I LOVE SOMEBODY BUT WON'T SAY WHO : DORIS DAY and BUDDY CLARK

SENDING FLOWERS? HERE ARE SOME SUGGESTIONS!

When a man wants to send you flowers, always say, ‘My florist is Cartier.’ - Geramine Mitzaah Bricard 

image is from ArtNet identified as a Cartier Basket of Flowers

enamelware from 1847 that was previously auctioned.

Therefore, I believe Bricard was suggesting she wanted something like this rather than cut flowers.

While we do not pick flowers from nature as we do not want to hurt their natural environment for reseeding, nor from public gardens that are intended for the joy of the public, it is still classy to cut flowers from one's own garden and present them in a  bouquet. Set the flowers down in a jar of water and wrap it in decorative paper, or perhaps a quarter yard of fabric - even a cotton handkerchief will do.  Add a small note.

Flowers, gifts, and cards that go unsigned or come from a mystery or anonymous person are now considered to be creepy and undesireable.

ABOUT MADAME BRICARD and CHRISTIAN DIOR

From Ilya Parkin's book on the return of femininity to fashion after the masculinization of style due to the World War II demands on women...

In this book we learn that Dior's inspiration, in terms of his notions of femininity may have been his mother and memories of her, while his sister, who also had presence and impact in his work, had been part of the French resistance and had actually been arrested and put into a concentration camp. He had a nostalgia of femininity that had been abandoned in the War years. Perhaps he was even thinking of the Belle Epoque. He relied on a few women for their opinions - collaborations - with him at his workshop where he designed. One of them was Mitzah Bricard who he ever called "Madame Bricard," never getting on first name basis with her. She is portrayed as icy cold emotionally and yet...

Excerpt page 123

Dior's entwinement with femininity as a condition of his selfhood as a designer and celebrity can be most clearly seen in his very close working relationship with women over the course of his career. Unlike Poiret or Schiaparelli, Dior was not heavily invested in the image of the designer as genius who both found inspiration for and executed his craft entirely alone. Dior's work contains many references to the process of dress design as collaborative, as 'passionate collective research.'

Excerpt page 125-126

It is perhaps Dior's descriptions of Mitzah Bicard that are most telling, even if they do not have the same quality of incorporation that his discussions of Mms, Raymonde and Marguerite, the other members of his exalted triumvirate of women, have.  Like the others, he characterizes Mme Bircard as collaborator. But her role is never clearly specified. She functioned as a kind of muse, and certainly she had been memorialized as such. Her collaboration appears, in all of his portrait of her, to simply be, embodying elegance outside of time: 'Mme Bricard is one of those people, increasingly rare, who make elegance their sole raison d'etre.  Gazing at life out of the windows of the Ritz, so to speak, she is superbly indifferent to such mundane concerns as politics, finance, or social change." In Talking about Fashion, he says, 'if times are hard, she will ignore them, and troubles leave her unmoved.' Notably, it is Mme Bricard who inspires Dior's ideas; she catalyzes the process of creation. 'Her moods, her extremes of behavior, her faults, her entrances, her late appearances, her theatricality, her mode of speech, her unorthodox manner of dress, her jewels, in short her presence, bring the touch of absolute elegance so necessary to the fashion house.

Unlike Dior's smooth and harmonious incorporation of Raymonde and Marguerite, the relationship with Mme Bricard is described as tempestuous. He writes, "I knew that her presence in my house would inspire me towards creation, as much by her reactions - and even her revolts - against my ideas, as by her agreements.' It is a curious formulation, since what Dior values in Mme Bricard is ostensibly the same quality that is understood to be key in his success; an essential, almost inherited, understanding of the grammar of chic as something timeless, removed from the vagaries of history.  And yet he describes himself as being inspired by a motto he attributes to her, one which he struggled to apply to himself: 'I will maintain." What he takes from her is her compulsion to tradition. It is a compulsion that does not come entirely naturally for him, even if that traditional orientation is the trait on which his celebrity is bu8ild,.  Through Mmm Bricard, he learns to 'maintain,' to steadfastly carry on the timeless French traditions of chick and couture despite the vagaries of history and commerce.  In simply being, she fills an educational role in Dior's life, temporarily reorienting him to tradition and to the French past.

***

And yet... there are many an image of her in which she is not posing in an aloof or haughty manner, but smiling with warmth or as an active participant.  So, she is not just around posing at all...

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All Rights Reserved including International and Internet Rights. 

A DOCUMENTARY FILM ABOUT CHRISTIAN DIOR - MITZAH BRICARD APPEARS

THE WORLD OF MONSIEUR DIOR IN HIS OWN WORDS from 1949.

At about 3:35 you'll see Mitzah helping dress a fit model.  Those teeny waitlines! Around 13:35 again Madame Bricard with his other "collaborators."  Voluminous skirts.  Femininity. 

DREAM A LITTLE DREAM OF ME : OZZIE NELSON

PRIVATE DINING ROOM

 

MITZAH BRICARD DRIPPING WITH RUBIES : AN ACCOUNT BY BILL CUNNINGHAM

Excerpt from Bill Cunningham's book Fashion Climbing

Page 198

Halfway through the Dior collection, Dior's Directress, Madame Bricard, entered. One of the three ladies who started with Dior sixteen years earlier and was now considered the dowager duchess of fashion, she was a raving beauty at the turn of the century, a very grand demimondaine whom kings, princes, and dukes, showered with jewels.  Madame made her appearance at the top of the grand stairway and magnetized my eyes for the rest of the collection, as this extraordinary woman, sparking with every conceivable device that forms the mystery of fashion, stood like a vision from one of the great French novels, the Madame Bovery of the 1960's  A tall baby-blue felt cone hat wrapped in yards of spidery black veil exposed marcelled black curls over each ear, which were hung with pearls and blood-red rubies from the hat edge. Over the right eye danged a brooch with a pearl the size of a nightingale's egg.  A pearl hatpin anchored the seductive veiling, which shadowed a face so preserved by the art of cosmetics, the yes lacquered and painted in silver fish streaks of green, dropped under the weight of inch-long lashes that served to shade the mystic sapphire blue of her eyes.  Everyone in the room was riveted to this fascinating woman, whose delicate mouth darted out like a lovebird.....

 CHECK ALSO GOOGLE BOOKS

http://thecoincidentaldandy.blogspot.com/2018/11/mitzah-bricard-christian-diors.html   Mitzah Bricard (whose birth-name was Germaine Louise Neustadtl),

MITZAH BRICARD : AT ONCE UNKNOWABLE and OPINIONATED : THE ONCE GRAND-HORIZONTAL and INSTINCTUAL FASHION MUSE of CHRISTIAN DIOR

Madame Mitza Bricard is one of these almost unknowable creatures. Mitzah Bricard had the strong reputation - deserved - as a fashion muse as well as owning the good jewelry collection of a woman who had been treated as a a treasure or gifted by the men who enjoyed her as a courtesan.Yet, if this is true, the name or names of the man or men who kept her or patronized her remain unknown.

She is most known as a muse to fashion designer Christian Dior, not that she was ever his mistress. Her presence and opinion were important in that design studio and have had lasting impact. The mistress's role as muse to her man is an important one too, so you see the connection I've made. Her taste and her very presence made her a woman who stood out.  Dior said she was a rare person who made elegance her reason for being.

Fond of wearing leopard coats and turbans or simply wiffs of printed cloth, 

Mitzah was even called Christian Dior's Leopardess. 

MITZAH BRICARD

Germaine Louise Neustadtl

1900 - 1977

Our Mistress of the Month, Mitzah Bricard, maintained a mysterious past that had her encountering those who would keep her in stand-out jewels such as her long array of pearls - jewelry which she continued to wear judiciously to accessorize.  From being a person who had the means to purchase, she evolved to be one of designer Christian Dior's salon muse - collaborators. Called one of the last 'grand-horizontals' by John Galliano, then designer for the House of Dior, in a 2017 article in Women's Wear Daily, she was also known for what she did not wear, knickers. It was said she walked around the salon, comfortable in her nakedness but for a wiff of leopard cloth. She was photographed by the elite photographers Louise Dahl-Wolf and Horst P. Horst, and Cecil Beato,  black and white portraits of a mature woman with great presence. Unafraid to speak her mind, she sometimes looked in as the designs were evolving, only to make a negative comment, and was also known for ranging moods. Mitzah had a background in millinery so Dior made her the head of that department and she was also known for wearing hats, along with the above mentioned leopard and pearls. 

Her background contains mystery. She was born maybe in Paris, maybe somewhere in Romania. Her mother was English but her father was Austrian but how did she get to Paris or meet the Romanian diplomat and did she ever live in Romania?  As for that name Mitzah, also spelled Mitza or Mizza, who knows where it came from or when; to me it sounds Jewish. She had a string of rich lovers but was it love or were they patrons? She first married a Romanian diplomat, Alexandro Biano (which sounds Italian). After his death, she married in 1941 to the uber-rich Hubert Bricard, president of B.L.B. Laboratories; this we are sure of.**  Prior to Dior, she is credited with having been a muse to English designer Edward Henry Molyneux, who had a salon that opened in 1919 in Paris, before World War II. Did this artist, fashion designer, and military officer, also give her jewels?

Christian Dior (1905-1957) lived to be only fifty-two, dying while on vacation in Italy after suffering a third heart attack. Madame Bricard was already a woman of a 'certain age' during her tenure at Dior, in her late forties and fifties, looking well preserved and quite beautiful and most of all elegant and feline.

In reading around Dior, whose legacy is lasting, I learned that this late-bloomer died about a decade or so into having his own business and label, after working for other designers in Paris.  Dior suddenly got attention in 1947. On board during those years were a number of women who are credited as being his collaborators including his sister, for whom the Miss Dior perfume was created. Mitzah is credited with naming it.  In more modern times, the House of Dior created a perfume in her memory named after her. Certain collections through the years have been inspired by her. The fall 2021 collection included a Mitzah jacket, a leopard print with a figure-shaping hug.

Known for going against the more functional but 'masculine' apparel worn by women during the World War II years, in which women stepped up to activities once owned by men, and creating a tiny waist- full skirt fashion that emphasized femininity, Dior was not at all opposed to having women's opinions. These women lived for fashion but also they worked at the salon actively throughout the process of creating a new garment. Mitzah is seen pining a dress to a fit model, at a quick lunch in the salon before they all get back to work, and appearing at small in-house fashion shows as staff, wearing her finest, as well as modeling for photographers, a busy woman. While Coco Chanel deplored the feminine look of Dior, those in his camp thought her fashion's androgynous. His women were considered to be "flowers."

Who was this man, Dior?  In a podcast I listened to on YouTube originating from the House of Dior, an interesting and beautifully stated mini-documentary, I learned that  Christian Dior believed in the occult - palm readings, astrology, psychics, fortune telling - intuitive women - and went for readings frequently. He sought guidance for his success.

Image of Madame Mitzah Bricard at work in millinery from BlogStudio 

BLOG STUDIO - CHRISTIAN DIOR many good images here.

The current Dior line of long, thin silk scarves includes an astrology pattern. Dior's emergence was on the last day of what was the 1947 Paris fashion shows, almost as if this was the plan for luck. He is said to have sewn lily flowers into the hems of garments because they were his favorite flower. 

We'll be learning more about Christian Dior and Madame Mitzah Bricard this month as I pull from a few books that describe their relationship, which is the best way to get to know a woman who became known, while keeping her mystery.

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** Although there is information on current companies with this name, I've not been able to clarify what the company her husband was president was about or if it still exists. I won't speculate as there are a few possibilities.

Research for this month's Mistress of the Month, Mitza Bricard,  includes the article, "The Formidable Women Behind the Legendary Christian Dior" by Lindsay Baker, which lead me to the book Poiret, Dior, and Schiaparelli by Ilya Parkins.  

As well as Bill Cunningham's book "Fashion Climbing."

And, we'll look at Dior's own memoir.

*** John Charles Galliano CBE, RDI is a British fashion designer who was the head designer of French fashion companies Givenchy, Christian Dior, and his own label John Galliano. At present, Galliano is the creative director of Paris-based fashion house Maison Margiela.  - citing Wikipedia.

Interested in modeling and fashion?  You might want to read :

SIMONE MICHELINE BODINE -  "BETTINA" - THE FIRST SUPERMODEL and MISTRESS OF ALY KHAN - A JET SET ERA MISTRESS  which appears in the June 2015 edition of Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot.