Paul Poiret

“WHEN I PUT MY SIGNATURE ON A DRESS, I REGARD MYSELF AS THE CREATOR OF A WORK OF ART.”

Paul Poiret is ranked among the outstanding artistic personalities in fashion history. With his new lines, developed in the first two decades of the twentieth century, he pointed the way towards a modern era. He was not only a couturier for the avant-garde but also a visionary and entrepreneur, one who was prepared to take risks, pressed forward into foreign territory, and won a great deal, but, in the end, also lost everything.

Poiret began his career with a commercial apprenticeship, while sketching and drawing in his spare time. Madame Cheruit – who bought fashion sketches from him – introduced him to Jacques Doucet (1853-1929) who gave him the opportunity to learn the basics of haute couture while working in his studio. There he learned Doucet’s technique of designing directly on the body, a method which he was to retain all his life. In 1899 Poiret was entrusted with the task of designing a coat for the famous actress Rejane,  and his design caused a furor. When Poiret parted company with Doucet because of conflicts of loyalty, Poiret used the opportunity to develop his esprit nouveau for the House of Worth, which he did for two years prior to opening his own haute couture salon in 1903.

Denise Boulet, Poiret's wife was his muse.

His fashion boutique, with its extravagant ambience and theatrical models in exotic, expressive, and colourful designs, found a favorable response among the avant-garde. Poiret’s creations were often worn by his wife, Denise Boulet. In 1906 she appeared in one of his first, corset-free dresses, and photos taken around 1910 show her in thin chemises a la Grece. Dressed in an Orient-inspired costume, she caused a huge sensation at the “A Thousand and One Nights” party organized by Poiret. Poiret’s “lampshade” tunics and “Turkish” harem pants were also a media event – the scandal of the 1910/11 season.

Poiret saw himself as an artist and considered the fine and applied arts as parts of a unified entity. He had an excellent understanding of how to spotlight his fashions through social events: his models made public appearances, and he hosted tours, showed films of fashion parades, and initiated book projects with Paul Iribe and Georges Lepape. All of which had the intention of not only illustrating his modish creations but also of interpreting fashion in a free and artistic manner. He commissioned Erte to do drawings for him, and in 1911 he collaborated with the painter Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) to design fabrics. These activities were decidedly innovative, as was his penchant for starting businesses: he established a perfume factory with a couturier (Rosine, 1911), set up a craft school and craft shop (Ecole Martine, 1911), and opened a workshop for packaging design (Collin, 1912). With his instinctive feel for the wishes of his chic female clientele he became highly successful and was soon the owner of a complex of houses in the heart of Paris.

During World War I, Poiret’s fashion house was closed, and after its reopening he had difficulties adjusting to the new conditions. By 1925 he was in financial ruin, his businesses were sold, his painting collection was auctioned off, and in 1929 his salon was declared bankrupt.

Next topic: Femmes de la Mode

Orientalism and Opulence

“A CULTURED ELITE DRESSED WITH DISTURBING OPULENCE. JAPONISME SUPERSEDED THE POTPOURRI THAT WAS HISTORICISM…” (URSULA VOSS, 1986)

The Orient has been a source of inspiration for fashion designers since the seventeenth century, when the waters of India, China, and Turkey were first widely seen in Western Europe. While the sue of the term “Orientalism” has changed over time, around 1900 it referred to the appropriation by western designers of exotic stylistic conventions from diverse cultures, and the Asian continent. This trend reached and apex in the early twentieth century, and the sources for this mania for ‘all things oriental” ranged from a nostalgia for the legends of Persia and Arabia, as popularized by A Thousand and One Nights, to the Paris debut of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909. This burst of Orient-inspired creativity in the realm of fashion also had lesser-known sources, including the avant-garde art movement Fauvism and Japanese kimonos made expressly for the western market.

French couturiers, such as Paul Poiret and Jeanne Paquin, were inspired by the Ballets Russes’ performances of Cleopatre, Scheherazade, and Le Dieu Bleu. This Russian dance company took Paris by storm with their revolutionary choreography, music, and costume and set designs by the Russian artist Leon Bakst (1886-1924). In addition to these fantastic costume shapes and opulent decorative elements, couturiers incorporated the vibrant colour palette of Fauve artists such as Henri Matisse. Not only did designers create garments with Orientalist influences, so did the modistes: turbans topped with aigrette or ostrich plumes and secured with jeweled ornaments were paired with neo-classic and exotic silhouettes.

The modern couturiers’ adoption of the construction elements in East Asian garments was another crucial innovation in twentieth-century fashion. One prime source was the flowing Japanese kimono, a garment that began to be exported to the West after 1854, when this island-nation was opened to the West. The reverence for textiles held by the Japanese (and many other non-western cultures) discouraged the cutting of fabric necessary for European, body-fitting fashions that divided the female form into a corseted of bodice on top and a full, floor-length skirt below. In the decade prior to the onset of World War I, the demise of the corset was imminent. Revolutionary couturiers like Marie Callot Gerber (1895-1937), for the House of Callot, found inspiration in the drapery-like quality of kimonos, Loosely cut sleeves and crossed bodices were incorporated into evening dresses while opera coats swathed the body like batwinged cocoons.

Madame Gerber created some the earliest versions of the harem pants, “Turkish” pants. From 1910 to the outbreak of World War I, acclaimed beauty and woman of style, Rita de Acosta Lydig, worked with Gerber to create versions of Oriental costumes that were composed of vests made from seventeenth-century needle lace or one-piece garments that were made like pants instead of skirts. Often called the tango dress, after the new dance craze imported from Argentina, this style was popularized by couturiers like Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon, 1863-1935) and by fashion illustrators Paul Iribe (1883-1935), Georges Barbier (1882-1932), and Georges Lepape (1887-1971).  

Next topic: Paul Poiret