 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 March 2000 Issue No. 472 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 March 2000 Issue No. 472
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Elegance may be her birthright, but only the kindest cut will satisfy this most adamant of artists
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Books Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Yvonne Madi:
Grounded in glamour
Profile by Fayza Hassan
Warm-hearted, gentle, compassionate: these are the words that immediately rush to one's mind as Yvonne Madi opens the door to her atelier on the fifth floor of a formerly elegant downtown building. Daring, too: such openness is neither common, nor for the faint at heart. Transparency is not fashionable. Integrity is also an essential part of the picture, obvious at a glance, not only in the lack of pretension of the interior, featuring functional furniture in different hues of brown, but in the no-nonsense grooming of the hostess. The neat, dark, slightly curly hair is elegantly short; the pleated grey skirt and polo neck worn with flat, comfortable shoes inform that Madi values simple good taste above all. This bon chic, bon genre style is a little surprising, maybe, in a woman who for long years has been associated with glamour and showmanship, first as the daughter of the famous actress Zouzou Madi, then as Miss Egypt, and an actress in her own right, and finally as a prominent grande couturière. Wearing almost no make-up save a little lipstick, she looks years younger than the age I guess at, but of course I shall not comment. On the telephone, she had not seemed enthusiastic about having her photo taken and I don't want her to start fretting about her appearance.
She is genuinely surprised: "Why me? What do you want to know about me? I have not done anything worthy of notice..." And maybe she hasn't, not in the sense of having written famous books, moved public opinion by her inflammatory speeches or held a seat in parliament. Then again, it would be a mistake to discount her achievements, even though she refuses to dwell on them. Her luminous smile hides genuine shyness.
Asked about her childhood, she shrugs: "I always wanted to make dresses, that is what I remember vividly. There was a maid, Umm Nagiya, and I used to buy cheap fabric and place a length of it on her and cut it along the lines of her body. I did not even know how to put the pieces together. I saved the leftovers to make dresses for my dolls. I never thought seriously about doing anything else."
After finishing her studies at the convent of the Sacré Coeur, she spent two years at the American Girls' School. Having complied with the curriculum demanded of young ladies of her class, she was ready to launch herself in her chosen career, but her mother insisted that she should learn the art of dressmaking before she opened her own atelier. "The only essential person in your enterprise should be you," Zouzou Madi told her daughter. "If you know how to do things for yourself, you won't feel dependant on anyone and no one will be able to dictate their terms to you." Convinced that she could not command unless she mastered the intricacies of haute couture, Yvonne enrolled in a dressmaking school in Cairo, where she learned the rudiments of her future career. "Of course I was taught the theory, and I am not saying that it was not immensely helpful, but nothing trains better than hands-on experience. Working with real clients was my school. This is when I really began to make progress."
Madi has a lot to say about the right way to cut different fabrics and how clothes should fit the wearer. One is left with no doubt as to how meticulously she has gone about the task. "It is one thing to design a basic pattern, but one figure is different from the other, even though in the end they may wear the same size. This is what makes the job so challenging. Everyone has good and bad features; the difficulty is to enhance the former and hide the latter."
Like mother, like daughter: Yvonne Madi; and Zouzou (bottom, seated, with Faten Hamama)
Her best memories are of the time she worked for the cinema, making costumes for Cecil B de Mille's Ten Commandments and then working with the late Shadi Abdel-Salam. "He was such a terrific designer and a careful researcher," she says wistfully. "He insisted on total historical accuracy. It was a pleasure to give life to his creations."
Often, those who knew Madi in the past mention the period when she used to make dresses for export to Russia. Opening the subject with her is like suddenly finding the key to the magic door. So far, she had been succinct in imparting information, refusing to dwell on her election as Miss Egypt, barely recalling the name of the film she acted in (it had something to do with someone called Bayyoumi, she finally admitted vaguely, dismissing the whole topic as if shooing away a fly) or the famous clients who frequented her atelier ("Friends of my mother, whom she had probably convinced to patronise her daughter's budding business," she suggested at length when pressed, as a logical explanation of her success). Now she was warming up to the subject at hand: "It was in the late '50s. I wanted to do something for the country. What Egypt needed most was hard currency and I knew how popular our cotton was overseas." She remembered buying herself a very expensive T-shirt in Geneva that had 'made with Egyptian cotton' on the label. It had lasted for years. "I thought to myself, why not do something with our 'white gold'? So I put together a collection of simple cotton dresses, but in the end I did not get permission to travel to Europe and all the work was wasted."
Still, she persevered and sent samples to Germany and Russia. She drew a blank with the Germans, but the Russians were interested. One of the models who travelled with her to Moscow recounts how Madi saved on costs but not on her labour, of which she gave freely. Even the most modest of her creations were enhanced with subtle little touches, making of them fashion statements that belied their miniscule price. Her career in exports ground to a halt with the end of the Russian presence in Egypt in the early '70s, but, encouraged by her positive experience, Madi saw no reason at first why she should not expand her horizon and seek different markets. She managed this time to obtain a first order from Germany and set to work. "Fortunately, I was wise enough to experiment with items taken at random before shipping them. It was a good thing I did, because I saved myself and the country from embarrassment."
She was dismayed to discover that the fabric did not conform to specifications. Shrinkage was far superior to the allowed 4 per cent and, as for the dyes, "I don't want to bore you with the details, but colour fastness was definitely not one of the qualities I could advertise freely," she says. "In the end I cancelled the order and gave up on the idea." She thought then, and still thinks today, that Egyptian clothes manufacturers have a great deal to learn before they are able to tackle international markets. "We need experts to show us how to treat our cotton correctly. It is a neglected wealth. We could be among the greatest exporters of pure cotton ready-made clothing, instead of selling the raw materials to be processed elsewhere and using imported cheap synthetics for our local production. We had all these public-sector spinning and weaving factories and there has always been plenty of labour power. All we needed were the experts and the machines. It was probably considered too costly to set up such an operation but I am sure that it would have been a good investment for the government. Now it is too late. The factories will be privatised and their owners will be making big profits for themselves."
Madi is a giver: she cannot begin to understand the principles of profit maximisation. In her conversation she constantly refers to the difficulties young people face today in trying to dress decently on a tight budget. Her dream is to do something to ease their plight. Her heart goes out to the large families who have to buy clothes for all their children. "The cheapest men's shirts retail for LE35 to LE50," she says. "How can a university student find the money?" According to her, the same shirt could be put on the market for half the price if only manufacturers were not so greedy. "And it needn't look shabbier than the more expensive shirts, either," she adds. "Why not sell a large number of one item, making a small profit on each, rather than the same profit on fewer sales?"
Little girls' dresses also get her going. "Have you seen how ridiculous they look? False pearls and sequins have replaced good craftsmanship. And how is a mother supposed to wash these expensive productions? That is, of course, if the colour of the fabric does not run in the first place." A few weeks ago she tried to buy a dress for the granddaughter of one of her friends. It was a disaster. The dresses all looked as if they had been put together out of leftovers that did not even match. "Manufacturers do not seem to know that there are basic rules for mixing and matching, or maybe they have forgotten them in their eagerness to make money fast," she says contemptuously. When I suggest that she write about these things, she smiles sadly: "I have, many times. I used to write a column, but I was by no means the only one. Other journalists have also tried to draw attention to the deterioration of good taste. No one listens. And how can the consumers know about good quality and design if they never see them?" she wonders. Suddenly she smiles: "I read a wonderful book recently. It is called What Happened to the Egyptians, by Galal Amin. It gave me great pleasure. I kept reading and thinking 'yes, he is right' and the more I read, the righter he became. We are no longer what we used to be, and I was happy to find out that I wasn't the only one who noticed."
Madi misses the old days, but more than anything else she misses her mother. "Sometimes I hurry because I think she will be worried and then I remember that she is no longer here to wait for me." Zouzou Madi died 18 years ago in April. "We were great friends. I told her everything and she always advised me on the right course to take. I went with her to the studio and just hung about. We went out together and had a lot of fun, just the two of us." When I venture that maybe her deep love for her mother prevented her from developing other permanent attachments, she denies it vehemently. Her feelings for her mother were of a different quality altogether. It has never prevented other relationships. She was married twice, briefly. "It is not because a man and a woman cannot live together that one of them is necessarily flawed. They can both be fine people, but just find out after a while that they are incompatible. This is what happened in my marriages, but I remained friends with both my husbands. It was just living together that was hard."
Now that her mother is no longer here, life has a different, less pleasurable taste. She has her nephew and niece, however, the children of her older brother, who are like her own children. Taking a framed picture from the side table, she raises it to her own portrait, by the famous photographer Garo, which hangs on the wall, so that I can compare them. "This is my niece and this is me at the same age. What do you think?" she asks proudly. The resemblance is indeed striking but maybe still to Yvonne's advantage.
Madi values friendships with both men and women, but true friendship is rare to find, she comments. "I had a good friend once," she says. "We were having dinner together in a public place and I was telling her something important. Suddenly I felt her attention waver. 'Look who is here,' she told me, discreetly pointing at a couple who had just arrived. She had forgotten what I was telling her and I felt that I no longer belonged in her life. I have never let her know how much she had hurt my feelings that day, and we still see each other occasionally, but I no longer confide in her. One should never dismiss other people's problems as trivial. Friendship is about listening and empathising...very few people understand that."
(photo: Randa Shaath)
