From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In March 2023, there were unusual goings-on in a first-floor gallery on Dover Street in London. Instead of displaying the Indian miniatures, drawings and textiles in which she has been dealing since 1992, Francesca Galloway was presiding over a fashion shoot. The models wearing examples of haute couture from across the 20th century were mannequins; the clothes were Galloway’s own. Dresses, coats, shoes, hats and turbans by some of fashion’s most famous names were on a mini-break from their usual home – climate-controlled storage in south London – to be photographed for a book called An Eye for Couture: A Collector’s Exploration of 20th Century Fashion, which has just been published by Prestel.
Galloway had been approached to do a book about her collection and also had a decision to make about her business: ‘Our lease for the gallery came to end, so either I was going to have to get a new lease, or leave.’ Once she had made the decision to leave, it was her friend, the graphic designer Misha Anikst (and designer of An Eye for Couture) who suggested that the photography take place in the huge gallery space while she still had it. Galloway generously credits Christine Ramphal, a textiles and fashion expert who managed the gallery and now works as an independent art consultant, as ‘the mastermind’ of the project. The photographs were taken by Katrina Lawson Johnston, who has created images that fall somewhere between fashion photography and still life. But although the mannequins are immobile, the clothes they are wearing have movement – or seem to on the page – thanks to the efforts of Galloway’s niece Mary, an actor, who came up with gestures and poses for the mannequins to adopt, and of the fashion conservator and dresser Sarah Glenn, who mounted the clothes on the forms.
I am meeting Galloway and Ramphal in the Holland Park flat where Galloway lives and where she now also runs her dealership. If elegance consists of seeming comfortable and at ease in what one is wearing, Galloway is just that. As we speak, I find it hard not to be distracted by a sleek Jack Russell called Rex; he is also rather elegant – but he is also only a year and a half old and determined to destroy a chew toy.
Collecting couture that can’t be worn may seem like a curious activity to some, but it’s clear that being, as Galloway puts it, ‘into clothes’ has been an important part of her life. Her professional involvement with clothes predates her first job working with Indian art and her personal interest may have got her that first job.
When Galloway was 19, she went to work for Valentino in Rome. She says that her spoken Italian wasn’t good enough – but English secretaries tended not to make it to the three-month mark at which Italian labour laws kicked in anyway, and she was no exception. After a spell at Christie’s, also in Rome, she interviewed for a job in the Indian and South East Asian department at Spink & Son in London (or ‘Spink’s’ as she calls it) and was vetted by the director, Anthony Gardner, and the then-head of the Indian department, Adrian Maynard. Afterwards, they told her that she was hired ‘because they were wowed by what I wore’. Galloway says that she was wearing a black silk suit that she’d had made in Rome, and that it had a flower made of the same fabric. But she must also have come across as single-minded. ‘I’d said to them very clearly at the interview: “I know you’re taking me on as a secretary, but I want to be a dealer; what are you going to offer me?”’ The answer, once she’d been taken on, was some Indian miniatures that hadn’t sold in an exhibition: ‘If you can sell them, they can become your thing.’ She could, and they did. Spink’s was more interested in dealing in stone and bronze sculpture, so miniatures were something Galloway could really make her own.
But while she was at Spink’s, she also set up a textile department. This had the support of Gardner, who collected textiles himself, but when she later set up the couture department, in the mid 1980s, ‘not everybody was happy to see clothes in Spink’s window’. One exception was Azzedine Alaïa, who saw an early ’50s Dior outfit in the window and decided that he wanted to buy it, but it was on a Sunday so he was unhappy (‘ballistic’, Galloway says), because there was nobody there to sell it to him. The couture business began with a consignment of Fortuny, but Galloway also remembers seeing an exhibition of Balenciaga around the same time and thinking, ‘this isn’t just fashion, this isn’t just clothes; it’s a decorative art, it’s more than fashion’. This was a period when the women who had been able to buy couture and treasured it enough to have kept it long after they were able to wear it, or it was possible to wear such clothes, either needed money, were downsizing, or were dying. For Spink’s, for example, Galloway bought all the ’50s Dior dresses that belonged to Madame Worms (1923–2006), a woman of letters married to an industrialist, who had only paintings by Dubuffet on the walls and wore only Dior.
The provenance of sculptures from India, Thailand and Cambodia was already a problem in the 1970s (the late, disgraced dealer and collector Douglas Latchford was, she says, ‘such a shark’), but when Galloway left Spink & Son to set up on her own in 1992, fakes were still considered more of a problem – and she felt that she wasn’t knowledgeable enough to know for sure. She was, however, a keen student of Robert Skelton, the immensely knowledgeable curator of Indian art at the V&A, whom she describes as ‘my guru’. As well as helping Galloway and many others train their eye when it came to miniature painting of the 13th to 19th centuries, Skelton could also be of great practical help, putting her in touch with people who had works to sell. (‘He didn’t have to do that.’) She remembers him telling her, after spotting something in a French auction, ‘“Francesca, I think you should go and have a look at that, because that could be good for the Met.” So he was a big sweetheart.’
Galloway bought Spink’s out of its small couture collection when she left – a year before Christie’s bought the venerable auction house. ‘I didn’t want it just to be dumped at auction again,’ she says, describing the decision as ‘quite emotional’. Although she did continue dealing in couture for a while, she decided to concentrate on Indian miniatures, as she had done before. The early ’90s was an exciting time in the field: ‘There were very good collections coming to the market, and I was getting them.’ Managing couture clients, on the other hand, was ‘an awful lot of work’ for what sounds like not very much money. So Galloway decided ‘to just collect it, and to collect it when I had the money’.
For someone who describes herself as shy, Galloway is an excellent storyteller. She asks me at one point if she’s being boring, which no one boring ever would. She is clearly no pushover, either, which, combined with her friendly manner, somehow makes her seem more formidable – in the nicest possible way – than not. Of her decision to leave Spink’s, she says, ‘I thought, if I’m unsatisfied, there’s no point complaining, just go and start something yourself.’
Limited funds at the beginning, combined with the nature of what Galloway took over from Spink’s, shaped the collection in interesting ways. The book is a selected overview, not a catalogue raisonné; nor is the collection trying to tell a complete history of haute couture. When I ask where Galloway thinks her impulse to collect clothes began, she goes back to Balenciaga. She’s not sure if it’s the first piece of couture she bought – to wear that is – but ‘a black, gauze Balenciaga from the mid ’50s, extremely plain, simple, but it had an underslip, which was its structure, and then the dress itself just fell over this structure, so it was extremely light and very beautiful, and quite simple’. When it comes to her own personal style, Galloway describes what she bought for herself as ‘terribly understated’. The dress she has just mentioned isn’t in the book, but we can see an unfussy white Balenciaga coat ‘that came from Tina Chow’ (the American model and jewellery designer).
The book may not be comprehensive, but it lives up to its subtitle of ‘exploration’. Galloway seems to be drawn to the innovators of 20th-century couture or, perhaps more accurately, that is the line that Christine Ramphal and Mary Galloway, whom she had choose what was included – ‘they’re stricter than me’ – have followed. There is particularly good representation for Paul Poiret, the couturier who not only loosened silhouettes, lowered waists and liberated women from corsets (even if he wasn’t, as he claimed, the first to do so), but also invented modern fashion marketing, putting out a perfume line and taking his models (living mannequins) on tour to publicise his clothes. The survival of Poiret’s work and its documentation after the failure of his business in 1929 and subsequent liquidation owes a huge debt to his wife Denise. The couple divorced in 1928, with Denise taking ‘trunks and trunks and trunks of dresses’, with Paul’s consent. Her careful conservation of what she had taken – and her extreme longevity (she died in 1982) – made it possible for curators to rediscover the clothes in bulk in the 1970s. The orientalism of many of Paul Poiret’s creations can be seen in the context of the success of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which did for the body on stage what the couturier could do, albeit much more modestly, for his clients in real life. Ramphal points out a photograph she has sourced of Denise wearing the silver brocade and lamé ‘Persane’ evening dress and turban at the nightclub opened by Poiret after the First World War (it was called ‘Oasis’, for anyone with an orientalism bingo card to complete).
‘Sérail’ or ‘Persane’ evening dress and turban by Paul Poiret from Spring/Summer 1923. Previously owned by Denise Poiret. Photo: © Katrina Lawson Johnston
Galloway is inevitably drawn to garments that refer to Indian textiles (‘I don’t even think about it,’ she says), but knows what she does and doesn’t like. Balenciaga’s sari-dress, for instance, has never appealed, while Poiret’s ‘Lure’ dress of 1924 clearly has. Galloway says that she feels ‘dreadful’ about the outfit as it appears in the book. ‘Lure’ consists of a silk-crêpe length (of fabric woven in France) wound around a gold lamé column like the untied end of a sari. For Galloway, the winding of the cloth around the ‘body’ of the mannequin is a little awkward and also, (‘but I shouldn’t tell you this’), she thinks that Denise cut the end of the cloth to stop it getting in her way.
Galloway also owns a silk knitted dress and a satin and crêpe evening dress, both by Jean Patou, that belonged to Niloufer, an Ottoman princess who grew up in France and married a son of the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1931, when she was only 15. Niloufer bought a lot of couture, even after her divorce in 1952, with designers such as Lanvin and Griffe making her saris, as well as European clothes. The Indian connection is purely incidental, this time. Galloway bought the dresses at auction because she thought they were ‘fab’, but couldn’t get more because Niloufer ‘had a very interesting taste in European couture and I do remember all sorts of museums buying’.
Evening dress made of knitted cotton mesh and metal washers from Autumn/Winter 1936 by Paco Rabanne. Previously owned by the singer Béatrice Arnac. Photo: © Katrina Lawson Johnston
Another important strand in the book and in the collection is the space-age design and unorthodox materials of Paco Rabanne, Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges. A stand-out piece is a full-length, figure-hugging Paco Rabanne evening dress of 1967/68 made of commercially available metal washers knitted together. As Galloway says, ‘it’s a fantastic piece to make an entrance, and it’s very heavy’.
While she regards those French designers of the 1960s as ‘revolutionaries’, Galloway deflects any suggestion that she might be unusual for being a successful woman in what is still a very male field. Her own choice of clothes when she started out might tell another story: ‘Armani, aged 25, is what I wore […] I was desperate to make people respect me in my career, so I dressed to impress (or whatever the word is). I don’t see myself as a woman, I just see myself as a dealer.’
The book may be done, but the collection is still growing. When we meet, Galloway has her eye on a pair of shoes in an auction, but doesn’t want to tempt fate by telling me what they are. A few days later, I email to ask if she managed to get them. ‘Yes, we did!’ she replies almost immediately. ‘Thigh length white patent leather boots by Cardin from the late 1960s!’ She is definitely a collector, too.
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.