Magazine
Fashion Is a Serious Business. Once a Year, It Makes Time for Ridiculousness.
The St. Catherine’s Day festivities are a reminder of why the industry indulges in its frivolous side.
Of all the unexpected gifts this job has given me, perhaps the greatest one is the opportunity to be a visitor in the worlds of design and fashion. Anyone who has been allowed entree into a realm they never knew well (but were always curious to know better) understands that much of the fun of that introduction is learning about the culture of the place — the rituals and traditions that members of that tribe have long since ceased to find extraordinary.
For example: Last year, I was talking to a dear friend, a fashion designer in Paris. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I have to finish the hats for the Catherinettes,” he said, so matter-of-factly that, for a moment, I wondered if my inability to decipher what he was saying was actually a sign of my ignorance.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
It turns out that, every November, most of the French fashion houses participate in the St. Catherine’s Day festival. St. Catherine is the patron saint of, among other special interest groups, single women and, back in the 1940s and ’50s, the day was celebrated by 25-year-old female couture assistants putting on whimsical or outlandish hats and wandering the streets of Paris, announcing to one and all that they were looking for a husband.
Today, some things about that tradition have changed or been updated — men, called Nicholases, are now included; no participant can be older than 25 (men used to become Nicholases only when they turned 30); the Catherinettes and Nicholases can come from any kind of fashion house, not only those that make couture, and don’t have to work in the design ateliers — but it endures. There are still extravagant hats, many designed by the maisons’ artistic directors, typically in yellow and green, the colors associated with St. Catherine (no one can agree on why). The honorees, usually among the lowest-ranked, newest members of the houses, still get the afternoon off. (Dior even throws their employees a ball.)
