Mrs Harris Goes to Paris: The fairy-tale myth that endures

In Paul Gallico's 1958 novel Flowers for Mrs Harris, there is a couture dress called Temptation. It is black velvet: the long skirt covered in jet beads, the b odice a pale froth of chiffon, tulle and lace. It is number 89 in a show held within the hallowed halls of the House of Dior. Among the usual attendees – "ladies and honourables from England… baronesses from Germany, principessas from Italy, new-rich wives of French industrialists, veteran-rich wives of South American millionaires, buyers from New York" – there sits a London cleaner, enthralled by every emerging look. It is Temptation, though, that steals her heart. "She was lost, dazzled, blinded, overwhelmed by the beauty of the creation. This was IT!!"

Gallico's book, later re-titled Mrs 'Arris Goes to Paris, is one long caper devoted to the feeling of "IT!!" induced by the perfect item of clothing. The story is a simple one. The titular Ada Harris, a widowed cleaning lady living in 1950s London, finds herself bewitched by one of her clients' couture Dior gowns. It grips her to the point of obsession. She "want[s] it dreadfully… consumed by the fires of desire". Mrs Harris embarks on a long journey of scrimping, saving and scheming, hampered by ill-fated setbacks and helped by the odd stroke of luck, until she has enough to make the trip to Paris and purchase something equally beautiful for herself. On arrival the clash of worlds and social classes provides all the right conditions for a comic triumph against the odds, Mrs Harris becoming not so much the princess as the Fairy Godmother – her pragmatism and charm put to good use in sorting out the lives of those she meets.

This summer sees the release of a new film adaptation of the book, starring Lesley Manville and Isabelle Huppert. Unlike the lovely but rackety TV movie starring Angela Lansbury in 1992, this is a lavish affair that has been produced with the full co-operation of Dior. Perfect replicas of gowns, skirts and bar jackets swish past Mrs Harris (Manville) as she sits in the front row, her expression beatific at the sight of so much loveliness.

To use clothing to change our seeming [appearance] is, on some level, an enchanted act – Hilary Davidson

It's unsurprising that Gallico frames Mrs Harris's need for this gown in magical terms. She is enthralled and enchanted by Dior's designs, striving to possess one for herself because of its talismanic power – those layers of tulle and chiffon reminding this mature woman of her own youth, vitality and beauty. Her dress is also literally transformational. Although it might not change her appearance (Gallico is either cruel or honest enough to appraise the vision of her in her chosen gown as one "that worked no miracles except in her soul"), she still achieves her moment of "dreamed-of and longed-for bliss" in Paris – and leaves as a much-altered and enriched woman.

We're all familiar with the garment that could change everything. It's a classic fairy-tale trope. In its most positive format, it's what allows Cinderella to attend the ball. In its darker iterations, as with the Brothers Grimm's The Six Swans, Charles Perrault's Donkeyskin or Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes, it's the object that can turn boys into swans, disguise a daughter so that she may escape from her incestuous father, or condemn a vain girl to dance to her death. "Magic is inherently about transformation. Clothing is also the easiest way for humans to transform, disguise, reveal, and become apparently more or less than they are," fashion historian Hilary Davidson tells BBC Culture. "Clothing is our second skin, our socio-cultural skin, and determines a large amount of how others perceive us. To use clothing to change our seeming [appearance] is, on some level, an enchanted act."

Davidson is currently researching shoes, which she sees as a particularly stark example of the transformative powers of dress – whether in the everyday sense, or in the realm of myth and folktale. "They can facilitate or hinder how we move through the world, and the strides we take literally or metaphorically in everything from seven league boots to Air Jordans," she explains. "Because footwear is the foundation of our posture, shoes also affect the whole way we stand and hold ourselves, the structures of our body."

Modern retellings

Fairy tales have always been a flexible form. Told, retold, subverted, and tailored time and time again to convey different messages, fitting themselves to each new era in turn. In her lively book Once Upon a Time: A Short History of the Fairy Tale, the academic Marina Warner comments on the contemporary proliferation of these old stories: "film adaptors and producers, stage directors, and designers are all busy refashioning fairy tales for audiences of all ages… performance artists, couturiers and photographers… a festive cavalcade… are losing themselves in the forest of the fairy tale in order to come back with baskets of strawberries picked in the snow."

The forest of the fairy tale has always been particularly fertile ground for Hollywood. In the way that fairy tales rely on particular plots and characters, films have their own library of tropes, plots and repeat motifs, many of them borrowing from these earlier forms. Take the makeover montage scene. From Miss Congeniality (2000) to The Devil Wears Prada (2006), these sequences are the equivalent of cinematic comfort food: the idea that all a (very conventionally attractive) woman needs is the right haircut, make-up and wardrobe to transform from ugly duckling into swan.

Various films hinge almost entirely on the consequences of such a transformation. In Sabrina (1954), Audrey Hepburn's titular character leaves for Paris as a gawky adolescent and returns a sophisticated woman with a suitcase full of chic Givenchy outfits – suddenly commanding the attention of the eligible men who previously overlooked her. In Pretty Woman (1990), sex worker Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) is vindicated in the moment she returns to the snobby shop that refused to serve her the day before. Now dressed in demure, expensive white, she lambasts the woman who'd previously looked down on her in her thigh-high boots. "Big mistake, big, huge," she says, magnificently ablaze as she sweeps off with her armfuls of designer shopping bags.

The secret life of clothes

These kinds of films fulfil their own fantasy narrative: that of being seen as you think you deserve to be seen. Clothes here don't just bestow status or beauty, although that's certainly a crucial part of their function, but the right kind of visibility. They elevate their wearers, rendering them deserving of affection and admiring attention. Just like Cinderella, these women acquire power in their moment of visual metamorphosis because they ascend the social hierarchy.

Their debt to these earlier stories of magical transformations and revisions of the social order do not go unacknowledged. Speaking about Sabrina Fairchild, Hepburn deemed her character "an incorrigible romantic" and "a dreamer who lived in a fairy tale". In Pretty Woman, Vivian tells Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) that she "wants the fairy tale". By this, she means she no longer wishes to be a kept woman, a paid, pretend girlfriend. She craves the real deal: love. There is a certain irony in the fact that, much like the original fairy tales from Grimm and Andersen with their frequently horrible endings, the final scene of Pretty Woman was meant to be a bleak visit to Disneyland funded by Vivian's dealings with Lewis. Instead, it was rewritten to appeal to a more Disney-ish sensibility, the much-transformed princess finally getting her prince.

A fairy tale ending?

Why does the myth of the life-transforming dress endure? On the one hand, we might see it as a kind of brutal pragmatism. We all understand that we are judged by what we wear. If you attend an exclusive party in sweatpants, you will receive a different reception to that of the person wearing a formal gown. Strip away the magic of many fairy tales, and what you have is a realistic assessment of the social order, and the way clothes place us in the world. On the other hand, we might see this myth as one now aggressively sustained by those in the business of making and selling clothes. For the fashion industry, the promise of change is a powerful profit-making tool. All you need do is buy the right garment, and your life will be forever altered.

Colleen Hill is curator of costumes and accessories at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. In 2016 she staged an exhibition titled Fairy Tale Fashion, drawing parallels between fairy tales and the contemporary world of high fashion – pieces by Alexander McQueen and Zandra Rhodes were exhibited to illustrate the magical possibilities of dress in all their dazzling aesthetic appeal, as well as their seductive promises of change and improved social standing. "Within these early fairy tales, dress was incredibly heavily associated with status," she explains. "For example, Cinderella showing up at the ball wearing a gold and then a silver dress essentially indicated that she was royalty."

So much of the real change that happens in our lives is slow – no wonder we are enthralled by the idea of immediate access to beauty, or power, or attention

To her, there are obvious echoes in the ways we approach dress today. "I think all of us have made those kinds of fashion mistakes where we buy a pair of shoes that we can't actually walk in, or a dress that is a little too tight, but at the time, we were hoping we could fit into," Hill says. "There's always this idea that the next thing we buy will actually be the perfect thing, [which] is certainly wrapped up in this idea of consumerism and transformation."

Film and literature are littered with characters who obsessively believe in the power of the perfect piece of clothing. To them this perfect item is not just transformative, but redemptive. Take the miserable Sasha Jansen in Jean Rhys's 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight. As she drifts around Paris drinking and running out of money, she frequently imagines the ways in which her life could be improved. She "madly, furiously" longs for a black dress with "wide sleeves embroidered in vivid colours – red, green, blue purple." To her, this dress is a totem of the ideal life, always just beyond reach. "If I could get it everything would be different," she predicts at one point. "I must go and buy a hat this afternoon, and tomorrow a dress," she thinks at another. "I must get on with the transformation act."

A transformation act, like a magic trick, alters everything in an instant. It suggests that a new self is always just ahead, lingering on a mannequin or waiting in the seams of a dress that merely needs to be pulled over one's head for the grand abracadabra moment. So much of the real change that happens in our lives is slow. It takes time, and understanding, and effort. Often it is arduous. No wonder we are enthralled by the idea of immediate access to beauty, or power, or attention.

What remains so interesting about Mrs Harris Goes to Paris is that for all its fairy tale trappings, it is more complex in its understanding of transformation. Without giving too much away, for Mrs Harris there is a distinction between merely wearing a dress and knowing it is yours. It is the latter experience that is more valuable. She wants a Dior dress "hanging in her cupboard, to know it was there when she was there, when she was away, to open the door when she returned and find it waiting for her, exquisite to touch, to see, and to own." When she finally makes her way to that fabled atelier, she is thrilled not so much by her own reflection as by her ability to possess such beauty. "Buying a Paris dress was surely the most wonderful thing that could happen to a woman." Much as we might see this as the ultimate capitalist fairy tale, there is a tenderness and dignity in Gallico's approach to Mrs Harris. She is, above all, an aesthete: someone who deserves her ravishingly gorgeous gown just as much as the rich ladies whose houses she cleans; a singularly determined woman, moving through the world in pursuit of that perfect feeling of "IT!!"