D'NA collects: Swans—Legends of the Jet Set Society (Assouline)

 

A gentleman leaves the Deauville summer house of a good friend at 4 in the morning. He returns later that evening, only to find his friend had been riding, played a spot of tennis, flown to England to watch one of his horses run, flown back and returned with a few girls to play a game of bridge. This man was Prince Aly Khan, and his friend Jean Fayard: welcome to the world of the Jet Set, where names matter less than titles do if you are on the inside. According to former Sotheby’s director, John Bowes-Lyons, this was a small group of a few hundred people “who saw each other, dined with each other, and stayed with each other, entirely, all the time.” Nicholas Faulkes introduces us to a dazzling cultural landscape of excess so vast, he does his best to convince us juicy vignettes such as this are barely skimming the surface.

 

Swans: Legends of the Jet Society’ examines this world with a droll sense of humour, exploring key players in cultivating the scene, such as Stavros Niachros and Aristotle Onassis, Gianni Agnelli, Prince Alfonso von Hoenlohe-Langenberg. It seems fitting that this era of self-aggrandizement would be born out from the period of insecurity that came between the two world wars, where the race to beat German fighter planes led to the technological advances in jet-propelled aircrafts. It was not until 1949 that the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) offered the world’s first commercial jet flight from London to Tripoli and back, at a record of 2,980 miles in six hours and 38 minutes. Next came the first Trans-Atlantic flight from London, England to Idlewild, New York a few years on in 1952. By 1958, Pan-American World Airways had caught up with the launch of the Boeing 777, offering round-trip flights from New York to Paris. These would become the popular destinations that would trump a London still in the throes of post-war rations and economic depression well into the fifties. In a world where people still lived in the city where they were born, spoke with their own language and ate their own food, the cultural shift was seismic. That same year in January, the Harper’s Bazaar cover hails 1958 the “Year of the Jet Set”, featuring an editorial which required staff stopping over in the greatest cities of the world and taking note of the fashion. Diana Vreeland recalled:

“The most haunting impression of all the trip was the this sense of a world not only contracted in space but in time. Everywhere. The eye commutes- from past to future and back again- with bewildering speed.”

Mining the history of this past, where Foulkes excels is in the cinematic images he recreates: there are vivid descriptions of parties, palatial estates, and panoramic vistas that would not seem out of place in an Evelyn Waugh novel. Stavros Niachros and friends insisting on entering their estate grounds by jumping out of a their helicopter and into the pool, fully clothed; Baron Henri Thyssen and Nina Dyer eloping to Paris to live in a hotel suite for a year with a hoarde of dogs and a panther; Grace Kelly agreeing to a publicity trip to Monaco between shoots of To Catch a Thief, not yet a fashionable summer destination. These are the kinds of hyper slices of high society life which appeal to the archetypes we know today: dappled sunlight on a clear sea and deeply tanned athletic couples sailing in white, surely what Madison Avenue executives dreamt of at night when conceiving campaigns for Ralph Lauren, Lacoste , or Lily Pullitzer. In fact, the effect of the anecdotal story-telling is so seductive that the line between fact and fantasy begins to blur, and it becomes exciting to consider how many fictional constructs that are part of popular culture which could have emerged from the very social milieus Foulkes describes. For example, Ian Fleming’s world of James Bond and Thunderball is populated by well-dressed tastemakers in exotic climes who could easily emulate real life cads Baby Pignatari and Porfirio Rubirosa. Elsa Maxwell claimed to have invented Côte D’Azur as a summer destination, where it was virtually unheard of until Cole Porter and his wife summered at the Château de la Garope in 1921. It would be remiss not to imagine the stories pruned for the plots of F. Scott Fitzgerald, where among the summer murders and the spoils of moral ruin, you may be surprised to find among the guests at the Château that year were the couple Sara and Gerald Murphy, the real-life protagonists of Tender Is the Night. Or as it happens, amongst the sheer volume of scandalous revelations, you may not be surprised at all. In any case, infamy is the name of the game. The very title of the book ‘Swans’ refers to Truman Capote’s meditation on style icons such as Jackie Onassis, Slim Keith or Marella Agnelli, which emerges as an argument on the cultivation of taste as beauty. He posits that a young woman in her twenties is worthy of attention, but worthy of his admiration are these women of a certain age who enhance their natural gifts with the patience of ‘an artist whose sole creation is her perishable self’. What is interesting is Capote’s observation places the style aficionado as the artisan of their own legacy, where, if we consider Diana Vreeland’s remark that the pace of jet-setting contracted both space and time, and allowed the eye to travel, then it makes sense this heightened awareness of the world should translate into a heightened awareness of oneself. This after all was the dawn of the age of the papparazzo (coined in Fellini film La Dolce Vita in 1960) when legendary gossip columinists such as Elsa Maxwell and Igor “Ghighi” Cassini curried favour within high society by writing about them, showing the Jet Set were already turning that sharp eye inward on themselves.

Inevitably, the launch of the jumbo jet and the reality of air travel we know it today would kill of this clandestine culture in the early seventies. Yet if there is one key difference that separated those societies which Foulkes refers to as the Gilded Age and the Jet Set era and engineered for one its early demise, it is the lack of self-awareness between those Europeans still rooted in old world aristocracy and the more progressive guard of New World capitalists. There is a captivating passage about The Windsors, an old name for an old era, who still sailed their ship The Queen Mary twice a year for their vacations. As he tells it, despite their visiting the ‘right’ destinations in France, they spoke no French, so they did not host the most interesting people. The capital Paris still had its standing as the height of fine art, fine food and couture, but travel had begun to broaden the horizons of the social elite. Their lack of interest in keeping up with changing fashions and reverence for tradition were seen as démodé, when picking up new tastes while abroad was becoming like learning a new tongue. It was a new language of expression and in this sense, the relics of the Fricks, Carnergies, Vanderbilts, Gettys, Rockefellers with their Old Masters paintings had become too remote. Those in the know spoke in short-hand: they still shopped in Paris, but they also went to ski in St. Moritz, eat at Maxim’s and invest in Gaugins, Cezannes or Van Gogh pieces for their homes. Reading ‘Swans’ in 2015, this is a comforting reminder our global culture is not so remote from that of the Jet Set: our cultural short-hand may be different, but the past is no longer a foreign country.

By Hadeel Eltayeb

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Originally published here