The show-stopping gown of Charles James' career, in his own estimation as well as that of the press, is the Abstract or Four-leaf Clover ballgown first commissioned by Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, Jr. to wear to the Eisenhower Inaugural Ball in 1953. The dress is almost 15 pounds of flexible horsehair canvas, boning, French net, non-woven interfacing and 4" wide nylon braid used to make two layers of underskirt, with an outer covering of silk satin, velvet and faille. In spite of the weight of the dress, it moved easily because it was perfectly balanced on the separately constructed bodice.

This dress is equivalent to a modern sculpture, eloquently putting forth all of James's sensitivity to line and color. James stated: "I had intended it to be the last and final statement and it was composed of several [dress] parts previously developed as separate designs." In her book, The Genius of Charles James, Elizabeth Ann Coleman suggests that the serpentine hemline appears to be the result of James's mulling over the outline of his 1948 clover-leaf shaped hat.

Mrs. Hearst was one of Charles James' best customers, having commissioned several works from him. Mrs. Hearst also had gowns made by Marguery Bolhagen, a Washington DC area dressmaker. OSU purchased this gown, in 1988 from Marguery Bolhagen, who received it from Mrs. Hearst. Unfortunately, it is no longer in pristine condition. Sometime during its lifetime, this dress went through several alterations, and suffered hem damage from a flood. The bodice has been shortened (Mrs. Hearst was very long-waisted as can be seen from her other dresses) and so too has the skirt. Because the delicate balance of this dress is based on curved seams, once the dress was shortened, the side seams also had to be taken in. These alterations also affected the complex Jamesian understructure, requiring that it too be altered. While this dress is still a magnificent testimony to James' work, it is only a shadow of what it once was. After researching another version of this dress along with James' muslin of it in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, we are able to replicate the effect of the three-layered understructure that had been completely removed from the original dress. Since the essence of a James dress is his engineering, we felt it was a necessary educational component of the garment.

Gayle Strege
Curator
Ohio State University
Department of Consumer and Textile Sciences
Columbus, Ohio

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