A Bill For Haute Couture

The Domaine de Candé, one of my favourite chateaux, has recently acquired some photos and other ephemera connected to Wallis Simpson and Fern Lombard Bedaux. I particularly liked the bill now on display on Fern's desk. It comes from the fashion house Jean Patou, and she was buying dresses, scarves, belts, buckles, bracelets, pyjamas, perfume and suntan oil, for a total of what I think works out at about the equivalent today of €40 000.

Bill for fashion items from Jean Patou to Fern Lombard Bedaux, dated March 1932.

Fern was regularly listed in fashion magazines of the time as one of the most glamorous women in the world. She was the American wife of French businessman Charles Bedaux, living a life of elegance and sophistication at their home near Tours, the Chateau of Candé.

The brand Jean Patou is now owned by LVHM, and effectively defunct. Joy, the perfume Fern was buying, had been released by Jean Patou only a couple of years earlier, and despite the Depression, was marketed as 'the most expensive perfume in the world'. It was a tremendous success right from the start, being a heady blend of rose and jasmine that appealed to many people, and the allure of wearing such an expensive product was apparently irresistible amongst those still wealthy enough to afford it. The perfume was expensive because it was genuinely expensive to make, with a dozen roses and three thousand jasmine flowers needed for each millilitre of perfume.

Fern was also very much a part of the new trend setting sporty type of women, who liked to be tanned and wore the new knitted sportswear for comfort and freedom. Jean Patou had made his name as the designer of fast living French superstar tennis player Suzanne Lenglen's wardrobe, and Fern no doubt appreciated his remarkable ability to combine elegance with comfort. He was the first to create a scented suntanning oil, and this is undoubtedly what the '2 huiles @ 90FF' item is on her invoice.