Dressed for Chair No 7

I can still remember which postbox in Stockholm I used. It must have been in September 2013. On the envelope was Pär Engsheden’s address, and off went the letter in the post.

I was already aware that Engsheden is well known for two things. He is one of the most prominent haute-couture masters of Northern Europe; that’s one of them. The other is that he is the soul of discretion – he doesn’t even have a website. If Cristóbal Balenciaga were alive today, he probably wouldn’t have a website either.

I'd been in two minds about it for quite a while, unsure whether Engsheden would have the time or even the interest, but then I met a good friend who spoke highly of him one evening as we sat at the opera bar. I summoned my courage and wrote a letter. The situation needed explaining: that I had recently been elected member of Swedish Academy and that I would be delighted if he would consider designing a dress that I could wear when I made my inaugural appearance, which would be at the formal assembly of 20 December 2013. Like all other new members, I would give a speech about my predecessor on the chair, in my case the critic and literary researcher Knut Ahnlund. If I remember right, I added that I felt particularly honoured, as the first woman to be elected to the Swedish Academy had once occupied the chair that would be mine. I also described the formal assembly. It still takes place as originally laid down by the Academy’s founder, Gustav III: the king even made detailed plans of the room, with the assembly table taking pride of place in the centre.

The rules of etiquette require formal attire, which means white tie for the gentlemen and floor-length evening gowns for the ladies. It’s not quite that simple though, at least not for a woman. There is formal attire and there is formal attire. Dressing for the public assembly of the Swedish Academy is one thing; dressing for the grand Nobel ceremony and banquet another. The formal assembly calls for something sometimes known as a kontorsfrack, an ‘office tailcoat’.

There was one thing that I had been pondering ever since that Thursday evening when I'd been in the kitchen and received a surprise call from a withheld number that turned out to be the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund. Did I want to be elected? The Academy wanted me to be. Yes, absolutely, I rambled, you can count on me. We ended the call. My brain kicked into gear. One question after the other kept popping up in my mind. Particularly this one: how does a female Academy member dress? The Nobel ceremony might not be that hard to imagine, but the formal assembly was. As a new member, I would enter the hall in the Stock Exchange Building, give a twenty-minute speech, sign the articles of association and sit down on chair number seven. It meant, quite simply, that I would be representing myself as an intellectual. Hence a meticuluously thought-out female parallel to the office tailcoat was called for. Some low-cut thing in apricot seemed ill-advised.

Pär Engsheden said yes and sounded genuinely enthusiastic. We met at his discreetly located atelier in a forgotten part of Stockholm. I in my foolishness had imagined that a dress commission meant the designer took your measurements, discussed models and suggested fabrics, and then you would pick up your garment a few weeks later. I’m sure it often does work that way. But not with Mr Engsheden.

There are several black-and-white photographs of Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940) taken at different formal assemblies. From her seat on chair number seven she had a good view of Gustav V and the rest of the royal family on the balcony opposite, and the supreme representatives of the Svea Court of Appeal, the Riksbank and the bishops. The men in these pictures were wearing white tie.

The tailcoat is a practical garment. Even if it doesn’t flatter all figures, especially not short and round-bellied ones, it has one winning advantage: once you have obtained a tailcoat and all the necessary accessories, you never need worry about what to wear again. As long as you make sure it’s always hung up nice and clean in a suit bag in your wardrobe, along with black trousers with black silk stripes, a white waistcoat, a white shirt with a starched chest and high collar, a white bowtie, cufflinks, a handkerchief, black patent shoes and a pocket watch. That’s how a male Academy member should look.

I've often daydreamed about how the very first Swedish Academy members might have been dressed. The tailcoat is a relatively new garment; even if it’s easy to imagine that it’s been around for ages, it didn’t actually establish itself as Swedish formal attire until the mid-nineteenth century.

This made my daydreams about the founding members of the Swedish Academy all the more vivid. I dreamt of coats of velvet in royal blue or emerald green, beautifully worked waistcoats of gleaming silk, white shirts with ruffles and maybe some lace details, and nicely cut knee breeches. Instead of black patent shoes I saw in my mind’s eye high-heeled footwear made of silk, preferably decorated with an ornamented mounting of golden metal, or why not embroidery? In any case they must have worn knee breeches, as the Academy was founded three years before the French Revolution: it wasn’t until after the revolution that long trousers took over the world.

That was how I imagined the first version of the Swedish Academy. But it wasn’t like that at all.

It took the Swedish Academy almost 130 years to reach the point of electing a woman to one of its eighteen chairs, even if some of the first members had discussed Anna Maria Lenngren (1754–1817). Lagerlöf herself was surprised: although she'd long been aware she could be elected, she hadn’t expected the decision just then. But once the Permanent Secretary, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, had been wise enough to assure her that she would be able to carry on working just as she used to – that was the whole idea, in fact – the matter was decided. On 20 December 1914 she gave her inaugural speech about her predecessor on chair number seven – the poet Albert Gellerstedt.

Gellerstedt is probably an unknown name to most these days. And the ceremony sounds like something from the distant past. It wasn’t really, though; it was no longer ago than when Franz Kafka was writing The Trial, Proust was working on the second part of In Search of Lost Time, and Virginia Woolf was about to debut with The Voyage Out.

Still, not much about the formal assembly itself has changed; that much is clear from looking at photographs from Selma Lagerlöf’s time. A century has passed since her inauguration: the world's not the same, but most of the senior posts still exist; it’s just that their holders have changed. As a matter of fact, most of them even still sit in the same places.

One thing in the Stock Exchange Hall is different, however. The number of women holding the highest posts in society has increased greatly. Most recently, Antje Jackelén was appointed to the post of archbishop, thereby becoming the first woman in Sweden to hold the postion. A similar tendency can be seen in the Swedish Academy. While Lagerlöf remained the only woman in it until her death in 1940, Elin Wägner (1882-1949), the incomparable author of Penwoman (Pennskaftet) (1910), Alarm Clock (Väckarklocka) (1941) and other books, was elected four years later, becoming woman number two. Wägner’s merits also include her firm commitment to the campaign for female suffrage. The total number of women members in the Academy has now reached eleven – not a figure to be proud of. But it feels a teensy bit better when you realise that, of those eleven, seven are current members of the Academy. Things are moving in the right direction.

Pär Engsheden leaves nothing to chance. He wants to get to know every client, as I soon realised. What was more, I realised that he had an impressive knowledge of Marcel Proust’s great novel In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927). He could even discuss details of the descriptions of Madame de Guermante’s wardrobe – off the top of his head, at that.

So I wasn’t surprised to see him sitting in the audience at a conference on Proust’s work that a colleague and I organised that autumn at Moderna Museet. There were four hundred people in attendance, Mr Engsheden among them. When I gave my talk, the couturier listened with particular attention; I could tell. Afterwards, he came up to me. I thought it was just fantastic that someone like him, a ladies’ tailor of the highest class, always fully booked, went to academic conferences. I lauded him with emphasis. Fantastic, I said, fantastic.

He flashed his usual million-dollar smile and looked swiftly away. ‘Yes, I’m sure you think I came to listen to your talk. And it’s true – I did. Awfully good, by the way. Mostly though, I came to study you. You know – your way of talking, how you move, how you gesticulate, how you use the space. That sort of thing.’ Then he smiled again and dashed off.

Selma Lagerlöf’s inauguration into the Academy was a major event. All the newspapers sent their journalists and illustrators to report on it. She had paid several visits to the leading fashion house in Stockholm that autumn, as she had ordered an evening gown for the occasion. What her outfit looked like is not entirely clear, but one thing is beyond all doubt: on that December evening in 1914, she must have stood out like a magnificent orchid against a backdrop of black tailcoats. She herself described the dress as ‘engageantes, veils and fringes’ – a quote from Carl Michael Bellman, from Fredman’s Epistle No 3.

She had had the dress made at the grand fashion house of Augusta Lundin at Brunkebergstorg in Stockholm. At that time – its heyday – the company is said to have occupied four floors and employed as many as 170 seamstresses. Selma Lagerlöf was already a familiar customer: it was here that she ordered the exquisite evening gown in silver-grey silk that she wore to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909. It was where one went, after all: the fashion house supplied the latest Parisian fashions to Swedish ladies – without giving anyone preferential treatment. Everyone had to wait their turn. Augusta Lundin herself is supposed to have said ‘nowadays we are all fortunate to be people, with our human value as a certificate.’

Selma Lagerlöf’s Nobel gown is usually on display at Mårbacka, her home in Värmland, western Sweden. It was designed with care and made up in a gleaming silk brocade with roses and trailing leaves woven into it, intended for an exceptional individual: the queen of Swedish literature. If you look a little closer, you can see that the bodice fits loosely, with a front of the sheerest tulle in matching grey. The puff sleeves end just below the elbows, and the waist is well-defined. The beautifully cut skirt follows the seat before opening up into two large gores that end at the back in a generous train. At the front, you sense lots of tulle, which peeks out from beneath the skirts. Over her shoulders Lagerlöf wore a hand-embroidered shawl, its edges decorated with six rows of beads wrapped in thread. This painstaking handiwork had also been applied to the neckline.

Just as we were working on the lower half of the toile – with me standing as straight as I could while Mr Engsheden crawled around my hems – the concentrated silence was broken. From below I heard Mr Engsheden’s voice, hissing in that distinctive way that comes from holding pins between your teeth.

‘What do you think, Sara, shouldn’t we have a train?’

‘Of course we should have a train,’ I said.

So it had a train.

First Engsheden made a toile in undyed cotton, and then another one. He altered and altered, insisting on fitting after fitting. Finally the garment began to take shape, and it was time for the scissors to snip into the black silk. There were more fittings, albeit now in Maggie Webrink’s atelier, and at last it was ready: a perfectly styled evening gown with a modest boat neckline, narrow sleeves, neat bodice, slim waist and long, sweeping skirts from the hips downwards. No decorations, none, and minimal skin exposed. The only flourish was the removable velvet mantel, an allusion to the cloaks of old scholars, and it was fastened in place with the help of poppers on the inside of the back neckband. That way I would carry a protective wall with me wherever I went. And so it was created, Pär Engsheden’s female office tailcoat, with the inbuilt ability to subordinate itself to the intellectual representation duties of the evening. Once again Engsheden had succeeded in demonstrating that simplicity is worth the difficulty. I, meanwhile, had got what I wanted: a perfect mixture of nun, librarian, and nightclub diva.

It’s hard to imagine anyone repeating Selma Lagerlöf’s magnificent entrance into the Swedish Academy. It did not become her to make herself less than she was: the queen of Swedish literature, famous practically the world over. Her historic moment will never come again. Selma Lagerlöf was the first, and no one can take that away from her. What’s more, she was the first in more ways than one. She was the first Swedish author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature; she was also the first woman. By that time she'd enjoyed considerable success with The Saga of Gösta Berling (Gösta Berlings saga), A Manor House Tale (En herrgårdssägen), Lord Arne’s Silver (Herr Arnes penningar) and Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden (Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige). Five years after receiving the Nobel Prize, she became the first woman to be elected to the Swedish Academy. When she corresponded with Erik Axel Karlfeldt on the matter of her election she was working on the manuscript of The Emperor of Portugallia (Kejsaren av Portugallien) (1914).

At that time Swedish women still didn’t have the right to vote in general elections, and it would be several years before they did. Like many others, Selma Lagerlöf was involved in the fight for female suffrage. In the summer of 1911 she gave a speech on the subject of female liberation at the Swedish conference on suffrage, and in May 1917 she spoke at the assembly on women’s rights. The fight had been going on for a long time, as we know from history books and contemporary accounts.

I also know about it from my grandmother: she was one of the many who had dedicated themselves to the cause. Sigrid Danius wrote in the Falu-Kuriren newspaper under the Wagnerian nom de plume of Brünnhilde. On 14 February 1906 – she was 33 at the time – she published a lively article describing how she'd been collecting signatures for a petitions. The headline: A Day in the Service of Female Mass Petitioning. She had two small children at home, Margareta and Anna-Lisa, just a few years old, and the maid had to look after them while she walked street after street collecting signatures. Mrs Danius knocked at all sorts of people’s doors and visited every conceivable shop: ‘I’ve been to dairies and bakeries, coat shops and woodwork shops, I’ve hung around in delicatessens and haberdashers, sat down in tidy small parlours where I’ve been offered coffee, and made observations concerning this and that between a herring barrel and a paraffin bottle in a general store.’

She was now hoping that the ‘white flakes’ would transform into a large, powerful river. In her writing she dreamt of the springtime of women’s freedom. Talk about it wherever you go, she commanded her readers: ‘It needs to be drummed into people so that everyone has to think about it, even its opponents. Don’t be put out by men’s scorn and the lamentations of the “true” housewives, the ones who say women are abandoning their station. You and I, we know better than that. And between you and me there is a secret understanding; we squeeze each other’s hands and look each other in the eye happily. No resistance can quash our courage, for we know that we are fighting for the victory that is absolutely certain to arrive.’

The breakthrough came thirteen years later. Sweden gained universal suffrage. On 29 May 1919, Selma Lagerlöf spoke in Stockholm at a citizen’s celebration that had been organised by the national association for women’s political suffrage. ‘This is a day I thought I would never see,’ she began, ‘and I am happy that I have been able to see it emerge from the recesses of time and become reality.’

The very first members of the Swedish Academy wore uniforms. These were made from black cloth with crimson details in the silk and are usually simply referred to as the ‘Swedish costume’. The clothing was the invention of King Gustav III (1746-1792). He wore it himself – in fact, at his death he is said to have had over 60 sets in his wardrobe.

One people, one costume – so it was said. In practice, though, it meant that only five per cent of the population wore the outfit. Commoners – in other words, ordinary people – were, like priests, exempted from Gustav III’s reform. Anyone who had been introduced at court was expected to wear it though, and the Academy members had. They had even held their first few meetings at the Royal Palace.

As early as 1775 – eleven years before the Academy was founded – Gustav III had begun considering a national costume. He was not alone. Many European courts dressed similarly at that time. The king had good reason: the costume would stop the continued spread of luxury among the Swedish aristocracy, who generally tended to be quite hard-up yet still considered dressing extravagantly for ceremonies par for the course. He knew what he was talking about when he pondered the attractions of luxury – he himself loved French fashion. Therefore the costume needed to be simple and modest, as well as the same for everyone, with one version for men and one for women. Nor should it be an obligation; such things were often repugnant, he added. Therefore: merely a strong recommendation. And furthermore, Gustav noted, a clothing reform would boost cloth production in Sweden. At that time there were thirty-nine silk weavers in Stockholm alone, all of them on Södermalm.

It was a warm late-August afternoon. We – my secretary and I – sat in the back seat of a Volvo S90 and whizzed along the E4 in a southerly direction. We were heading for the Swedish costume’s very own mausoleum, in a gigantic facility plonked down in a field in Tumba. The National Heritage Board’s storage facility turned out to be a traditional government building, complete with strip lighting and municipal-approved curtains. Ms Söderling and I had to pass through a series of corridors before finally reaching the room where we were to examine the Swedish costume. Four examples had been brought out, and each of them lay wrapped in tissue paper inside a rectangular cardboard box resembling a flattened coffin.

All four jackets had the characteristic stand-up collar and lattice sleeves. They were small miracles of the finest handicraft. We were quite smitten with the gala version in sky-blue silk with white details such as the lining, pocket and waistcoat. Next up was the everyday costume for court, in black cloth with crimson silk detailing, worn together with a red silk sash, white stockings and high-heeled shoes in black leather decorated with red rosettes. Then we moved on to the general – in other words, bourgeois – costume, which was always monochrome, black in this case. And, finally, we reached the Ekolsund costume, which originated at the castle of Ekolsund, in yellow with blue detailing. None of these costumes had been worn by Gustav III himself though.

But a fifth box awaited us. That was certainly unexpected. The intendant understood the value of dramaturgy. Because here it was, the vision I'd secretly been thinking about. I’d seen it in a painting by Alexander Roslin: the first Swedish costume, which Gustav III had had made for himself. His Majesty wore it accompanied by an artfully tied cravat and the blue band of the Order of the Seraphim. It wasn’t just any old occasion, either. It was the king’s outfit for the public inauguration of the Swedish national costume on 28 April 1778.

Gustav III’s version was splendid. It was made of an aubergine-coloured silk that shimmered in gold and had been lined with pale, salmon-pink atlas silk. The jacket was decorated with silver and gold embroidery, as well as golden sequins, and along the edges of the lower half and the sleeves you could see trims with bling-bling in the form of embroidery-edged pieces of foil that shone in different colours. The jacket was accompanied by a richly decorated waistcoat in atlas silk with gold thread woven in, and knee-length breeches and a cloak.

The supplier was based in Paris, as was so often the case when it came to Gustav III; and Le Roux et De La Salle, as the company was known, supplied him with fabric, embroidered edging and decorated buttons, all handiworks in their own right. The costume was stitched by the court tailor Petter Rungren, for whom the reform must have meant a lot of work. As one contemporary noted, ‘Rungren measured, cut, and said nothing, had it sewn up, tried on, and altered.’

You can imagine the elegant impression the king must have made on those assembled when he entered the hall to inaugurate the Swedish national costume that evening on 28 April 1778. And can’t you almost see before you the soft glow of the candlelight, making the small foil pieces on his jacket and waistcoat gleam turquoise, pink and fuchsia as he advanced through the room? That’s how it must have been.

The séance was at an end. The E4 was waiting. The silken clothes went back into the rectangular box, the tissue paper was arranged, the lid put on. Then the box was put on a stretcher, taken out into a corridor and pushed into an appropriate lift for transfer to a shelf in the controlled temperatures of the National Heritage Board’s facility.