It was late in life, perhaps 1977, when I discovered this avatar, this shocking touchstone of enormous vision, endless taste, and shattering style: the Baroness Pauline de Rothschild. This experience changed my life and my entire approach to creativity as a designer and an artist. Pauline de Rothschild, Elsa Peretti, and Diana Vreeland are the three women who shaped my work for the rest of my life.
My study of Pauline began with American Vogue magazine, December 1963. The holiday issue was always an explosion of editor in chief Vreeland’s vision, as she was the Enchantress of Fashion Journalism. For this particular edition, she sent the photographer Horst P. Horst and his partner, Valentine Lawford, to the Château Mouton Rothschild to capture how Pauline and Baron Philippe lived in their private wonderland.
I think that every fashion designer, every interior designer, every man and woman of social position, and those in training, were bewitched by the sheer audacity of Pauline’s juxtaposition of objects, art, statuary, and her haute couture and jewels. It was an aesthetic explosion for a world that saw Pauline not as only a woman but also as a religion.
Vreeland knew that she was onto something big… big… big.
Then, she sent Horst and Lawford back for the Vogue March 1965 issue to photograph the baron and Pauline working late at night, putting together the museum in the basement of the château. It was the unique Musée du Vin dans l’Art—a display of rare goblets and other objects celebrating wine. Well, let’s just say that the photographs that Horst sent back went beyond even Vreeland’s expectations! The baroness planned and staged an opera for the senses: She had new couture made by Yves Saint Laurent and for the shoot donned a previous look from Cristóbal Balenciaga’s last collection.
“Overboard” is an understatement. An example: a steel-gray satin duchess coat lined in white ermine, with the black ermine tails falling from inside of the cuffs.
In the October 1966 Vogue, Vreeland included an excerpt from the book that Pauline had written about her travels with the baron in the Soviet Union, called The Irrational Voyage: Notes on Leningrad. What is essential to know is that, though it took two years to have her dismissed completely, this is the issue that eventually resulted in Vreeland’s being fired from Vogue. Why? She sent an entourage—a list of names too long to provide here—to the snow-covered mountains of northern Japan, where Richard Avedon captured the most magnificent display of furs—a staggering 24 pages showing what the pelts, and women draped in them, could be, but all too out of this world in both cost and wearability. (Vreeland saw no logic to this way of thinking.) It was the most expensive shoot in the history of American Vogue, and with this layout, Condé Nast honchos decided to can the artistry of Vreeland. But little did they know that she was just beginning her life as a legend.
Now, returning to the relationship between Mrs. Vreeland and Pauline, remember that Vreeland was always enamored with the baroness. Since she arrived in New York, Pauline was the head couture designer at Hattie Carnegie—and reportedly the highest-paid woman in fashion. Carnegie was a salon that provided clients access to all of the major houses in Paris, as well as the collections that Pauline made in New York. From what I have been told, Pauline’s collections were way over socialites’ heads, often in shades of Braque—eggplant and deep petrol green.
Which brings me to the bed. In June of 1969, Vreeland again sent Horst and Lawford to Paris, this time to photograph the baroness in her small one-bedroom apartment. Pauline and the baron maintained separate apartments in Paris and would see each other by appointment so that their relationship would maintain its sparkle and excitement. (Also, they both were rumored to have lovers; thus the marriage and living arrangements had great elegance and respect.) To say that it was an awakening in the world of interiors doesn’t begin to describe it. Only the great Lorenzo Mongiardino’s home for Elsa Peretti in Rome comes close to touching it.
Pauline’s apartment was the culmination, as the baron said, of everything that she had seen, studied, distilled, and manifested from her cultural evolution. This home became the touchstone for my personal selection and reference for my own life in terms of quality of furniture, objects, art, statuary, and fabric and of my deep association with everything chinoiserie.
The juxtaposition of furniture in space and negative space being as important as actual space—and at times more important than it—contribute to what is “Pauline.” For me, the most hypnotic element is her bed. The baroness designed the piece in the ’60s, and it was created by the great Parisian house Maison Jansen. The frame is made of dark-gray, almost charcoal steel, and the rings that hold it together are a dull gold vermeil. It has a very high canopy of 11 feet, and at each post connecting to the sides are vermeil pine-cone finials. The bed is larger than a California king, and it is a mystical world unto itself.
When I first became bewitched by the bed, I saw it as a microcosmic sphere within the universal macrocosm. This object was definitely not of this world—it is a space that one arrives to. I immediately knew that someday I would own it, because like other, yet few, things in life, you know that something is supposed to be in your life.
How did it find its way to me? Pauline became very ill with heart disease. She and the baron found a specialist in Santa Barbara. Her appointments were becoming too frequent, so they took a floor at the Biltmore Hotel. The baron wanted her dwellings to maintain the luxury and grandeur she naturally lived in, so he shipped her museum-quality furniture, art, and objects, and this magnificent bed. As Pauline grew more ill, she convinced the baron that he had to have a female companion—and Pauline found a very elegant, cultured, refined, and beautiful woman in Santa Barbara, who became the baron’s lover. In the mornings, Pauline would take beach walks, a picture of eccentricity in huge, bright satin duchess Balenciaga coats over matching capri pants and slippers. A vision of inspiration. She died one morning, in 1976, in the lobby of the Biltmore.
After her death, the baron gave his companion Pauline’s bed, a pair of simple blue-and-white espadrilles, and two blue-and-white porcelain bowls. Years later, this woman became a client of mine, and knowing my obsession, she left the bed to me in her will. Her daughter—a divine angel—facilitated the transport, and once the bed arrived in New York, it underwent a three-year rejuvenation. When it finally appeared in my home, it was as if all was correct, the way destiny had planned.
My aspirations are reinforced by the bed’s presence, and I am constantly in awe and humble adoration of the otherworldly entity known as the Baroness Pauline de Rothschild, a girl from Baltimore, whose first New York railroad apartment had gold-leaf ceilings executed by master decorator Billy Baldwin.
In 2001, fashion designer Ralph Rucci became the first American invited to show as part of the official haute couture calendar in Paris. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries, and he has been the subject of books and documentaries. Among his many awards is an honorary doctorate from the Fashion Institute of Technology.