Vogue compared the little black dress to a Ford
Black was the colour of mourning. A woman in black in 1920s Paris was either bereaved, a servant or a shopgirl, and it was not what you wore to dinner. When CHANEL published a simple black crêpe dress in 1926, the point was that it had no decoration to date it and no colour to argue with.
American Vogue ran it with a comparison to the Ford Model T — a garment that would become a sort of uniform for all women of taste. The comparison was meant admiringly and was also exactly right: the design's whole argument was mass production and sameness, at a moment when couture sold the opposite.
The trench coat is from the trenches
Thomas BURBERRY invented gabardine in 1879 — a tightly woven cotton, waterproofed as yarn before weaving rather than coated with rubber afterwards, so it kept the rain out while still breathing. Explorers took it first. Amundsen wore Burberry gabardine to the South Pole in 1911 and left a gabardine tent there for Scott to find.
Then came the First World War, and officers bought a shortened version privately because the army coat was wool and useless in mud. Every detail people now think decorative was equipment: the shoulder straps held rank insignia, the D-rings carried kit, the storm flap kept water off a shoulder holster, and the deep back vent let you ride in it. It came home with the officers and simply stayed.
A flat trunk, and the first anti-counterfeit pattern
Louis VUITTON started as a teenage apprentice packing cases for wealthy travellers, which meant he understood the problem before he solved it. Trunks had domed lids to shed rainwater, which made them impossible to stack. In 1858 he made a flat-topped trunk in waterproofed canvas — lighter, stackable, and suited to the railways and steamships that were changing how people travelled.
It worked so well that copies appeared almost immediately. The striped canvas was imitated, so he changed it; the checked Damier pattern of 1888 was introduced with his name woven in specifically to make forgery harder, and the famous monogram followed in 1896 for the same reason. The most copied pattern in the world began life as an anti-copying device.
What a designer's name is actually worth
Pierre CARDIN worked out early that the valuable thing was not the clothes but the signature, and licensed it to anyone who would pay. At the peak his name was on something like 800 products in more than 100 countries — sunglasses, saucepans, sardines, a car, a bidet. He became enormously rich and the fashion establishment stopped taking him seriously, which he claimed not to mind.
It is the cautionary tale every house on this list navigates: a name can be rented out until it means nothing. The grid holds the ones that have so far avoided it — DIOR, BALENCIAGA, GIVENCHY and VALENTINO; ARMANI, VERSACE, GUCCI, PRADA and FENDI; LAGERFELD, GALLIANO, McQUEEN and WESTWOOD; and the American houses LAUREN, KLEIN, KORS, HILFIGER and Vera WANG, who designed her first wedding dress because she could not find one she liked for her own wedding at forty.