One of Truman Capote’s famed Swans is migrating south for winter.
C.Z. Guest, or “cool vanilla lady” as Capote liked to call her, is being honored for the first time with a retrospective at the SCAD Fash Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta.
Open Thursday until Feb. 21, the exhibition, titled “C.Z. Guest: Portrait of an American Style Icon,” was curated in collaboration with Stefano Tonchi and is being presented by Max Mara, one of the iconic socialite’s favorite ready-to-wear labels.
Included are more than 40 complete outfits, the lion’s share of which were donated by her daughter Cornelia and are being preserved by SCAD Fash as part of its permanent archive.
According to Cornelia Guest, SCAD was the perfect spot to house the collection because, not only is it a museum, it’s part of a larger university and she wanted students to have intimate access. “I wanted them to be able to see these clothes,” she said, “to study how everything was created, how they were stitched, the craftsmanship. That was so important to me.”
Tracing C.Z. Guest’s history through her wardrobe is like tracing the history of 20th-century fashion itself, no small undertaking for Tonchi, who stumbled across the collection two years ago while working on a separate exhibition for SCAD’s Museum of Art in Savannah.
“I was intrigued by the amount and the variety of the pieces,” he said. “Everything from gowns to bathrobes, riding boots to penny loafers, fur jackets to cashmere twinsets — often in multiples of 10. When C.Z. liked something she bought or had it made in a variation of colors, fabrics and leathers. Also, as a real WASP, she wore and kept almost every garment and never got rid of anything.”
With help from Ariel Stark, SCAD Fash’s assistant director, Tonchi selected the best examples of Guest’s style, which he described as “a mix of pragmatism and elegance” rarely achieved by anyone today. The two then painstakingly matched the items with photos of Guest wearing them in order to tell the complete visual story of her life.
Born Lucy Cochrane in 1920, Guest attracted press attention early on, having been voted the “Glamour Girl of Massachusetts North Shore” in a local beauty pageant. Sources say her nickname came about when her brother labeled her a sissy, eventually morphing into C.Z.
That pseudonym followed her as she moved to Hollywood, where she briefly pursued acting with a walk-on role in the “Ziegfeld Follies” before marrying Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, a polo player with an even more illustrious pedigree than her own, in 1947.
As an arbiter of taste, Guest influenced others with the designers she championed. Those featured in “Portrait of an American Style Icon” include European names like Chanel, Courrèges and Valentino alongside New York-based ones like Adolfo, Carolina Herrera and Mainbocher, all of whom she developed intimate relationships with.
Once he moved back from Paris after World War II, Mainbocher was particularly crucial in cementing the image of sophisticated nonchalance that would become Guest’s signature. “I like to wear very good suits and his fit so well,” she once said. “Besides, everyone doesn’t have them, and that’s important.”
While there are no suits by the couturier, Mainbocher is well represented through a tailored coat and a selection of evening frocks, such as the white gown with gold embroidery she wore to the Met Gala in 2001 honoring her friend Jackie O.
Organized thematically, “Portrait of an American Style Icon” opens with a photographic exploration of Guest’s private and public personas, ranging from vacation pictures taken by Slim Aarons at the Guest estate in Palm Beach, Fla., to Tony Palmieri’s paparazzi shots of her flitting about Manhattan’s party circuit for the Eye column in WWD.
The fashion on display takes a similar tack, further bringing these two sides to light. There’s Guest, the domestic horticulturalist and equestrian at ease in Max Mara short shorts or jodhpurs by Huntsman, and then there’s Guest, the high-society fixture resplendent in floral embroidered Oscar de la Renta, whose inimitable glamour landed her on the International Best Dressed List in 1959.
While the latter will certainly get visitors through the museum door, it’s the former her daughter would like them to get better acquainted with. “I hope people really realize that my mother was not just a socialite,” she said. “Yes, she was very social, but her heart belonged in the country with her family and her horses in her garden.”
Cornelia Guest added that she’s particularly fond of her mother’s riding gear because “we would spend a lot of time in Middleburg, Va., going cross-country riding and she would teach me so much about the rivers and all the animals, so that was a very special time between the two of us.”
Still Guest’s hand in shaping the codes of “American style” as we know it today extends much further. Tonchi pointed out: “Her personal life reflects the many turns in the voyage of the American woman in the last century.”
And 16 years after her death from ovarian cancer, she’s still relevant as ever.
“As designers focus on the many facets of a woman’s personality, C.Z. becomes a natural reference. She was able to adapt every fashion to her style. She always dressed with a purpose and never to impress. Her wardrobe choices are never fashion statements, but, in a much more contemporary way, self-statements,” Tonchi said.
