Working Girl

My latest post for On Pins and Needles is, for the most part, a book review 

– a review of Ginette Spanier's It Isn't All Mink. I read the book on the subway, enjoying Spanier's humor, empathizing with her during the war years, and appreciating the insight she provided on life at the House of Balmain. While reading her life story, I laughed, I almost cried, and I learned a lot. And, as always, fellow subway riders found me a bit strange.

 Can you hear the music?

 There were too many interesting quotes to include in one post, so I thought I would include some of the other quotes here:

Thoughts on waking up:

I've always had some difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, and I found it refreshing to read Spanier's opinion about her morning routine. Note: Dinkie Mann was a fellow (very successful) sales associate who married Barney Baruch Jr., a wealthy American businessman.

“I learned a lot from Dinkie Mann, the most important of all being how to wake up in the morning. Throughout my whole career people have admired me for all the wrong things: my courage, my energy, my thoroughness, my giving up the boring social life which takes place in the daytime. For one thing only do I deserve admiration and respect – getting up in the morning; and when I say so, people shrug their shoulders and think I am trying to be funny. Getting up in the morning is a daily torture. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ they said when I started my job at Fortnum’s. ‘You’ll get used to it in three weeks.’ Why three weeks? Why not thirty years? It’s rather worse today than it was then. Only Dinkie understood and suggested a remedy. How did I come to work, she asked me? By tube, I answered. That was bad. I was to come by bus and get out at Hyde Park Corner and walk through the Green Park. Getting up was such an agony anyway that half an hour earlier made no difference. So every morning, come hell or high water, Dinkie met me at Hyde Park Corner and we walked through the park together and I was awake when I reached Piccadilly. Moreover, I got to love the park so much that even now on fine, misty mornings, I get a deep, almost painful nostalgia for it” (47 – 48).

Thoughts on banking (and making the most of what you have, even if you have very little):

“After my first week as a shopgirl, I had ten shillings left over from my pay. This was to be the basis of my fortune. I looked around for a bank with which to open an account. Sticking to my principle of 'luxury wherever possible,' I wanted the grandest I could find, the one with the most marble and gold, so that I should enjoy going there every week. I chose Barclays, 160 Piccadilly, and took them my ten shillings. As I handed the money over the counter I told them to take good care of it, adding that it probably did not mean a lot to them, but it meant a great deal to me. I’ve had no cause to regret my choice of bankers; they have always been perfectly sweet to me, not only when I put money in but even when I took rather too much out” (48).

Memories about World War II and brief moments of rebellion:

“Everyone talked in low, almost inaudible voices. There were no snatches of conversation to overhear in the street…No 'And he said, and I said, and he said, and I said,' which is part of street life, particularly in France” (81).

“Every now and then, of course, I couldn’t stand it, and I burst out and felt better. For example, one fourteenth of July, Bastille Day, we were with friends in a restaurant and we started quarrelling about the possibility of an English defeat, and my voice got louder and louder, and I was sure everyone was listening and I didn’t care. The B.B.C. had told us to wear red, white, and blue ribbons in our buttonholes to show Vichy we were not done yet, and a blond pro-Vichy young man suddenly asked me what my tricolor rosette meant. Exasperated, I shouted, 'The B.B.C. told me to.' (It was enough to send Paul-Emile to a concentration camp.) And when the excited feeling—the pride in what I had done—wore off, I worried myself sick.

“Another time I went slightly crazy and marked an enormous V sign and the Cross of Lorraine with my lipstick on the window screen of a German car” (81).

Thoughts on diligent and dedicated work at a job that inspires you:

“It is easy to imagine how I felt in the evenings. I got tired. I still do. The standing, the arguing, and the lack of air, to say nothing of the tension and the artificial light, took toll of my nervous system. They still do. I am on my feet eight hours a day, four in the morning and four in the afternoon. I quite often feel as if I had forgotten to breathe, because of the couture house atmosphere. If I try to open a window someone instantly closes it; and it is quite impossible to light a grand salon properly without strong arc lights” (186).

"I made bad mistakes. I was not tactful. I was violent, uncompromising. As I grew tired I became more violent. Nowadays, although I often get whipped up about my work, I lose my temper less often; I am, it seems to me, calmer and more dignified than is humanly possible! And in spite of all the difficulties I became very interested in, and very fond of, the human beings involved in couture. And I also, of course, enjoyed the constant drama. I might have drowned in the ocean of haute couture, but I did not. I had to swim. As I did so I learned" (187).

And as I read and as I write, so I learn.