wise, I’m still going with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and it just gets more and more brilliant. I almost feel a little like I should stop writing myself because genius such as hers can never be achieved by my poor writerly brain. There are so many lines I want to highlight and revisit and she is especially good at specificity - finding the one detail of a person or setting that makes a description rise above mere set dressing to add another layer of meaning.
The characterisation of Angus (a teenage girl) is especially brilliant, from the description of her “nervous” grey eyes, to her delightfully weird fashion sense, to the way we just know she’s so vulnerable to her father’s one-eyed football obsession, despite her tough-girl attitude.
It’s making me reflect on what makes a word printed on a page come to life in someone’s mind, something that this piece by Lincoln Michaels about the whole Prosecraft debacle also considers.
ICYMI - Prosecraft purported to be an A.I. model that helped writers write books. It took the text (breach of copyright alert) of around 25,000 novels and scraped and analysed them for their “vividness”, use of passive voice and a whole lot of other “metrics”, giving them percentage scores. Apparently this would help new writers by allowing them to compare their own metrics to those of their favourite books.
So, it was all a bit sketchy. The scraping of the published works, the claim that this was somehow A.I., the idea that this could actually help anyone write a better book. But the strangest thing of all was, as Michaels points out in his piece, the whole idea of ranking a single word as being more vivid than another.
Words only become vivid when they’re combined in a specific way to create the telling detail that immediately makes the reader see the scene or the character in full colour, three dimensional rendering. Above, I used the example of Kingsolver describing Angus as having “nervous” eyes. The word nervous in and of itself isn’t especially vivid. But applied to Angus’s eyes, it launches the reader straight into the scene because Angus is as tough as they come - apparently. Her eyes have previously conveyed withering judgements of people. But not in this scene.
It’s one of the things I love most about words. Their power to shapeshift, to become bigger or more powerful or renewed by their placement in relation to other words. And Demon Copperhead is a masterclass in this aspect of writing.
If you want to know more about Demon Copperhead, it’s a story set in Appalachia about an orphan boy whose mom dies of an overdose, and who then makes his miserable way through multiple foster homes, who encounters drugs as a mere ten year old, and is used for child labour. Yet it’s often hilarious and always incredibly touching no matter how horrific things get. I have about seven hours of the audiobook to go (it’s a long one) and I’d be surprised if it doesn’t earn the title of best book of the year for me.
I’m also still reading and making my way through The Artist’s Way, although I had a brief pause while I was away. I failed miserably at the no-reading week, but I’m relying more and more on my morning pages, to the point where I know I’m going to have a good day’s writing if I get these done first thing without interruption from the various members of my family.
I’m also struggling with the artist dates. I’m supposed to take myself out each week to do something reenergising - just me. I can never quite think what to do, besides go for a walk on the beach, so if you have any other ideas, let me know!
Time to head to Versailles for some shenanigans and surprises!
As I said at the start, the Battle of Versailles was one of my very first ideas when it came to writing The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard. In the early 1970s, the Palace of Versailles just outside Paris, former home to French kings, was crumbling. Caretaker Gérald van der Kemp worked with baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild to stage a fundraising extravaganza - a battle for fashion supremacy between 5 French couturiers and 5 American fashion designers.
Sounds amazing, right?! What captivated me about this idea from the start was the time period - I hadn’t written a book set in the 1970s before and this sounded like fun - the setting at Versailles, which I could just picture in my head as being an incredible backdrop for a novel, and the fashion angle, which you all know I love writing about! And the more I read about this fashion battle, the more fascinated I became, and the more I knew my book would hinge around the events of that one night in November 1973.
So what happened at Versailles?
First up, 10 designers were chosen to do battle: five French and five American. Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Emmanuel Ungaro, Christian Dior (Marc Bohan was the designer at that time) and Hubert de Givenchy represented the French. The American designers were Oscar de la Renta, Stephen Burrows, Halston, Bill Blass and Anne Klein. Yes, just one female was chosen out of the ten designers. It’s my biggest regret that I had to cast Anne aside – as is so often done to women – to make room for Astrid Bricard in my story. Heartfelt apologies to Anne Klein and her legacy for doing this.
Anne Klein is a name hardly remembered today but she revolutionised fashion for ‘working women’, introducing the concept of separates, and the idea of mixing and matching pieces of clothing. Before Anne, the only thing women could buy to wear to work were suits: skirts and jackets that matched.
Despite her innovativeness, she was looked down on by the (male) fashion establishment because her customers wore her clothes to work - dreadful! You only garnered the respect of the industry if you made showstopper gowns that hardly anyone could afford and few people wore.
Anne made a lot of money – was arguably more successful than her peers, in fact – but garnered little praise from those peers. Her treatment at Versailles by the male designers was nothing short of execrable, according to Robin Givhan who, in her masterful non-fiction account of the event, The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled Into the Spotlight and Made History, recounts, ‘None of the other designers – not the French, not the Americans – wanted her there. Their scorn for her was obvious. She was shunted aside. . . . She was belittled. She was forced into a workspace in the basement . . .’
Donna Karan, Klein’s assistant, supports this, saying, ‘They did not like Anne. She knew the others were totally against her. It was horrible.’ And one of the models at Versailles said, ‘People thought they could push her around and walk all over her.’
Was it because she was the only woman? Was it because her sportswear, her clothes for ‘working women’, were seen as couture’s lowly tenth cousin, thrice removed?
Eventually the atmosphere at Versailles, where there was no heating, no toilet paper (yes, really), no water, and too many male egos trapped in one small space erupted. The target of that eruption was Anne Klein. Givhan describes ‘a major screaming shout-down’ by Halston that was ‘so vicious that Kay Thompson (the choreographer) quit’, as did Halston, screaming ‘Halston is leaving’ (he referred to himself in the third person). Yes, he had a tantrum and walked out - like a child. He also threatened Enid Nemy of the New York Times that she’d never be invited to his shows if she reported his behaviour.
Blass, in his memoir Bare Blass also says that at Versailles, Halston ‘behaved like a monster’, and that although they’d won, ‘it was impossible to feel completely proud of it’ because ‘we were so terrible to one another’. He also comments that Anne Klein had ‘no talent’. Apparently she fired Blass when he was just starting out.
It’s hard not to wonder if being fired by her might be one reason why he would suggest that a woman who’d created a whole new sector of the fashion industry and who was making money hand over fist was untalented.
In spite of all of that, the Americans won the night. You’d think that would go down in history. But it’s surprising how little is known about the event, how few photographs exist. Perhaps the atmosphere was so sullied that, afterwards, people only wanted to forget.
So, in writing The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard, I took this history of ‘tears, screaming matches and backbiting’ as Givhan relates it and imagined what it might do to a woman already bullied and hounded to her very edge.
For more on this event, make sure you watch the 2016 documentary Battle at Versailles read Givhan’s book, check out this article, or wait for my novel to be released!
The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard is out on September 27 in Australia/NZ, Jan 30 in North America, in ebook on September 27 in the UK and paperback in Spring 2024. You can preorder the book now.
Some of my favourite purchases this month are this pink gin from Wise Winery, this exceptionally delicious nougat from Bettenay’s and the cheeses from Cambray Sheep Farm, where I learned the difference between pecorino and Parmesan - the former is a sheep’s milk cheese and the second is made from cow’s milk. All of these products are from WA’s southwest, and were bought while I was on my mini-break.
I’ve also been looking for the perfect largish by still stylish handbag for travelling. It needed to fit a water bottle and iPad for the plane, even a fresh T-shirt, plus all the other stuff you need when you’re flying halfway across the world and want a bag that can also seamlessly adapt to be the one you carry around all day in Paris. I also wanted it to have a crossbody strap as I find that easier on my shoulders and back.
I love A-esque bags, handmade to order in Melbourne, and took the opportunity while I was in Melbourne last weekend to pop into the atelier and try their Halo Day Satchel. It was like they’d read my mind - it was perfect!
The thick padded strap is super comfy to wear. I was worried after just seeing it on their website that it would be too large and the strap too thick as I’m quite small, but it’s just right. I carried it around Melbourne all weekend and took it in the plane and can thoroughly recommend it.
It’s expensive, but the bags are handmade in Melbourne using traditional artisanal skills. I like supporting businesses that are low waste, and that value craft. A-esque was created by Mimco founder Amanda Rettig so they know handbags!
That’s It!
So that’s it for the magazine this month. I’ve done a bit of reformatting for this monthly post for my paid subscribers, so I hope you enjoy the new breakdown of topics.
Please let me know in the comments what you’re reading, and if you’ve come across any especially vivid descriptions in that book. And let me know anything else you’re thinking after reading this post too! I always love reading your comments.