The fan

In 1904 the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna of Russia purchased as a gift for her sister, Queen Alexandra, a fan composed of two-color gold, guilloché enamel, mother-of-pearl, gold sequins, silk, cabochon rubies, and rose diamonds from the House of Fabergé in Saint Petersburg. The Empress paid 325 rubles for it. At the published rates of exchange for January 1904, this was almost exactly the same as £13 7s (The Times, February 17, 1904, p. 13) or $64.25 (New York Times, January 3, 1904, p. 7). Today there are many online tools designed to calculate the equivalent of these prices in 2012, and all are based on formulas of varying degrees of complexity according to which essentially two sets of data—(a) prices (consumer goods, rent, stocks, bonds, gold, tariffs, etc.) and (b) earnings (salaries, wages, fees, charges, interest rates, etc.) are assembled and then indexed or adjusted in the light of annual inflation or depreciation, cyclical change, and a host of economic variables that obviously alter the value of money over time. Of these tools, and there are many, perhaps the most finely calibrated and reliable is the U.S. Department of Labor’s so-called Consumer Price Index, which is now nearly 100 years old. Between January 1913 and January 2012 this rose from 9.8 to 226.665, an aggregate increase of 2,212.9%. Upon that basis alone—and not taking into account any number of other factors that are uniquely applicable to the art of the eventailliste or fan-maker, or indeed the House of Fabergé, such as the economy of pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, the fluctuating exchange rate of the ruble to the pound sterling, the scarcity of specialist skills of enriching and decoration, the availability of tortoise-shell, fine lace-making, etc.—today’s price for the fan ought to be in the vicinity of £295 or $1,422. And this is where we strike our principal problem, because it does not take an economic historian to grasp that in the context of today’s luxury goods business, in which a pair of Christian Louboutin high-heeled shoes now retails at Barney’s in New York for $795, the price tag of £295 for the fan is peanuts. One can account for this anomaly in various ways, but a keener elucidation of the original £13 7s will always take us back to plotting its equivalents in other 1904 wages and salaries on the one hand and/or costs and prices on the other.

Accordingly, the sum of £13 7s was roughly 2.78% of the yearly earnings of a London barrister; 3.37% of a Harley Street physician’s; 6.47% of a Church of England clergyman’s; 7.84% of a middle-ranking army officer’s; a clerk in the civil service: 11.49%; a carpenter: 11.9%; a lady typist in the civil service: 16.87%; an unskilled male laborer 24.45%; a seasonal agricultural worker 27.77%, and a poor married woman who took in sewing as and when she could: 51.34%. These hard numbers are derived from the testimony of real people, and are set out in John Burnett’s fascinating A History of the Cost of Living in England from the Middle Ages to the 1960s, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, pp. 268–278, 298–301). Let us look a little more closely at the example of the London barrister. If we assume that a reasonably all-right London barrister now earns approximately £200,000 per annum (in many cases this is demonstrably conservative), it will be found that the CPI-adjusted price of £295 for the fan is only 0.1475% of his or her yearly earnings. On the other hand, if, as in 1904, the Dowager Empress’s fan today cost the equivalent of 2.78% of our barrister’s annual income, the price would be a great deal higher, approximately £5,560—so we are obliged to tear up the CPI. Incidentally, I would argue that this steeper sum is much nearer the mark because of the enormous increase in the price of gold and precious stones, and of the steady rise in the cost and scarcity of highly skilled artisanal labor—which we can assume is probably beyond the remit of the CPI. Thus the fan might easily now cost £20,000 or more. In any case tortoiseshell is critically endangered and permanently removed from the luxury goods menu, so the case is entirely academic. Indeed what was once a useful personal accessory has by historical slight of hand turned into a work of art, and thus migrated into a completely different market with its own completely different and rather more volatile criteria of value, but that is another story.

            Returning to the solid 1904 fan benchmark of 325 rubles and £13 7s, let us assemble a few more comparisons. That sum was in 1904 the same as 44 weeks’ rent for a three-room flat in an East London tenement; one sixteenth of the price of a brand new Humberette motor car; roughly a quarter of the price of a good-quality saddle, or a third of that of a gig or jinker harness; the cost of 76 bottles of whisky or 200 lbs. of loose tea or 229 lbs. of Danish butter or 427 lbs. of British (and not colonial) beef; a fraction less than two years’ supply of coal and firewood for a working-class family; 178 two-ounce flasks of mastic varnish; 97 yards of best quality, 27 inch-wide artists’ Spanish linen canvas; three evenings’ entertainment in the best private box at the Hippodrome; two-thirds of the cost of an exotic hothouse shower bouquet from one of the better Mayfair Court florists; 1,780 copies of The Times newspaper (one a day for four years and nine months); about a quarter of the price of a first class ticket from Southampton to Melbourne via the Cape of Good Hope and Natal aboard a Blue Anchor Line steamer; 0.13% of the value of the estate of Alfred Wiggs, an industrious London builder, which was granted probate on January 12, 1904. Even if you could locate and defend an equivalent of any one of these comparisons today (which is doubtful), you would assemble a wide range of theoretical prices for the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna’s fan that differ sharply from the CPI adjusted figure of £295, in other words a spectrum so wide as to be entirely useless. Note also that by their particularity these comparisons form a picture that is unique to 1904, and are bound to shuffle out of alignment in any other year. The quest for relative historical value is, in this sense, fruitless—tools or no tools. However, the exercise can be suggestive. Perhaps the most revealing point of comparison is the prices of food. Today at Waitrose online, for example, 76 bottles of Johnny Walker black label whisky cost £2,155; 200 lbs. of loose Twinings English breakfast tea £1,420; 229 lbs. of Danish butter £366.40, and 427 lbs. of British beef a staggering £11,951, although that is for rump steak at a high-end premium, so a more accurate figure ought to be considerably less than that, say £5,000 wholesale, or for lesser cuts. Therefore the best that we can say is that over the past 100 years the London fan to butter index has evolved in a relatively orderly manner, but that the fan to tea, fan to whisky, and, above all, the fan to beef indices have gone berzerk. All have outstripped the CPI by some considerable margin, which no doubt says something about the evolving cost of the most expensive food in the developed economies, but rather less about high-end fans. Such are the pleasures and frustrations experienced by the economic historian straying into the world of art, but more properly by the art historian or museum curator seeking in vain the aid of economic history in his quest for relative values. And now I must take out the rubbish.

Scarlet heels again

When a big chunk of your working life is spent immersed in the historical disciplines, occasionally you notice a collective blind spot in the culture of the present. Take, for example, the almost universally abused term aristocratic. A visitor from Mars might presume, based on current usage, that things aristocratic—everything from norms of behavior all the way down to particular quirks of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fashion such as scarlet heels—reflect nothing more particular than ostentation deriving from wealth. Indeed these days the term is often thrown around without regard to the more nuanced concept of high rank absolutely and exclusively defined by noble birth. A thrilling exception to this trend is the article by Meredith Blake about the present Countess of Carnarvon and Highclere Castle in today’s Paris Review Daily. The problem is actually an old one, and is brought forward in the article on aristocracy, n., in the Oxford English Dictionary, where the Greek etymology is telling: αριστος best + -κρατία rule, in other words “the government of a state by its best citizens.” The gradual drift from this ancient notion to “that form of government in which the chief power lies in the hands of those who are most distinguished by birth or fortune” is, in a sense, the history of Europe in the past two and a half millennia boiled down to a single sentence, and indeed its last three words form something of a précis of one of the the central tensions of the Age of Revolution. The O.E.D. goes on to define aristocracy more narrowly as “the class to which such a ruling body belongs, a patrician order; the collective body of those who form a privileged class with regard to the government of their country; the nobles. The term is popularly extended to include all those who by birth or fortune occupy a position distinctly above the rest of the community.” True, a little space is then reserved for “fig. …those who are superior in other respects,” and this appears to be the conceptual basket into which many drafters of labels and wall texts (among other writers) now choose to put most if not all their eggs, and that basket is more often than not labeled money. Yet prior to the last century money was not at all the same thing as fortune, which was far more likely to mean land, for centuries the reserve currency of aristocracy. So it goes.

As I mentioned some years ago, the truly aristocratic credentials of the scarlet heel seem to have congealed around the court of Louis XIV and his eighteenth-century successors; the specimen above belonged to Louis XVI in the splendid coronation portrait at Waddeston. It (the scarlet heel) therefore became a rather convenient target in the revolutionary years. For example, as its title suggests, the pamphlet Le Portefeuille d’un talon rouge; contenant des anecdotes galantes et secrètes de la cour de France (Paris: Impr. du comte de Paradès, l’an 178* [daté “de Versailles le 18 juin 1779,” but “envoyé au pilon sur l’ordre de Lenoir le 19 mai 1783”]) attacks the wallet, i.e. wealth, of the “red-heel,” meaning aristocrat, and thus provided a convenient pretext for a surprisingly vicious attack upon Queen Marie-Antoinette herself. Yet the scarlet heel has a far longer, more complicated, and even foggy history, morphing thence into the greyer areas of middling rank, social mobility, and decidedly non-aristocratic wealth. Various anecdotes about the origins of the habit swirl unhelpfully around the blogosphere, though the general suggestion that red or scarlet heels at different times denoted the claims of wealth, sometimes but not always distinct from the privileges of noble birth, is, I think, undeniably true. Now thanks to Christian Louboutin, we have scarlet soles, which though certainly plutocratic is most definitely not aristocratic. One need only glance at who ends up wearing them.

Drinking champagne from a lady's satin slipper

After A Brief History of the Smile and The Finger: A Handbook, lately published in New York by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I am not inclined to tackle any more body parts. Already I receive quite enough inquiries from colleagues who are sure I will know the answer to arcane queries about hands and feet.

Most recently, a young English graduate student who is very interested in the history of dance described to me an incident in which a party of balletomanes somehow got hold of the shoe of a prima ballerina, chopped it into little pieces, stirred them into a broth, and drank it—a kind of homage. This put me in mind of that extravagant custom that seems to have flourished in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth whereby raffish gents toasted some celebrated beauty with champagne drunk straight from her satin slipper. The excellent John Cooper had never heard of this practice, so I resolved to track it down for him.

The standard line appeared in a brief article signed by “The New Sub” and entitled “Where the Shoe Pinches,” in Judy: The London Serio-Comic Journal, July 21, 1906, p. 341:

In the age of gallantry, for which the present period is not remarkable, it was the custom to toast the mistress of one’s affections by drinking champage out of her white satin slipper; how many young men of the present day have a slipper amongst their valued collection of souvenirs? Not one of them; indeed, it is doubtful if they have souvenirs at all. Of course, it may have been a bit awkward for the lady, depriving her of her slipper, unless she provided herself with another pair, but those who indulge in poetical follies of this description never troubled their heads about practical matters. Nowadays we are too hopelessly dull and matter-of-fact for anything.

The New Sub seems to place this “age of gallantry” at some considerable distance from 1906, but a review by Ivor Brown of Charlot’s Revue at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London (“Bark and Bite,” The Saturday Review, September 27, 1924, p. 308) implies that drinking champagne from a lady’s slipper was not entirely un-topical, in other words an Offenbach-ish, Léhar-esque, Marlborough House baccaratty, Folies Bergère, Moulin Rouge, or at the very least Belle Epoque phenomenon, and, from the vantage point of the mid-1920s therefore, a sitting duck for the spiky wit of the brilliant young Noël Coward:

The chance thus to maul the ludicrous is supplied by the two chief librettists, Mr. Ronald Jeans and Mr. Noël Coward. These authors are usually more than flippant if less than philosophical…Mr. Coward, for instance, is at his liveliest in depicting a Parisian cabaret of 1890 with the polka as its high lavolt and a vintage English gentleman (Mr. Morris Harvey) drinking champagne from the slipper of La Flamme, a ravishing and freely proportioned charmer who sustains her ardour for the polka and English whiskerdom with much knowing application to the absinthe glass. This is nonsense de luxe. I need hardly say that Miss Maisie Gay coruscates as La Flamme, Mr. Harvey being an engaging moth to this prodigious candle.

More recent sources attribute the gesture to individuals such as H.R.H. Prince Henry of Prussia (a younger brother of the Kaiser, and rather less complicated with both arms in working order), who, when touring the United States in 1902, apparently expressed keen interest in visiting the demi-monde Everleigh Club at 2131 South Dearborn, Chicago, Ill., and was said to have drunk champagne from the slipper of one of the proprietors, the Misses Ada and Minna Lester, who lost it whilst dancing on a table. (Earlier the Lesters ran a modest but friendly bordello in Omaha, Nebr.)

However, identically the same incident was soon ascribed to H.I.H. the Grand Duke Boris of Russia, and instantly deplored by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who protested in the strongest possible terms by registered letter to President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt. The Grand Duke hotly denied ever having done such a thing on the grounds that he was a prince of the blood royal, and haughtily blamed gutter journalism. (See “That Naughty Boris,” The Camperdown Chronicle, Tuesday, November 18, 1902, p. 6, and “Boris the Badgered,” Tuesday, December 9, 1902, p. 6.) One senses the the thrum and sparkle of the Lesters’s overreaching public relations machinery—overreaching because before too long it got them raided by the police, and closed down.

Interestingly, the gesture eventually came to be associated with particular actresses such as Lillian Russell, also of Chicago—though rather satisfactorily the owner of the shoe now took the driver’s seat. According to “Beaucaire,” in her regular column “While Strolling Around Town” (Argus, Saturday, February 1, 1941, p. 14),

Back in Lillian Russell’s day, no actress possessed the real spirit of the theatre if she didn’t periodically dance on a supper table and drink champagne out of a slipper. But though I watched Elsa Stenning, the Australian actress [and soprano], who opens at His Majesty’s to-night in “The Vagabond King,” very closely at a party the other night, I didn’t notice her do either of these things. She seemed quite content to nibble nuts and ham sandwiches.

Though diminished, and transplanted to midtown Manhattan, the Lillian Russell tradition was still alive and kicking as recently as March 20, 1996, when Russell Baker remarked in the New York Times (p. 23):

After long absence from New York you notice things that full-time New Yorkers have quit seeing. Has it been widely observed, for instance, that the famously talky New York cabdriver is gone with the Trylon and Perisphere, the $1.50 second-balcony ticket for the best show on Broadway, Yankee Stadium crowds wearing fedoras and business suits, and old Delmonico’s [at Fifth Avenue and 44 Street], where men with diamond studs glittering on starched shirts may or may not have drunk champagne from Lillian Russell’s slipper?

Nowadays certain members of the international bondage and discipline set have taken up this curious scenario, noting with some excitement that the shoe-designer Christian Louboutin (top) “s’est associé à la marque de champagne Piper-Heidsieck pour remettre à la mode un «rituel» quelque peu fétichiste du monarque anglais Edouard VII dans les années 1900: boire le nectar pétillant dans les chaussons d’une danseuse juste après le ballet.”

However, by far the earliest and most intriguing clue I have yet located as to the origins of drinking champagne from a lady’s slipper is a throwaway remark tucked in the middle of a tedious and prudently unsigned review of Turquoisette, or, A Study in Blue, the first classical ballet ever conceived and produced in colonial Australia. Expensively choreographed by Rosalie Phillipini, and set to music by Léon Caron, the prolific composer of bad commemorative cantatas, Turquoisette was commissioned for Williamson and Musgrove’s Italian Grand Opera of Melbourne “as a plotless divertissement in one act.” The show augmented Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci and Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana during a brief but lively season at the Princess Theatre (Argus, Saturday, September 16, 1893, p. 10). According to the Argus’ critic:

The pas seul, pas de deux, pas de trois, and pas de quatre, which used to drive the exquisites of “Fops’ Alley” wild with excitement in the reign of William IV. [1765–1837], when champagne would be drunk out of a figurante’s white stain slipper, and a glove that had been worn by Fanny Eissler [the celebrated Austrian ballerina] was worth its weight in gold, have been superseded to a great extent by brilliant groupings, picuresque masses, a harmonious blending of the dominant note of colour, supple and simultaneous maneuvres of a hundred flexile figures in sumptuous costumes, rapid changes of position, producing the effect of a bed of gorgeous tulips swaying hither and thither as the wind stirs them, and brightening and darkening under alternate sunshine and shadow.

“Fops’ Alley,” incidentally, was the comparatively wide space between the edge of the orchestra pit and the first row of stalls in which during the entr’acte “exquisites,” “mashers,” and other dandies ogled young ladies in the boxes, and puffily drew to themselves as much public attention as possible. If the part about the reign of King William IV is true, then blame for the unsavory and stubbornly durable habit of quaffing perfectly good champagne from a grubby, smelly, lukewarm old shoe may safely be laid at the feet of Queen Victoria’s awful Hanoverian uncles, or at least their regimental mess-room pals.