Despegando

In the fl edgling years of the twentieth century, Mad-eleine Vionnet liberated women from the corset, inspired by the celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan, whom she never met but admired from afar. For that alone, Vionnet was an important force in the history of fashion, but there was much else besides. Her achievements overshadow her personality, for she was a reticent person compared with such contem-poraries as the effusive Paul Poiret. Vionnet was re-luctant to attend client fi ttings, locked herself away in quiet isolation in her rooms at 50 avenue Mon-taigne, and draped material for hours over three-foot-high rosewood dolls with articulated joints.

Perhaps, if she had been less reticent, she might have made an even bigger splash. In 1973, two years before her death, a series of forty-one vintage dresses by Vionnet, displayed at the groundbreak-ing exhibition, Inventive Clothes: 1909–1939, stole the show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her inspiration was classical Greek dress, which she studied up close on ancient Greek vases in the Louvre. A plethora of modern designers continue to adore her work, applauding her ability to made fabric come alive. Japan’s Issey Miyake commented: ‘Vionnet’s clothes are based on the dynamics of movement, and they never stray from this fundamental ideology.’

Contrary to legend, she did not invent the bias cut.

This form-enhancing technique of cutting material across the grain was used before Vionnet for collars, cuffs and trimmings. Vionnet’s achievement was to explore the full potential of the bias cut, creating entire dresses cut on the bias or using it for inserts or panels. Although the fi nished result was effort-less to the eye, it was diffi cult to complete without

the fabric puckering and bunching up. Fashion his-torians Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton point out that in order to meet the demands of cutting on the bias, fabrics were woven twice as wide as was then customary. The ideal fabric for her experi-ments was crêpe romaine or crêpe de Chine, al-though she also explored bias cut with velvet and even heavy tweed.

Although her skilful and original tailoring should not be overlooked, it was her talent with the draping of cloth for dresses that put her in a league of her own, much admired later in the century by design-ers such as Azzedine Alaia, who created a photo sequence to demonstrate exactly how he believed it was done. ‘Dresses designed by Vionnet hang freely, and the technique of twisting the material gives us this unexpected draped effect,’ he ex-plained.

Born in 1876, Madeleine Vionnet was accustomed to working hard. From the age of twelve, she toiled for long days as a lacework apprentice to the wife of a neighbour in the village of Aubervilliers in the Loiret. Her family was from the Jura Mountains, but it was not much of a family, her parents separat-ing when she was two, and her toll inspector father only too ready to put her to work at an early age. At eighteen, she was briefl y and unhappily married to Emile Deyroutot, and bore one child who died in in-fancy. Then, at the age of just twenty, demonstrat-ing exceptional courage and strength of character, she left both her husband and her country to move to England, where she landed a job in Dover Street, London, at the premises of Kate Reilly, who specia-lised in high-quality copies of Parisian designers.

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These were the years of learning, although Vionnet was clearly quick at doing so, assuming responsi-bility for an atelier of twelve seamstresses.

By 1901 she was back in Paris, working as head seamstress at the house of Callot Soeurs, em-ployed by the eldest sister, Madame Gerber.

‘Thanks to her, I was able to produce Rolls-Royces,’

Vionnet later remarked. ‘Without her, I would only have made Fords.’ However, it was at the house of Jacques Doucet, where Vionnet moved after fi ve years, that she fi rst enjoyed signifi cant creative freedom. Doucet, who had an eye for new talent, hoped Vionnet would bring a young spirit to his house. He got more than he bargained for: a col-lection by Vionnet for Doucet in 1907, rippling with the spirit of Isadora Duncan (the models were both barefoot and corset-less), was not well received, ei-ther externally or internally. Vionnet did at least fi nd an early champion in the radiantly beautiful actress Lantelme, who admired her ‘ deshabilles that can be worn in public’.

Lantelme’s early death robbed her of a possible muse and fi nancial backer. Both Vionnet and Poiret claimed to have been fi rst to ditch the corset, al-though Fortuny was producing his Delphos dresses in Venice in 1907 and Gustav Klimt was designing uncorseted dresses in Vienna as early as 1902 for the Flöge sisters’ fashion house, as fashion his-torians Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton have highlighted.

By 1912, Vionnet had assiduously saved enough money to open her own house at 222 rue de Rivoli with backing from another client, Germaine Lillas.

She achieved some progress until war intervened and forced her to close shop before the business was picked up again in 1918. Vionnet fast estab-lished a reputation for purity of vision and a series of immaculately conceived dresses, such as her exquisite four-pointed dress. Her core skill was in focusing intensely on a simple fabric shape such as a square, circle or triangle, building a dress with the shoulders and waistline as the natural anchor-ing points. In the 1970s, American conservator Betty Kirke exhaustively explored her technique and re created many of the dresses, revealing many of Vionnet’s tricks that had hitherto been somewhat of a mystery to modern designers. The

dresses were also sometimes a mystery to the cli-ents, some of whom were forced to call at the stu-dio to be reminded as to the correct way to twist and drape the fabric.

By the early 1920s, Vionnet’s work was attracting suffi cient attention for her to become embroiled in a lawsuit over copyright, a perpetual issue for de-signers then—and now. In 1922, her business had achieved suffi cient momentum for her to move to a spacious new location at 50 avenue Montaigne, where Georges de Feure was commissioned to decorate the walls with friezes that paid homage to both ancient Greece and Vionnet’s own de-signs. Here, she had the resources to develop a fashion house that, at its peak in the 1930s, com-prised twenty-six ateliers and 1,200 seamstresses.

Vionnet rightly drew recognition for her responsi-ble treatment of her seamstresses, which was well ahead of the standards of the time. The avenue Montaigne property was well lit, and the seam-stresses were provided with chairs with backrests rather than stools. The young women also ate at a staff canteen and could make use of an in-house doctor’s surgery. Madeleine Chapsal, her god-daughter, said: ‘I never heard her use the word, yet indeed she was a feminist to the very depths of her soul.’

Through the 1920s, the house grew steadily. In 1924, Madeleine Vionnet, Inc. was founded in New York, with a boutique on Fifth Avenue and the sale of designs in one size with unfi nished hems that could be altered to fi t clients. Another boutique followed in 1925 back home in France in Biarritz. Besides bias-cut dresses, other innovations included the cowl collar that hung forward, sometimes known as

‘the Vionnet drip’, and her exploration of the scarf, considered by her to be an integral part of a look, whether draped round the neck or hips or knotted at the wrist. She also created a dress with different gradations of colour, achieved by soaking the ma-terial for varying lengths of time. On her behalf, Les-age even developed new embroidery techniques (such as the vermicelle straight grain, with each point worked to follow the warp or weft) to create embroideries that worked with bias-cut dresses.

The rose was Vionnet’s favoured motif, especially the American Beauty rose, which had caught her eye on a trip to the United States in 1924.

VIONNET

After the Great Crash of 1929, hemlines plum-meted and the classical infl uences and sculpted forms of Vionnet’s designs were appreciated more than ever. The essence of Vionnet is best summed up in the captivating black-and-white photos of Hoyningen-Huene, published in Vogue in Novem-ber 1931, depicting house model Sonia as a danc-ing nymph in an ancient Greek bas-relief. The material fl oats as light as air, with body and dress fl owing in effortless harmony. Vionnet responded to the romantic revival of the mid-1930s with a series of fuller skirts and period-style dresses, although these styles were perhaps more to the taste of Marcelle Chapsal, her closest collaborator throughout her career. Vionnet herself disliked the switches of direction that are so intrinsic to fashion.

In a rare and comprehensive interview with Marie Claire in May 1937, she said: ‘I proved myself to be an enemy of fashion. There is something fi ckle and superfi cial about the whims of each new season that offends my sense of beauty.’ Instead, she said, her focus was consistent and rigorously concen-trated on the four principles of ‘proportion, move-ment, balance and precision.’

Although in later life she claimed to stand outside fashion (most interviews with her date from her re-tirement), detailed examination of her collections shows that she did seek to respond to the mood of the times. Madeleine Ginsburg reported that a collection in 1934 was scrapped two weeks before launch while Vionnet hurriedly responded to the more romantic mood sweeping through fashion.

Severely dressed and obsessively hard-working, Vionnet did fi nd time for a private life. She married for the second time in 1923, although her choice of husband was ill-advised. Dimitri Netchvolodoff (‘Netch’), a Russian, was extravagant and not pos-sessed of Vionnet’s own disciplined work ethic. She used to describe herself with a certain grim humour as his banker, although he did do some work, run-ning a Vionnet-backed shoe shop at 8 rue Troyon.

There were some happy times, not least at her

houses at Cely-en-Biere near Fontainebleau and 3 place Antonin Arnaud in Paris or her summer home (known as the Maison Blanche) in Bandol in the south of France where she holidayed with Netch and Marcelle Chapsal’s family. But the marriage gradually disintegrated, ending in divorce in 1943.

By then, her fashion house had also closed. The fi nal years were diffi cult for Vionnet after a traumatic falling-out with long-term company shareholder Theophile Bader, owner of the Galeries Lafayette.

His proposal to create an in-store boutique selling copies of Vionnet and other couturiers incensed her, leading to a legal battle that Vionnet won in 1939. But Bader had simultaneously won control of the business, leading to Vionnet’s decision to quit.

The house went into liquidation in 1940. The do-nation of dresses, toiles and copyright albums to the Union Française des Arts du Costume (UFAC) in 1952 helped to ensure proper recognition of her contribution to design. Modern designers turn to Vionnet time and time again. As Betty Kirke pointed out, ‘Whenever the silhouette is soft, people . . . look at Vionnet.’ She lived for many decades be-yond her retirement, becoming the grande dame of the couture world, always ready to dispense advice and occasionally presenting classes on sewing or bias cut. When she became bedridden, Balenciaga made for her a pink printed, silk quilted trouser-suit in which she received visitors. She died in 1975 at the age of 99. The Vionnet trademark was acquired in 1998 by the Lummen family, who sold it on to Matteo Marzotto and Gianni Castiglioni in Febru-ary 2009. A retrospective at Les Arts Decoratifs museum in Paris in 2009 drew tremendous media interest.

Further reading: American Betty Kirke did much to keep the name of Vionnet in the spotlight, not least with her book Madeleine Vionnet (1998). Also worth reading is Madeleine Vionnet (1996), a biography by Jacqueline Demornex. Women and Fashion:

A New Look (1989), by Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton, has some valuable observations.

SCHIAPARELLI

Art met fashion head on in the form of Elsa Schia-parelli, an Italian designer who came to fashion late and proved a breath of fresh air in a world often caught up in its own high seriousness. She was a surrealist by instinct with a playful ability to change the predictable into the unpredictable. To the sur-realists, one might also add the Italian futurists, whose verve, speed and joie de vivre excited the young Schiaparelli. All this energy was encapsu-lated in the intense pink—shocking pink—that be-came her hallmark. ‘Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fi sh in the world put together . . . a shocking colour,’ she said with suitable hyperbole in an auto-biography that shares some of the surreal charac-teristics of her design work.

Even now, her best work is startlingly, thrillingly modern. Choose from the crossword-puzzle sweaters and zippered dresses, the knitted hats and costume jewellery, the culottes and jumpsuits, the experimentation with new synthetic fabrics, and, above all, the bold way with colours. Her cel-ebrated tear dress, made from a fabric designed by Salvador Dali, created the illusion of material that had been ripped: to modern eyes, it looks thoroughly Punk in spirit. Ignorance was bliss for this untrained fashion designer. Rules were there to break, and Schiaparelli enjoyed upsetting the bourgeoisie. ‘Madame Schiaparelli trampled down everything that was commonplace,’ said Yves Saint Laurent, who dressed her and adored her. She was, said her biographer Palmer White,

‘a gifted bull in a china shop.’ Meanwhile, her arch rival, Chanel, derided her as ‘that Italian who’s making clothes.’

Schiaparelli was from a conventional enough back-ground, born in Rome in 1890, the daughter of Celestino, a Piedmontese intellectual who was in charge of Rome’s historic Lincei Library. Her mother, Maria Luisa, was from an aristocratic family in Na-ples. She spent her childhood in Rome’s Palazzo Corsini, surrounded by art and history, growing up with a surfeit of potential inspiration about her.

A sensitive, shy young girl, she initially experimented with poetry and published her fi rst book at the age of 20. The passionate subject matter shocked her father, who promptly dispatched his daughter to a convent. She in turn went on hunger strike and had to be withdrawn. In 1913, Schiaparelli visited Paris for the fi rst time and was thrilled by the city’s energy, attending a ball dressed in a hastily con-cocted pair of Poiret-style pantaloons. From Paris, she travelled on to England, where she had been invited to assist at an orphanage in Kent. While vis-iting London, she met the French-Swiss theologian Comte William de Wendt de Kerlor, to whom she was quickly married in 1914. The marriage was a disaster and did not survive a move to New York in 1919. But it was in New York that she met Gabrielle Picabia, wife of the artist Francis Picabia, and be-came part of an artistic circle that included Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.

An impoverished Schiaparelli returned to Europe in 1922 with her baby daughter Yvonne (known as Gogo) and an American friend, Blanche Hays. She had no money but all the right contacts in the ar-tistic and creative milieu of Paris. For her old friend Gabrielle Picabia, she made a gown, which drew compliments from the couturier Paul Poiret. En-couraged by this and despite her lack of expertise,

10 ELSA SCHIAPARELLI