Some people call French couturier Paul Poiret, who was known for his richly ornate tea gowns, Oriental bloomers and hobble skirts in the early 1900s, the first real “fashion designer.” That distinction should probably belong to English designer Charles Frederick Worth, from the 19th century, or even Rose Bertin long before him—she was Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker and a sort of cult personality in her own right. But Poiret was the first, perhaps, to consider himself an “artist,” and the first to expand his fashion empire to include perfumes, even though he did die forgotten and penniless. But, yes, he was an artiste, of the highest order. Just look at this fountain dress, made of cloth and dangling pearls. Extravagant, ridiculous, amazing.
“Fountain” costume designed by Paul Poiret, early 1900s.
(Source: deadbirdsclub)
Cubist Fashion!
During the 1910s through the ’20s, fashion abandoned the sculpted, exaggerated dresses of the Belle Epoque for something softer, lighter, more amorphous. Gone were the corsets and bustles and puff sleeves and heavy brocades that molded the female form into an exaggerated, womanly hourglass: Instead, designers like Callot Soeurs and Coco Chanel flattened, or even obscured, it with light fabrics — sometimes layered, sometimes adorned with surface beading or embroidery.
But, of course, fashion does not exist in a vacuum. It reflected the speed and volatility of modern life — of the Great War and industrialization and women’s greater freedom and the quickening pace of everything. And it also drew from art, especially Cubism. Like these new fashions, Cubism flattened and abstracted the figure, making it fragmented, geometric, dynamic. So you get the crazy collagist prints in a Nemser day dress that echo the disjointed cityscapes of Fernand Leger, or the linear liquid Vionnet dress that’s segmented into incoherent sections by a metallic cord.
The images in the collage/slideshow above are a smattering of dresses and paintings included in the book Cubism and Fashion, the accompanying catalog to a 1998 Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (I picked it up at the Strand recently for $10.) I hope to do some posts looking at particular dresses and paintings more deeply, but in the meantime, enjoy!
All the dress images are from the Met’s website. Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower is at the Guggenheim in New York, and MOMA has the Duchamp and Picasso.
Robert Henri, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1916, The Whitney Museum of Art
Robert Henri’s portrait of art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1916) is one of my favorite paintings from the exhibition Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time, currently at the Whitney. Henri has captured the quintessential modern woman of the time: She has this exotic, louche quality in the way she is splayed on the couch, in the direct, coy look she gives us, in the exotic blue silk embroidered jacket and teal pajama pants she wears. Bohemians and art patrons were mad about Orientalism at the time, and her outfit recalls Paul Poiret’s Oriental-inspired couture of the early 1900s. Yet Whitney’s outfit is much lighter and more modern (Poiret may have abolished the corset, but he did design the constricting “hobble” skirt). Whitney’s jacket and pantsuit look a bit like Belgian designer Dries Van Noten’s multicultural mash-ups today. Indeed, she was so ahead of her time that her husband refused to hang a portrait of his wife wearing pants in their Fifth Avenue home, for fear it would scandalize visitors.
