by Brenda Polan
Poiret was a true Parisian, born in 1879 near Les Halles, to parents who owned a wool cloth shop. As a young child, he was an avid art gallery visitor, entranced by colours in particular. He was also a lover of the theatre, sketching the costumes of the actresses at the Comédie-Française. Forced by his father to become an apprentice to an umbrella maker, he preferred to spend every spare moment developing his sketching abilities. The breakthrough came in 1898 when the couturier Jacques Doucet offered him a job as a junior assistant. His first piece, a red wool cape, received orders from 400 customers. Poiret went on to design for two star actresses of the period, Gabrielle Réjane and Sarah Bernhardt, but was sacked by Doucet after a falling-out with Bernhardt. Following a brief and unhappy period of military service, he went to work at the house of Worth, where he created a coat cut like a kimono that famously upset its potential client, Russian Princess Bariatinsky, but was a precursor of his Orientalist style. Once again, however, he lost his job.
In 1903, with money from his mother, he opened his own house at 5 rue Auber. Encouraged by the magnanimous Jacques Doucet and championed by the actress Gabrielle Réjane, Poiret swiftly began to make waves. His muse was Denise, the daughter of a Normandy textile manufacturer. They were married in 1905. In those early days as a couturier, his enemy was the corset. As he put it himself, ‘It was in the name of Liberty that I brought about my first revolution, by deliberately laying siege to the corset.’
Poiret always designed on live models, working from the shoulders, initially creating a series of surprisingly plain gowns that skimmed the outlines of the figure. By 1906, he had banished the corset, replaced by the girdle and the brassiere, which he can lay claim to have invented. Among the other designers of the period who also dropped the corset were Lucile and Madeleine Vionnet, but Poiret, a brilliant self-publicist, stole most of the credit. Unlike Vionnet, he tended to work on the straight grain rather than on the bias. As Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton point out, the new natural silhouette marked a fundamental shift of emphasis in fashion away from the skills of tailoring to those based on the skills of draping, inspired by a mixture of sources, including the Greek chiton, the Japanese kimono and the North African caftan. ‘Poiret’s process of design through draping is the source of fashion’s modern forms,’ conclude Koda and Bolton.
Between 1906 and 1911, Poiret revived a high-waisted line, referencing both the Directoire period of the 1790s and the ancient Greeks. He mischievously provoked outrage by appearing at the Long-champ racetrack, accompanied by three young women wearing dresses with the sides slit from the knees showing off coloured stockings. He received even more precious media coverage in London by showing his collection at a tea party organised by Margot Asquith, wife of the prime minister. Poiret was by then a considerable celebrity in his own right, with the élan of a theatre impresario and a swaggering, confident personality that swept all before him. In 1909, he moved his premises to an eighteenth-century mansion on avenue d’Antin and created a veritable fashion empire, kept in check financially only by the conscientiousness of bookkeeper Emile Rousseau. Nor were his customers spared from his dominant, sometimes aggressive personality: Poiret, in his own eyes, could do no wrong. The cardboard sign outside his office read: ‘Danger!!! Before knocking ask yourself three times—Is it absolutely necessary to disturb HIM?’
His glory years saw Poiret move far beyond fashion, developing links with a series of artists, most notably Paul Iribe (who produced a catalogue of illustrations for him in 1908) and Raoul Dufy, who became a lifelong friend. Poiret’s catalogues prompted the creation by magazine editor Lucien Vogel of Gazette du bon ton, which was essential reading for the fashion set in Paris from 1912 to 1925. Poiret’s love of the theatre was reflected in a series of extravagant parties, the most notable being his ‘The Thousand and Second Night’ or ‘Persian Celebration’ in June 1911, where his 300 guests dressed in oriental costume and his wife, Denise, was locked in a golden cage and released like a bird. Erté became an assistant designer for Poiret in 1913, working with him on his theatrical designs. Poiret’s costumes for Mata Hari in a play, Le Minaret, were a sensation, featuring a tunic-crinoline shaped like a lampshade, which Erté said was ‘inspired by the transparent veils of the Hindu miniatures and by the pleated kilts of Greek folk costumes.’
Poiret foreshadowed the magpie tendencies of designers in the latter decades of the twentieth century through his happy plundering of styles from all points east of Paris. From harem pantaloons to kimono coats to Indian turbans, the couturier found inspiration in everything. His colour explosion brought orange, green, red and purple to the fore as never before, marking a break with the understated pastels of the Art Nouveau period. For a while, Poiret was the most celebrated couturier of the age, particularly famed for his coats, capes and cloaks, notable for their sheer lavish use of fabric, often with fur trimmings. By 1913, his love of bold colours and extravagant prints reflected the work of the Wiener Werkstatte, an influential decorative arts company in Vienna. Poiret did much to popularise the design ideas coming out of Austria and Germany (which led to some criticism from French patriots during the First World War).
Poiret always had entrepreneurial instincts and was bursting with ideas for making money. In 1913, he was the first couturier to embark on the conquest of America, touring department stores. Poiret was also the first couturier to give lectures, attracting huge audiences in the United States and across Europe. Despite his overbearing personality, he always insisted that the couturier’s role was not to be a dictator but to be a servant blessed with extreme sensitivity, able to detect the precise moment when a woman’s enthusiasm for a fashion was beginning to wane. His American tour was a triumph, but Poiret returned in a state of shock at the widespread copying of his designs. This led him to push for the creation in 1914 of Le Syndicat de Défense de la Grande Couture Française, of which he was the first president. Two years later, he tried a different strategy, producing reduced-price copies of his own dresses, advertised in Vogue in 1916 and also promoted in America. In her groundbreaking research, American academic Nancy Troy (2003) has shown the contradictions in the way Poiret presented himself as an artist not only to sell to wealthy clients but also to promote the mass production of his designs. The First World War put a stop to grand plans for expansion in America, and any last pretence at financial discipline evaporated after the war. Likewise, after the horrors of four years of war, Poiret’s love of theatrical extravagance struck a false note, contrasting with Chanel’s functional style and the garçonne look. Although Poiret continued to produce many outstanding collections, his heyday had passed, and a period of slow, sometimes painful decline followed.
Behind the extravagant personality, Poiret was a devoted father to his three children (Rosine, Martine and Colin, who all gave their names to the spurt of initiatives in 1911; he was devastated by the early death of Rosine from otitis). He divorced from his wife and muse, Denise, in 1928, telling the governess, ‘Make sure to tell Madame to take anything she wishes.’ In the 1920s, Poiret continued to have no lack of admirers and opportunities. The sadness was that his creative energies were matched by a reckless attitude to money that resulted in years of penury and near ruin despite the constant efforts of friends and admirers to help him out. By 1929, his extravagance led to the closure of his house, and the final years of his life were a depressing downward spiral, exacerbated by the advent of Parkinson’s disease. In 1937, a proposal raised at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture to grant Poiret a pension was vetoed by Jacques Worth.
However, the later years of his life were not empty and showed that Poiret was still a forward-thinking innovator. In 1927, he wrote a far-sighted article for The Forum magazine, predicting the future dominance of synthetics and plastics. In another groundbreaking move in the twilight years of his career, he designed for both Printemps and Liberty of London in the 1930s. Poiret’s status was fully recognised in 2007 through
a lavish exhibition, Poiret: King of Fashion, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, prompted by a treasure trove of clothing from the collection of his wife, Denise, that came up for auction in Paris in 2005: the Met acquired more than twenty pieces. In particular, a pair of 1920s nightdresses, inspired by classical Greek style and worn by Denise, confirm the lightness of his touch and the importance of his influence. But his more extravagant costumes also struck a chord. By the late 1920s, as fashion historian Caroline Rennolds Milbank put it: ‘Poiret’s global exoticism would not seem modern again until the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the haute couture had found new resonance as one of the most dramatic of arts.’
Fashion historian Diana de Marly called Poiret ‘a liberator’ (hobble skirts aside): his lean line marking the death knell of the restricted waist, his narrow styles reducing the need for layers of petticoats. Thanks to Poiret, clothes for women began the shift from burdensome impediment to lightweight and more practical adornment. For Met curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, Poiret ‘effectively established the canon of modern dress and developed the blueprint of the modern fashion industry.’ Poiret was indeed the precursor for much of the contemporary fashion world. Fashion historians are fortunate to have plenty of insights into his design philosophy from the couturier himself, thanks to his many lectures, magazine interviews and a late autobiography. Never mind that his message is sometimes as contradictory as those awkward hobble skirts. At his best, he stripped away the absurdities of late nineteenth-century European fashion and ushered in a new age for his customers, urging women to, in his own words, ‘simply wear what becomes you.’
Further reading: Paul Poiret summarised his own career in My First Fifty Years (trans., 1931). Biographers include Yvonne Deslandres, Poiret (1987); Alice Mackrell, Paul Poiret (1990); and Palmer White, Poiret (1973). Nancy Troy’s Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Culture (2003) highlights the commercial acumen of the couturier. Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton’s Poiret (2007), the catalogue to the Poiret: King of Fashion exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007, includes an illuminating reappraisal of his achievements.
5 MARIANO FORTUNY (1871–1949)
Not without reason was Mariano Fortuny known as a latter-day Renaissance man. The Spaniard’s span of interests was too broad for one-word descriptions. He was as much artist and inventor as designer: over three decades he registered more than twenty inventions in Paris. His great contribution to fashion, summed up in one dress, the Delphos, was to free the body from the restrictions of fashionable nineteenth-century dress. Created as early as 1907, the Delphos was a long, simply cut, pleated silk dress that hung loosely from the shoulders and could be scrunched up into ball for travelling. In an age when most women were tightly corseted and fitted, it represented a liberation, summed up best in photos from the period of the celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan in lithe, free-flowing garments. Fortuny recognised the importance of the Delphos, patenting one of the designs (with batwing sleeves) in Paris in 1909. Fortuny brought the worlds of art and fashion close together, as did his contemporary Sonia Delaunay. The interrelationship between art and fashion has been a theme in popular culture ever since, explored in the modern-day era by a host of designers, including Hussein Chalayan, Marc Jacobs and Viktor & Rolf.
Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo was born in Granada, Spain, in 1871 into a family full of artists and blessed with plenty of money. His father, Mariano, a distinguished painter, had married Cecilia de Madrazo, also from a family of artists. From 1872, they lived in Rome, where his father had a studio, and Paris. Mariano’s father died of malaria in 1874 at the age of only 36, a loss that grieved the son throughout his life (he edited a book on his father as late as 1933). Besides the skills of a painter, Mariano inherited from his father a taste for collecting antiques and objets d’art from exotic places, particularly the Arab world. The family collection included a treasure trove of textiles, often displayed as wall hangings.
After his father’s death, the family moved to Paris, where Fortuny began painting at the age of seven. He absorbed the work of the Old Masters, such as Rubens, learning the importance of colour that stood him in good stead in the future. The young Fortuny was plagued with asthma and hay fever in Paris, brought on by an allergic reaction to horses. So, in 1889, his mother moved with him and his sister, Maria Luisa, to horse-free Venice and the Palazzo Martinengo on the Grand Canal. Venice remained his base for the rest of his life. He attended night classes at the Accademia in Venice to improve his drawing and continued to copy the Old Masters, including Tintoretto and other great Venetian artists. Further inspiration came from a visit in 1892 to Bayreuth, home of opera composer Richard Wagner. The grand all-embracing vision of Wagner inspired Fortuny, who immersed himself in the world of theatre for many years, developing new lighting systems. Fortuny was as much technician as artist. All art forms had merit in his vision, and everything could be harnessed by the artist.
In 1897, Fortuny met a young Frenchwoman, Henriette Negrin, in Paris. Despite his mother’s lifelong disapproval (Henriette was a divorcee), Fortuny adored her for the rest of his life as wife, lover, companion and muse. She moved to Venice in 1902, by which time Fortuny had relocated to his own home, the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei. This splendid thirteenth-century palazzo, built on a truly Wagnerian scale, was the perfect stage for Fortuny to develop his ideas and inventions and display his antiques collection. A vast salon-studio was at the heart of the palazzo, though the private rooms were relatively small and simple. Here, Fortuny was able to play the host. A tall man with piercing blue eyes, he wore lightweight suits in dark blue serge with a white silk cravat and cut a dash in Venice, where a new generation of artists had been emerging since the 1880s. There was a sizeable foreign colony, attracted by this most romantic of cities. He got to know Italy’s leading literary star, Gabriele D’Annunzio, whom he met for the first time in 1894.
However, any attempt to locate Fortuny within the context of artistic movements of the time is tricky because the man himself largely ignored the work of his contemporaries and rarely stepped outside Venice. His biographer, Guillermo de Osma, situated him most convincingly within the Aesthetic Movement, whose exponents thought clothing had become a prison. The Aesthete painters looked back for inspiration to classical Greece and the Middle Ages (the dress of that period was particularly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites). But these clothes were only featured in their paintings and never realised, with the single exception of some toga satin dresses produced by Liberty’s of London, inspired by the work of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
Fortuny’s move into the world of textiles and fashion is thought to have begun in 1906 by experimenting with the printing of textiles at his palazzo. Some sketches for a play, Francesca da Rimini, were turned into costumes, receiving a lukewarm response. More promising were costumes for a ballet in Paris in the same year featuring his distinctive silk veils printed with geometric designs inspired by Cycladic art. These became known as Knossos scarves, which was a touch misleading because they were rectangular pieces of silk that could be used in all sorts of ways, as much clothing as accessory. They remained a feature of his work for more than fifteen years. ‘From these simple scarves, which showed him how to fuse form and fabric, Fortuny developed his entire production of dresses,’ wrote his biographer Guillermo de Osma. The Knossos scarf was most impressively worn over the celebrated Delphos dress. Fortuny’s patent registration described it thus: ‘Its design is so shaped and arranged that it can be worn and adjusted with ease and comfort.’ To this day, there is some mystery over how Fortuny created the pleating on the dress. The folds are irregular and were probably developed by applying heat while the material was wet. With the exception of hand-blown glass beads from Murano, everything was made by hand at the Palazzo. To counter the stretchiness of the pleats, Fortuny sewed cords strung with beads along the sides of his dresses.
Fortuny began with silk, usually bought raw and in off-white and imported direct fr
om China and Japan; later he added velvet, imported from Lyons. Both silk and velvet were used in countless variations. He experimented enthusiastically with printing, using wood blocks initially, then introducing hand-painting and developing his own high-quality stencils made of silk. He created his own colours, exploring ingredients from many sources and countries. Kennedy Fraser, writing in The New Yorker in 1981, commented: ‘The colors that Fortuny created are still rare and luscious after the passage of decades: blushing peach and apricot, purple grape and candlelit claret, blue of fountains and of peacocks’ tails.’
Fortuny was never recognised as a creator of fashion by the couturiers in Paris. In the early years, his dresses were worn only at home, considered far too louche for formal outdoors wear. He stood outside the rigidly controlled couture system and chose instead to develop his own sales and marketing operation. This included a ground-floor shop at the Palazzo and a small network of shops and sales agents across Europe. Two of the literary giants of the period did their best to create an aura around Fortuny’s work. Marcel Proust refers to Fortuny no less than sixteen times in his novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). Gabriele D’Annunzio referenced Fortuny beautifully for one of his fictional heroines, the Marchesa Casati Stampa: ‘She was enveloped in one of those very long scarves of Oriental Gauze that the alchemist Mariano Fortuny plunges into the mysterious dyes of his vats and withdraws tinted with strange dreams, and with his thousand hand-printing blocks marks new generations for stars, planets, animals.’