The Great Fashion Designers (10 page)

In the fledgling years of the twentieth century, Madeleine 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 contemporaries as the effusive Paul Poiret. Vionnet was reluctant to attend client fittings, locked herself away in quiet isolation in her rooms at 50 avenue Montaigne, 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 groundbreaking 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 finished result was effortless to the eye, it was difficult to complete without the fabric puckering and bunching up. Fashion historians 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 experiments was crêpe romaine or crêpe de Chine, although 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 designers 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 explained.

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 separating 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 briefly and unhappily married to Emile Deyroutot, and bore one child who died in infancy. Then, at the age of just twenty, demonstrating 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 specialised in high-quality copies of Parisian designers.
These were the years of learning, although Vionnet was clearly quick at doing so, assuming responsibility for an atelier of twelve seamstresses.

By 1901 she was back in Paris, working as head seamstress at the house of Callot Soeurs, employed 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 five years, that she first enjoyed significant 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 collection 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, either externally or internally. Vionnet did at least find 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 financial backer. Both Vionnet and Poiret claimed to have been first to ditch the corset, although 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 historians 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 established 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 anchoring points. In the 1970s, American conservator Betty Kirke exhaustively explored her technique and recreated 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 clients, some of whom were forced to call at the studio to be reminded as to the correct way to twist and drape the fabric.

By the early 1920s, Vionnet's work was attracting sufficient attention for her to become embroiled in a lawsuit over copyright, a perpetual issue for designers then—and now. In 1922, her business had achieved sufficient 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 designs. Here, she had the resources to develop a fashion house that, at its peak in the 1930s, comprised twenty-six ateliers and 1,200 seamstresses. Vionnet rightly drew recognition for her responsible treatment of her seamstresses, which was well ahead of the standards of the time. The avenue Montaigne property was well lit, and the seamstresses 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 goddaughter, 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 unfinished hems that could be altered to fit 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 material for varying lengths of time. On her behalf, Lesage 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.

After the Great Crash of 1929, hemlines plummeted and the classical influences 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 November 1931, depicting house model Sonia as a dancing nymph in an ancient Greek bas-relief. The material floats as light as air, with body and dress flowing 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 fickle and superficial about the whims of each new season that offends my sense of beauty.' Instead, she said, her focus was consistent and rigorously concentrated on the four principles of ‘proportion, movement, balance and precision.'

Although in later life she claimed to stand outside fashion (most interviews with her date from her retirement), 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 find 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 possessed 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, running 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 final years were difficult 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 donation 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 beyond 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 February 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.

Art met fashion head on in the form of Elsa Schiaparelli, 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 surrealists, one might also add the Italian futurists, whose verve, speed and joie de vivre excited the young Schiaparelli. All this energy was encapsulated in the intense pink—shocking pink—that became her hallmark. ‘Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together … a shocking colour,' she said with suitable hyperbole in an autobiography that shares some of the surreal characteristics 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 celebrated 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.'