Jackie & Carmen

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HINDSIGHT is the best sight, especially with a heavy dose of nostalgia. And even more so when you were never part of it, never there to begin with. How is it that one can be terribly obsessed with the creative past? To have an affinity for earlier decades; movements, scenes and places never seen or experienced? Being part of it then and there – and often enough having survived it – that’s how legends come into being.
Two fashion legends, Jackie Rogers and Carmen Dell’Orefice, intrigue me for a million reasons. I almost feel bad writing an article because there should really be a book, and I imagine there will be [Jackie hinted that she is working on an autobiography]. When I showed up to interview them together, I got the feeling they thought I was interviewing Jackie about her life as a fashion designer. It was the most likely reason to talk to Jackie, in large part because she’s been a notable entrepreneur with retail, spent time learning fashion design under Coco Chanel and is generally underrated. She has A-list celebs along with an army of Upper East Side “geriatric socialites” [which she says with a smirk, a raised eyebrow and sarcastic realism] who once ruled the scene as her more notable clients.
When Carmen arrives at Jackie’s store she is glowing with her pale skin and stark white hair. Her makeup is perfect and I am in disbelief that I find her as attractive as I do. She’s almost too old to be that beautiful. Her first move is toward the clothing racks, touching the fabrics and flipping through dresses and jackets like a kid in a candy store. Her eyes glaze over in a quick and transient intoxication. As I introduce myself, she’s pulled back into reality. At first glance, her eyes betray a view of the world with a youthful, yet classic and sophisticated perspective far less than half what I would guess her age to be. A sparkle.
As we begin conversation, Carmen talks about lines, form and Jackie’s contribution to liberating American women from the post-war hum-drum clothing and bringing a refined sensibility to their wardrobes. Jackie’s world of fashion was interesting enough, but I was sure these women had far more interesting stories, and if we talked proper fashion, I would only embarrass myself with my limited, unprofessional knowledge. I was there to listen and learn about their lives and experiences, to learn a life lesson or at least trinkets of information from vivacious, successful, professional, beautiful women. Fuel for inspiration. Being a photographer by trade, the weight of my interest was initially piqued in their lives as models and their relationships with photographers. After all, they had worked with some of the best ever. They star in the epic pictures they helped the masters create.
Last night I watched “Duffy: The Man Who Shot The Sixties”, a documentary in which Brian Duffy naturally says to Joanna Lumley (a model before she went on to star as Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous), “…those were the days when you had professionals,” about the way she did her own make-up, hair and styling as a model in the ever-swingin’ 60’s London. It was expected then, and that’s why models went to modeling school – something too easy to make fun of when you hear “modeling school”, but arguably a missing component of the modeling industry today – that along with creativity and personality. “Now everybody’s a bloody amateur, but they’re supermodels,” Duffy exclaims in disgusted surprise. Modeling used to be a collaborative thing – the models were more than a face and instrumental in creating the images; they did more than just get out of bed for an Evangelistan sum or simply show up and be pretty – the job actually used to be work. They had to show up with their hair and make-up done, not to mention with presence, manner and attitude.
Both Carmen and Jackie come from times before the 60’s. “It might have been the mid-50s. About ’54-55. And New York was a totally different place.” She adds, “Great people were lurking around. There were great nightclubs like El Morocco, and the Stork Club, where I happened to hang out.” They go on with themselves in an ‘oh, the good ‘ole days’ way about how fabulous it all was, “movie stars from Hollywood like Errol Flynn and Kirk Douglas,…the heavy hitters.” This was the other, social side of their lives – meat on the bones of a work-hard, play-hard lifestyle. Carmen was a young teenager when she landed on the cover of Vogue in the 40’s – a regular feature in an Irving Penn or Richard Avedon fashion frame. Her expression becomes delighted and warm as she explains the era in which she started, “Well it was all the ex-patriots who escaped the Nazi’s – like Horst, Erwin Blumenfeld, Cecil Beaton, all the cultivated older gentlemen hit New York and [Alexander] Liberman lead the way. You know, he had escaped with his wife and his daughter. (Jackie: I didn’t know that – Tatiana?) Yes. He knew the talent…I mean, it was wonderful – the best! They brought European civilization to the pages of American magazines. That’s why there was individuality. Brodovich brought along American young men- like Avedon…I can’t even remember all the names.” I pipe in, “John Rawlings?” “No honey, he was with Vogue, they were with Bazaar.” I quickly remember that Bazaar wasn’t always a thin magazine with knock-off ideas and boring commercial interests [not to mention Vogue].
Time is much less personal, more general than age. “The 60s into the 70s is not for me, I’m earlier and the best decade is now.” Carmen replies after Jackie praises the 60’s, Bob Dylan and how she was learning as much as she could from Chanel and landing roles in Fellini films (among others) in the early 60’s. Upon her return to New York in the mid 60’s, Jackie took Chanel’s advice, “she said, don’t get involved with women – they are gonna drive you insane.” It wasn’t a hard thing for Jackie to do, given her healthy appetite for men. “One day I was getting my hair done at Vidal Sassoon, and the hairdresser said, ‘Well, I’m cutting 250 men a week.’ I said, ‘You gotta be kidding – let’s go into business!’ At that time I was doing modeling and live television – doing commercials and stuff. So we opened in my apartment on 74th Street… and we cut men’s hair. It was a marvelous time- it was like 1968. All these hot guys would come in, you know. So we decided to open on Madison Avenue when nobody was on Madison Avenue. So I moved to 3rd Floor walkup for $350 a month. And we start cutting hair. It just grew. From Michael Douglas to Warren Beatty to Dustin Hoffman – the world came in there. Jack Nicholson, and all of the Rockefellers, and the who’s who of the advertising industry. Tom Jones…”
Carmen adds, “See, even if it was men’s hair, when Jackie puts her mind on something, that’s where design comes from. Believe me, they didn’t come there for no reason – to use a double negative – but when you could get a haircut for two-fifty at the time, there was something that was going on called style. And she opened up, for men, the idea that they didn’t have to have their neck shaved, to have a little sexiness with hair. So it’s all part of Jackie’s whole sense of looking; whatever’s she’s looking at, she is designing. She’s an arbiter of taste.” Jackie and Carmen continue to themselves about the expansion of the shop to the floor below and how women eventually started coming by the store to both be around men, but also to buy men’s jeans for themselves. “[Jeans] were for both – unisex. That’s where the word started – all of the unisex, so to speak. It was very successful, and then I started doing a little bit of designing for women, but not much. But that’s when I really started [designing] for women, because they wanted to get things for themselves. I was doing safari jackets, and the women thought they could wear them too, which is what happened.”
I become curious about how their lives would have been different had they taken a left instead of a right down the path of life. “I’d be producing movies- that’s what I would be doing,” Jackie says, adding that Fellini wanted to make her a star, but she was more interested in knowing the nuts and bolts, how it all worked. Carmen, who has had the same job for her entire life frankly says, “Maybe I’d be a plumber…or maybe an electrician. We must wear every hat when a situation arises in life.” Having been hit by both the financial crises in the early 90’s and the one we are in now, I believe her completely. Carmen smiles, “But you know, life is tits and ass.” Jackie adds, “That’s right baby. You better believe it!”
Jackie says, “Oh, I don’t look back. I find that today is the most important day of my life. I don’t look back and reflect, I really don’t. Look back, but don’t stare. I mean I’m in the midst of trying to write this bloody book of mine. Jesus, it gives me [she stops short of saying “a headache” or something to that effect]… I’ve got hundreds of pictures [she points to a few on the wall]. I miss people that were great people! Like Fellini, and [Marcello] Mastroianni. Jesus there were so many people.” Carmen continues, “I try to keep in the present, so I can appreciate the present and feel the present so that I can understand younger decades. I want to have this dialogue with humanity – I’m not prejudiced against age, against color, against anything. But the world is so full… I try not to be boring, and I try to be engaged with people who are not living in that fear. Most people are sleep-walking.” I nod. “I’d like to interview you to see how you hear, how you view the world, how you observe it in your own life, because you can’t observe something you don’t live through. And what you don’t experience you don’t know. Book learning is hearsay until you apply it to your life and make it work meaningfully. We’re all trying to figure out this thing called life. Part of that is how we choose to cover our body- we have to in the cold weather, we take it off in the hot weather, to varying degrees in between, we layer. And it’s not so complicated – but sometimes it’s not pretty.”
I’m sad to leave them and our conversation – there is so much more I want to know. They are true characters, somehow larger than the life they are fully engaged in. I walk out the door and I wonder if people will look back at the times now with the same affinity I have for the heyday of Carmen and Jackie. Will they, too, have an appreciation for these beautiful women on the covers of glorious magazines from 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago? Maybe their superimposed nostalgia will be for what exists today, though I kind of hope not because I suspect it would be symptomatic of decline. In 50 years will there still be the same interest in those times, or will they fall along to the wayside because a lack of true remembrance? I have no idea. But to reiterate, “you know, life is tits and ass.” And Jackie to Carmen: “That’s right baby. You better believe it.”