- 1890 (MDCCCXC)
- 1976 (MCMLXXVI)
- American
- Mainbocher (Paris), Mainbocher (New York)
- •Wallis Simpson’s wedding dress (1937)
- •First American couturier in Paris
- •The strapless evening dress (1934)
- •WAVES uniform (WWII)
Mainbocher
The Chicago-born Vogue editor who became the first American couturier to open in Paris — and designed the most-photographed wedding dress of the twentieth century.
Main Rousseau Bocher was born in Chicago in 1890 to a German-American family. He studied voice in Munich, served in military intelligence in France during the First World War, and moved to Paris in 1919. He edited French Vogue from 1922 to 1929, then resigned to open his own couture house on the avenue George V in 1930. He was the first American couturier to open in Paris — a distinction the Chambre Syndicale confirmed formally in 1932.
The Wedding Dress
On 3 June 1937, at the Château de Candé in Monts, France, Wallis Simpson married the former King Edward VIII of England. The dress was Mainbocher: a simple floor-length column in a cool blue-grey silk crepe she called "Wallis Blue," with long sleeves, a fitted bodice, and no ornamentation. It was photographed by Cecil Beaton. The photograph circulated in 147 magazines within a year. Within the season, every major American department store was selling licensed "Wallis" copies.
I do not design dresses. I design for the women who will wear them. — Mainbocher
The Strapless Dress
Mainbocher's other durable contribution was the strapless evening dress, which he introduced in his 1934 collection — the first couturier to eliminate the shoulder strap from a formal evening silhouette. The convention persisted.
New York, and the War
He closed the Paris house in 1939 and reopened on East 57th Street in New York in 1940 — continuing to present couture through the war years, when Paris was silent. During the war he designed, pro bono, the WAVES uniform, the Red Cross uniform, and the Women's Marine Corps uniform. He continued in New York until his retirement in 1971.
He died in Munich in 1976, at 86. His archive is held at the Chicago History Museum, which mounted a retrospective in 2016.
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