this fabled fashion show

IN the annals of fashion smackdowns, few events have attained anything resembling the legendary status of the 1973 Grand Divertissement à Versailles. A stunt benefit ginned up by Eleanor Lambert, the publicist who invented the Best Dressed List, this fabled fashion show, promoted as a Franco-American collaboration, was always destined to be seen as a battle for dominance: the Old World slugging it out with the New, a muscular group of comers with Studio 54 as their shared point of reference taking on the fusty world of the haute couture.

Liza Minnelli and American runway models belt out “Bonjour, Paris!” at the Grand Divertissement à Versailles in 1973. The event put American fashion on the international map.
To raise money for the restoration of Versailles, five American upstarts were invited to show their clothes alongside an equal number of what some journalists termed the “lions” of French fashion. The New York contenders were a decidedly motley lot: the gifted and imperious Halston; the industry stalwarts Oscar de la Renta and Bill Blass; Anne Klein, the sportswear pioneer; Stephen Burrows, a relative unknown then being touted as the future of American design. The French team, if that is the word for a collection of arch-rivals, comprised Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior (the label was designed at the time by Marc Bohan), Hubert de Givenchy, Emanuel Ungaro and Pierre Cardin.

Headlines of the day reported on the gala — which drew 800 guests, including erstwhile nobilities as well as Princess Grace of Monaco wearing a jeweled tiara — as if it had been a prize fight. The Americans, representing what must have been clear even then was the wave of the fashion future, delivered a knockout. The French, representing a dwindling world of stratospherically expensive one-offs made for millionaires, were on the mat.

Whether or not, as some have suggested, American fashion came of age at that moment, it was clear that the future of the business lay not in the cloistered sanctums of some rarefied Gallic dressmakers but in an increasingly expansive sense of what fashion meant. Fashion as the all-encompassing cultural phenomenon it is now did not come into being on one night outside Paris, but things occurred then that changed the game.

Casting was one. Hard as it may be to credit in an age of inclusion, the Grand Divertissement à Versailles was very nearly the first time that anyone in Paris had seen an African-American woman on a catwalk. Back in those early days, said Harold Koda, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “an ethnic woman was someone who was southern European.”

After the success of the Grand Divertissement, Mr. Koda added, it was not just American fashion that was on the ascendant but some starkly democratic New World beauty ideals.

“What made our show different was that in Paris no one had ever seen a black model on a runway,” Oscar de la Renta said last week by telephone. And while there are those who might dispute the assertion (the designer Paco Rabanne, for one, employed black models in the 1960s), there is no arguing with contemporary reports that described the presence of black models as a major factor in the transformation of American fashion, which the French had derided as mass-produced goods, into a global force.

To commemorate the moment, the Costume Institute this month is staging a rare gathering — a kind of Oprah moment — a luncheon to honor as many of the “ethnic” models from that fabled event as can be gathered in one room. There are names on the roster that many both inside the business and outside it will still recognize, like that of the perennial wild-child Pat Cleveland and also Bethann Hardison, an agent and industry gadfly in her post-modeling career.

And there are others whose mayfly fame barely survived the moment, women like Billie Blair, at one time a kind of cult idol and now so obscure that one has to search for clues to her existence in the outer reaches of the blogosphere.

“From that one moment on, there was a kind of interest on the part of fashion designers in representing the excitement and diversity of the street,” Mr. Koda said. “Part of that excitement came from the African-American community and the music scene, and part of it was a sort of animated desire for a range of looks,” he added and that range promoted a diverse “range of ideal imagery that all of us are still absorbing in one way or another.”

Black models, claimed the model Bethann Hardison, “were not the norm then and are hardly the norm now. But we were part of a time period where being a runway model meant something, a time before runway models were given up for print girls, and it was the runway girl who sold your merchandise. That really started changing people’s minds about us and what we could do."

What the new crop of talent brought to Versailles and the business at large, she added: “was character and the strength of defiance. The only thing I had was my fierceness in my eyes and in my body. I defied the French when I walked down the catwalk, and that’s when people started screaming and the programs went flying in the air.”

This did occur. Following that night at Versailles, Emanuel Ungaro declared the American show “genius.” The Duchess de la Rochefoucauld remarked that the “French were good but the Americans were sensational.”‘ The Countess Jacqueline de Ribes was more pointed in her appraisal. “The French were pompous and pretentious,” she said in the press of the day, referring to presentations that included showgirls, space ships and a pumpkin coach. “The American show was so full of life, of color,” the countess added. “Not since Eisenhower,” C. Z. Guest, the American chairwoman of the show, said with typical hyperbole, “have the Americans had such a triumph in France.”