StephenClarke

From the 1860s-1890s, Charles Frederick Worth was a household name throughout the Western world (for those lucky enough to own a house). Dickens, Henry James, Zola wrote about him. Lawyers fought battles for people who had overspent in his Paris clothes shop. His custom-made dresses were in royal portraits, fashion magazines and even the dictionary. 

My new biography is the story of a Brit in Paris – and, very importantly, his frequently forgotten French wife – who began life as a child apprentice in a London draper's (textile shop) and became one of the richest men in France.

In the 19th century, women could not own businesses or even a bank account, but his wife, Marie, was key to this success story. She was also a child apprentice with a Parisian draper, and when she and Charles met, she immediately became his muse and model. While both of them were working in the same shop, she wore Charles's dresses (which they paid to have made up) to work, becoming the first-ever full-time fashion model. 

They persuaded their boss to open a dressmaking department in the textile shop (a revolutionary innovation at the time), then in 1858 left to set up their own business. It would probably have gone bankrupt if Marie had not gone out prospecting for custom with high-society ladies. She eventually found the client who would commission a dress and wear it to a ball at the imperial palace of Napoléon III and Eugénie, and from then their rise was meteoric.

In the 1860s Charles and Marie invented everything we recognize about fashion designers today: the first brand labels sewn into clothes, the first catwalk, the designer as creative genius dictating to women what they HAD to wear. The Worths even founded the organization that controls Paris Fashion Week to this day.

A fascinating rag-trade to riches story, set in its social context. The opportunities to be seized in Napoléon III's France; the powerlessness of women to open their own business; the poorly paid workers who sewed these fabulously expensive dresses together; the mixture of envy and machismo that drove some Frenchmen to hate Worth, the man who was allowed to see their wives and mistresses in their underwear.

Out April 24.