Reading Vintage Vogues -- An Accidental Education: Jacques Tiffeau

Tonight: New Blood in Fashion

Tweeting the lovely "Fillie Trillie" by Duke Ellington.

I like this suit a lot. I like the gloves, the bag, the hat - although I think she would look better with her hair long and loose. I love the way the sleeves fit. The skirt is an inch too long, but that creates a kind of dowdy elegance. What does Vogue say?

"FLARING SKIRT NEWS. Suit of lacy blue worsted, with wide collar, a skirt that leads a fuller life. This, north or south, now. By Monte-Sano & Pruzan; about $225 ($1,805). Ronay handbag. Cloche: Christian Dior New York. All: Bonwit Teller; I Magnin. Suit, also at L.S. Ayres. Laguna necklace. Kislav gloves."

Bag Lady University has a nice page on Ronay in the 1940s and '50s. Kislav gloves has an intriguing story that we will tell some other time.

This season marked the debut of Jacques Tiffeau as designer for Monte-Sano Pruzan, a decades-old maker of dressmaker suits and better dresses. He won a Coty in 1960 for his two collections for Monte-Sano Pruzan, the same year Rudy Gernreich won for bathing suits - not yet the bathing-suit-whose-name-shall-not-again-be-written: pee you bee kay eye enn eye. (I suddenly stopped getting searches for this, leading me to actually believe that everyone who wanted to see had already tried this blog and turned away, disappointed. In reality, something happened to Sitemeter. I just realized that Blogger is still tabulation away on the old blog, and the top search is for IT.)

The NYT first mentioned M. Tiffeau in a 1958 piece about four recently-arrived French designers by the late Carrie Donovan. How startling it is to see her byline! I had never heard of Jacques Tiffeau, but several sources called him the first celebrity designer. We'll be following him in the issues to come. It was hard to find, but I tracked down and lifted this 1964 photo from an eBay seller: