Behind the arras: Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
DVD cover (from Sweden) of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, Focus Features, 2022. Image source: Kvarnvideo
Business as usual
With the ever-growing attention paid to the Met Gala, and the Met's current "Costume Art" exhibit showcased in its prominent new Condé M. Nast Galleries, it seems that fashion is having (yet another) cultural moment.
In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, art critic Jed Perl seems disconcerted by the apparent corporate takeover of the first exhibition space encountered by visitors to the Met. He writes,
What’s troubling isn’t that there are fashion exhibitions at the Met. What’s troubling is that there is reason to believe that the fashion industry has bought what amounts to prime real estate at the Met—and bought it for the foreseeable future. . .Named galleries are nothing new in museums, but naming the galleries devoted to fashion for Condé M. Nast, a publisher instrumental in the development of the fashion industry, is anything but disinterested. . .The cost of the galleries, estimated at something like $50 million, was covered by companies and individuals, all or nearly all of whom have ties to fashion. [1]
Perl gives as an additional example of the influence of the fashion industry on curatorial decisions the designer Thom Browne, current chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Browne donated sufficient money to the building of the fashion galleries that one of them is named after him; he also has at least three pieces in the "Costume Art" show that is inaugurating the galleries. Perl asks, "But didn’t anybody worry about the impression of a quid pro quo? When it comes to fashion, does the Met regard this as business as usual?"
The short answer is yes. The Met has a long history of financial connections to the fashion industry, which has played a huge and determinative role in how fashion is collected and depicted at the Met.
In 1946 Dorothy Shaver, president of the department store Lord & Taylor, was instrumental in raising money from garment manufacturers and other fashion-associated businesses to establish the Costume Institute at the Met.
"What is the American Look? It is made of many things: Dorothy Shaver (standing) discusses with artist Dorothy Hood and Art Director Rodman virtues and flaws of girls applying as American Look models." Life, 21 May 1945, p. 88. Photo credit: Nina Leen. Image source: Internet Archive
Two years later, fashion industry publicist Eleanor Lambert organized the first Met Gala as a benefit for the Costume Institute. Lambert was already an influential tastemaker in art and fashion, and her sponsorship of the Gala ensured its continuing success.
Eleanor Lambert in a James Galanos floral evening gown, ca. 1952–53. Image source: The Bend Bulletin
Although the Costume Institute became a curatorial department of the Met in 1959, the powerful influence of the fashion industry continued. In 1972 Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Harper's Bazaar who had just been fired after a decade as editor-in-chief of Vogue, became a "special consultant" to the Costume Institute. She organized its annual exhibitions into the late 1980s. It was Vreeland who introduced the idea of annual themes for the Costume Institute exhibits and their associated Galas.
Diana Vreeland, ca. late 1970s. Image source: Mercht
In 1995, the then-current editor-in-chief of Vogue, Anna Wintour, became the chair of the Met Gala, a position she holds to this day. Vogue was and is the flagship publication of Condé Nast. In recognition of her fundraising for the Costume Institute, in 2014 the wing of the Met housing the Institute was renamed the Anna Wintour Costume Center. Wintour continued as editor-in-chief of Vogue until 2025, when she became Global Chief Content Officer and Artistic Director of Condé Nast. Now Condé Nast has funded the Met galleries in which the Anna Wintour Costume Center's collection will be exhibited. All very cosy and circular.
Clarissa Alcock, Anna Wintour, and Annette Reed at the 1995 Met Gala. Photo credit: Nick Haddow. Image source: Yahoo News UK
Fashion and sustainability
It's ironic that fashion is attaining unprecedented cultural influence at a moment when we are facing a global sustainability crisis. The core business model of the fashion industry is, of course, anti-sustainability: convincing us that the clothes we wore just last year are shamefully out of date and need to be replaced.
The fashion industry is not only predicated on planned obsolescence, but as designer Natsai Audrey Chieza has noted,
. . .the textile industry is one of the most polluting in the world [second only to the petroleum industry, according to some accounts]. Most of the ecological harm caused by textile processing occurs at the finishing and the dyeing stage. Processing textiles requires huge amounts of water. And since the oil age completely transformed the textile industry, many of the materials and the chemicals used to process them are petroleum based. And so coupled with our insatiable appetite for fast fashion, a huge amount of textile waste [in the US, roughly 85 percent] is ending up in landfill every year because it remains notoriously difficult to recycle.
The fashion industry has also outsourced the manufacture of its products to low-wage countries with few worker protections and lax environmental regulations. The finished clothes then are shipped around the world to the points of purchase, creating supply-chain emissions and waste.
The fashion industry's exploitative practices are not limited to the manufacture of its products, of course, but also feature explicitly in their promotion, in which profits are generated by portraying the bodies and fostering the insecurities of young women. In model Cameron Russell's widely viewed TED talk, she says that while half of 13-year-old girls in the United States express dissatisfaction with their bodies, by the time they are 17 that figure rises to nearly 80 percent. Her talk was given in 2012, just after the founding of Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, and four years before the appearance of TikTok. A recent study has stated that among young women, "intensity of social media use has been shown to be associated with poorer psychological well-being, including more negative body image" [2].
Haute couture portrays itself as standing outside of this system; its designs are often one-of-a-kind, custom-sewn and -fitted creations. However, high-end fashion houses and the conglomerates that own them generally also produce ready-to-wear clothing. The haute couture collections can be seen as reputation-building loss leaders that promote more profitable ready-to-wear lines. High fashion has gone mainstream.
Which brings us to the subject of today's post:
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022) features E&I favorite Lesley Manville as Ada Harris, a charwoman in 1950s London. One day Mrs. Harris sees a Christian Dior gown in the closet of one of her employers, and is overwhelmed by the beauty of its design and the fineness of its materials and construction. It is unlike any dress that she has ever seen up close before, and she yearns to be able to wear one like it.
Lesley Manville as the title character in Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. Image source: Focus Features
With her war widow's pension and her life savings (multiplied by what turns out to be a fortunate bet), she travels to Paris to obtain an evening gown from the source: the Dior atelier.
She quickly learns from snooty atelier manager Madame Colbert (Isabelle Huppert) that Dior serves an exclusive clientele that does not include charwomen. However, Mrs. Harris is rescued by one of those clients, the Marquis de Chassagne (Lambert Wilson), who invites her to the presentation of the new collection as his guest. [3]
The Dior atelier is in some financial difficulties due to the habitually belated payments of their rich clientele, and Mrs. Harris's ready cash convinces Dior to accept her as a customer. Mrs. Harris desires a red dress called "Temptation," but it is claimed by a regular client, and so she selects an alternate dress in green—still very beautiful, but not the one she most wished for. Although at first she is treated with condescension and hostility by Madame Colbert, she ultimately wins over the staff, acts as matchmaker to a shy couple among them, and points the atelier to a way out of its financial bind by expanding its customer base. It is a lovely and sentimental story in which every catastrophe ultimately leads to a better outcome, and good will and solidarity win out over divisions of class and circumstance. Lesley Manville gives a delightful performance in the title role, and we enjoyed the movie very much.
Behind the arras
In reality, Christian Dior was bankrolled by one of the wealthiest textile manufacturers in France. The house, founded in late 1946, offered its "Corolla" collection just a few months later. The collection, which featured a tailored look on the upper body and narrow waists paired with full skirts, was referred by Harper's Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow as "The New Look." It was a decisive repudiation of wartime austerity, featuring luxurious fabrics and, for the skirts, shocking amounts of expensive yardage, and it made Dior instantly famous.
Dior's New Look, Spring-Summer 1947. Image source: Dior.com
The house quickly added added an accessories shop selling Dior-designed hats, scarves, handbags, jewellery and other accessories; later perfume and shoes were added. By 1949 Dior had opened a second store in Manhattan, and by 1950 according to one estimate accounted for 5% of France's entire export revenue. [4] So the house did not need Mrs. Harris's advice to improve its financial position; it was dominant almost from the first.
All this is not to say that everyone (and not just the wealthiest people in consumer economies) should not have beautiful, well-made, durable clothing. But in making fashion a mass-cultural obsession, the fashion industry—as so eloquently described by Cameron Russell in an interview with TED Radio Hour's Manoush Zomorodi—has instead developed a global system of gendered exploitation for its own profit.
It's a system that frequently has damaging consequences for those caught in it, as in the notorious sexual exploitation of young women in the modelling industry. The consequences can also be deadly: in 2013 a nine-story building near Dhaka, Bangladesh that contained five garment factories collapsed, killing over 1100 workers and injuring more than twice that number, mostly women. A report by Adiba Afros and Sifat E Nur Khanam published in The Daily Star (Dhaka) on 18 April 2026 and headlined "Rana Plaza, 13 years on: No justice, no memory," points out that "after 13 years, there has been little movement on accountability—not a single court has yet delivered a final judgment [against those responsible]. While humanitarian aid was provided, no compensation has been paid [to victims or their families] for the most devastating catastrophe in the history of the global fashion industry."
"Rescuers and volunteers navigate the catastrophic ruins of the Rana Plaza building in Savar following its collapse on April 24, 2013." Image source: The Daily Star (Dhaka, Bangladesh)
Among the brands for which the factories produced clothing were luxury retailer El Corte Inglés, Benetton, Mango, and The Children's Place.
But the fashion industry tries to mask the suffering involved in the manufacture and distribution of its products. And the presentation of its designs in the Met's Condé M. Nast Galleries, which (in Jed Perl's words) "have the pale gray walls and crisp architectural details of a Madison Avenue boutique," is a key element of this campaign. As Perl concludes, the Met has allowed itself to become "an infomercial for the fashion industry."
- Jed Perl, "Fashion Forward: Why has the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold prime gallery space to the fashion industry?" New York Review of Books, 23 July 2026. [subscription required]
- Jaehee Jung, David Barron, Young-A Lee, Viren Swami. 2022. "Social media usage and body image: Examining the mediating roles of internalization of appearance ideals and social comparisons in young women." Computers in Human Behavior 135: 107357. Figshare.com
- The film is a remake of Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, a 1992 CBS-TV movie of Paul Gallico's 1958 novel of the same title. In the role of the charwoman Ada Harris, the 1992 version offered Angela Lansbury, with Diana Rigg as Madame Colbert and Omar Sharif as the Marquis.
- Leah McGrath Goodman, "A Surprisingly Modern Take on America From a Long-Dead Frenchman," Newsweek, 21 January 2015.
