Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Jonas wandered about, searching for Nefertiti, a little more concerned now, but then along came six men carrying a piano belonging to Halvorsen who lived, thank heavens, on the ground floor, and so once more Jonas’s attention was distracted, because he had to see them set the piano up on a makeshift platform made out of planks, then see Teigen coming over, lugging his doublebass, and then the other, normally pretty boring dads trooping up, armed with trombones and trumpets and clarinets, the whole ensemble topped off by Joffen, who played the drums in the school band but who had also mastered the flick of the wrist necessary for that circular swish of brushes on the snare-drum, and it really swung, a kind of Dixieland music; swung so hot that even Herr Carlsen, a rather sedate gentleman in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, was on his feet right away with his daughter Eva, who had just started at university and, hence, represented an explosion in learning and the expansion of the Norwegian further education system; represented a whole decade in which the student body increased several fold, and all those children who would never again see such a community so modestly content with its lot, certainly not from the inside.

But as I mentioned earlier, a serpent was about to make its way into this paradise, not only into Norway, where a more minor but no less upsetting affair such as the Schnitler case in Bergen and the far greater calamity of the King’s Bay mining disaster on Spitzbergen were leaving the first scratches in that rosy picture, but also towards the blocks of flats alongside Bergensveien in Grorud; not far from the swinging amateur orchestra, parked at the top of Hukenveien, sat a motorized serpent, a Scania-Vabis truck, and one of the very biggest at that, with a driver who was just about to set out for home.

It took a while for it to dawn on Jonas that Nefertiti was not there, that something really was wrong, and that he was going to have to get out his bike to go look for her. It dawned on him as he dragged his eyes away from the undoubted hit of the evening: four housewives dancing barefoot on the grass in identical dresses which they had run up at their sewing bee to a pretty avant-garde pattern found in a fashion magazine: dancing gaily, uninhibitedly, in an ironic protest against the idea that women should not be able to dress alike and to celebrate their own liberation, now that their children would soon be grown and they could go back to work, maybe even take a course of some sort. And even I, while trying my best to remain objective, am inclined to agree with those who felt that Norwegian women, housewives and mothers — possibly due to sheer, unadulterated optimism — were never lovelier than they were on that Midsummer’s Eve on a housing estate alongside Bergensveien in Grorud, dancing barefoot on the grass in identical dresses.

Richard Burton was the first non-Muslim in Mecca. He dressed in disguise. Per Spook was, if you like, the first Norwegian in Paris, and he took that city by storm by dressing others. In Jonas Wergeland’s labyrinthine television series Thinking Big, the programme on Per Spook was a gala performance — spectacular but at the same time light and lovely — like the designs it reflected: a real star turn that could not but make even the most inveterate anti-nationalist proud of Norway.

Any normal run-of-the-mill programme would have been filled with shots of Per Spook cycling in Paris and in Sigdal, Per Spook strolling through the forest of Fontainebleau, Per Spook sitting alone in the back pew at a church concert. Jonas Wergeland concentrated solely on the decisive moment in Per Spook’s career, namely July 1977. Over the course of thirteen years, Spook had worked with three different fashion houses: at Christian Dior as an apprentice in the cutting rooms, with Yves Saint-Laurent as a designer and with Louis Feraud also as a designer — then, at the age of thirty-seven, he finally ventured to strike out on his own: a risk that is hard to imagine and even more difficult to describe when one considers that haute couture , so opulent in nature, is poles apart from the puritanical Norwegian character. Essentially, Per Spook’s decision was about as outrageous as the idea of a Norwegian lion tamer. It was a Thursday morning in late July 1977. Per Spook had been working day and night for six months and was now ready to present his first winter collection, within the space of one hour his fate would be decided; this was Spook’s moment of truth.

Prior to this, Jonas Wergeland had presented brief glimpses of Paris, of the school with the almost dauntingly grand name of École de la Chambre syndicale de la haute couture parisiènne, from which Per Spook had graduated top of his class, and, not least, a sequence from the Avenue Montaigne, lying there like an impregnable fortress, lined with exclusive fashion houses and boutiques, in which Jonas had close-ups of the signs run across the screen like coats-of-arms, famous names such as Dior, Chanel and Scherrer, Valentino, Ricci and Ungaro, together with shots of stylish, haughty Frenchwomen on the street, representatives of a race who had made a specialty out of cold-shouldering foreigners, before the camera panned once more along the façade of the fashion stronghold of the Avenue Montaigne, as if just to hint that the unthinkable might one day happen, and a Norwegian open not one but two shops on this street.

From here, Jonas jumped to a series of rapid clips showing the frantic preparations at Spook’s atelier — or rather, at that time in 1977, he had had his atelier in the rue de l’Université on the Left Bank, so Jonas Wergeland had cheated a little, showing Spook in the premises he occupied at the time of shooting, his fashion house in the modish Avenue George V — with a staff of fifty-plus working flat-out on the new collection, sewing for all they were worth, raising and lowering hems, taking in and letting out dresses, ironing, pressing; and in the midst of all this, Per Spook, discreetly elegant, surrounded by sketches and patterns and accessories and rolls of fabric and racks of clothes, or fitting the models on the mannequins together with the atelier manageress, fixing and adjusting, putting the finishing touches: all of this shown in a succession of quick cuts and changes of camera angle with a soundtrack designed to highlight the frenetic atmosphere and with Jonas Wergeland occasionally breaking in, a whispering commentator building up the tension like Finn Søhol before a crucial shot at Wimbledon.

And then, the unveiling of the collection at the Hôtel de Crillon, a venerable eighteenth-century building on the Place de la Concorde itself. Unbelievable, utterly improbable, but true nonetheless: a Norwegian in the heart of Paris, setting out to impress the international cognoscenti with the one thing, above all else, at which Paris excels: high fashion. It is like the fourth act of Peer Gynt , the great leap into the wide world, totally unreal, a combination of being a king among foreigners and emperor of the lunatic asylum. They took over two magnificent rooms, the magnificent salon and the actual restaurant, Les Ambassadeurs, which, incidentally and very fittingly, was one of the leading bastions of haute cuisine in Paris. In these surroundings of gleaming Sienna marble and sparkling gilt, huge mirrors and crystal chandeliers, the mannequins would parade up and down the narrow catwalk for forty-five minutes, modelling sixty to seventy items, ensembles comprising 150 garments all told. A whole phalanx of celebrities was ranged at the ringside, along with the representatives of the international press and, not least, Paris’s own ruthless, hypercritical fashion hacks.