Madeleine Vionnet: The purist of fashion

PARIS, France — Madeleine Vionnet was finally given a long-due major retrospective of her work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Not as hyped as Coco Chanel, this French designer was a revolutionary who has largely been forgotten by today’s fashion insiders. But ask any prominent designer and he would utter her name with a reverence for the legacy that she has passed on. Even Karl Lagerfeld, despite his loyalty to Coco, the founder of the house he designs for, credits Vionnet for her innovative techniques that liberated women from the constraints of the Victorian corset. John Galliano, who built his career on a revival of her famous bias-cutting, was one of the most passionate about the exhibit, even sending his seamstresses at Dior to go and see it. Azzedine Alaïa, whom Cathy Horyn of the New York Times calls “The Vionnet of our Times,” was just as effusive: “It’s truly beautiful, each dress is a masterpiece. She’s the mother of us all.” And this from someone who collects her dresses so obsessively that he has lost count of how many he owns.

We were just as excited for this exhibit, the scale of which was happening for the first time in 35 years since the designer’s death in 1975. It was also showcasing a treasure trove which Vionnet herself donated to the museum in 1952: 122 dresses, 750 dress patterns and 75 albums of photos,copyrights and books from her personal library. Just as she was meticulous in her designs, so was she in keeping a fashion archive. A major restoration program was undertaken since 2007 to bring the dresses back to life.

And what a new life they had! With Andrée Putman’s sleek design of mirrored vitrines devoid of unnecessary sets or props and all graphics and information contained in discreet, steel-encased digital screens positioned below each headless mannequin, the 70- to 90-year- old clothes were so right now. Putman was definitely the right choice for this exhibit which was aptly subtitled “Puriste de la Mode.”

The entrance to the exhibit featured the work of another purist, futurist artist Ernesto Michahelles a.k.a. Thayaht who designed the Vionnet logo of a woman holding up her sheath of a dress above her shoulders. Designed in 1922, it works just as well for the house of Vionnet today, this time outlined in red neon.

But what was most amazing was that the clothes did not age in style nor in spirit. Stylists could very well pluck out red-carpet numbers to dress their Oscar clients and couture clients will easily find the right dress for a coming ball or cocktail party. There are also day frocks that are well-cut and perfect for a charity lunch.

Vionnet’s creations are even so current now that there is a predilection for the minimal. But the simplicity of the pieces is deceiving, disguising intricate and painstaking techniques that go into each piece. “A true creation must necessarily and naturally be laborious:  whoever creates must struggle and suffer, ” Vionnet said once.

The same could also be said of her rise to couture fame. Born to a poor family in central France in 1876, her parents separated when she was only three years old. Her mother left them to open a vaudeville casino, after which her father brought her to live with him in a suburb of Paris. She wanted to become a teacher but with limited means, she had to forego studies to become an apprentice in a couture shop at age 11. After a brief marriage at age 18, she left her husband and went to work in London, learning the trade from various houses like the court dressmaker Kate Reilly.

But it was back in Paris in 1900, working with the famous Callot sisters that she acknowledged a great debt: “Without them I would have continued to make Fords. It’s because of them that I am able to create Rolls Royces.” With her newly acquired skills, she was asked to help modernize the dusty couture house of Jacques Doucet. It was here where she rebelled against the existing predilection for corsets, dismissing them as “orthopedic devices.” She also eschewed padding, stiffening and anything that disrupted the natural curves of a woman’s body, not to mention the body’s essential comfort. She tried to find alternatives for boning, eventually presenting a collection of loose-fitting deshabillés on bare bodies. The cut of these garments eliminated the need for lining, as well as the buttons, hooks and snaps that had held women’s garments in place. It also did not require a corset, resulting in a liberating silhouette exemplified by her models who came out moving freely with bare feet. At a time when women needed the help of their mothers and maids to dress, Vionnet announced that they could now finally clothe themselves! The collection drew raves from actresses and other forward thinkers, but was considered too audacious by everyone else. During a time of embellished Orientalist fantasies like those of Poiret, deshabillés which were normally for lounging were just too revolutionary to wear outside the home. The salesgirls at Doucet also found Vionnet’s less decorative and unrestricted silhouettes too plain and downright heretical and refused to show them to clients.

Frustrated, Vionnet decided to open her own fashion house in 1912 at Rue de Rivoli. Here she continued her vision of modern dress. A lot of her inspiration came from Ancient Greece – classical sculpture, architecture, theories of mathematical harmony. She was drawn to Greek attire, particularly the peplos, a tubular garment made from a rectangular sheet that draped around the body, gathered about the waist and knotted over the shoulders. It was so primal for her, the first cloth that enveloped the body, from which nothing has been cut. She was also influenced by dancers like Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan who favored the use of flowing fabrics and garments which appear to float freely around the body rather than distort or mold its shape. She eventually found her natural ally in the Bias Cut which helped her realize a lot of the designs in her mind. This cut was used only for small pieces like cap sleeves but she was the first to use it on a whole dress. By cutting diagonally against the grain of the fabric, she discovered that it could better cling to the body while moving with the wearer. It also allowed her to elegantly drape fabric in sensuous folds, orchestrating a dance between figure, cloth and gravity. She used fabric to express, rather than cover, the body.

Vionnet’s designs actually required a lengthy preparation process which was quite unorthodox. Instead of making drawings or preparatory sketches, she would cut, drape and pin fabrics on a miniature 2-foot wooden mannequin that was attached to the rotating seat of a piano stool. This created the necessary distance from the female form, encouraging greater abstraction and helping her realize a more formal vision and conceptual purity. Its smaller scale also made the fabric less cumbersome, allowing for easier manipulation.

It was on this miniature that Vionnet would perfect her mind-boggling way of cutting that was based on a rigorous study of squares, rectangles and circles. Influenced by the Purism movement launched in 1918 by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, she believed that “dressmaking should be organized like an industry, and the couturier should be a geometrician, for the human body makes geometrical figures to which the materials should correspond.” Putting together these geometric shapes like a puzzle allowed her to create many vastly different designs like her signature robe quatre mouchoirs or four handkerchief dress (winter 1920), made from 4 square panels of ivory crepe silk with a neckline plunging into a vertiginous V that gathers around the natural waistline, from which folds of fabric cascade into a rugged hemline. It was in the arrangement of these archetypal shapes — which were gathered, pleated, knotted, twisted and slashed — that her stylistic vocabulary was expressed and found form.

With this system she was also able to devise a way of using a whole cut of fabric with no waste, leading to her invention of the seamless and one-seam dress, a challenge which couturiers such as Balenciaga, Alaïa and Yamamoto have attempted to better since. The exhibit had an amazing computerized rendering of the process which demonstrated her genius. There were also animations of pattern pieces that revealed how those puzzling shapes she created moved together to create deceptively simple dresses, including a 1929 crêpe de chine creation made from two circles.

Aside from crêpe de chine, gabardine and satin were her fabrics of choice. She would order fabrics two yards wider than necessary in order to accommodate draping, creating dresses that were luxurious and sensual but also simple and modern. Aside from the handkerchief dress, breakthrough Vionnet styles include the cowl neck, and halter top. Essentially, she defined the modernist look of her era — using a language of extreme sophistication, where decorative elements such as rose motifs and fringes, drapes and twists formed the structure of her much-coveted dresses, rather than being mere appendage. “I only like decoration if it plays second to the architecture of a dress,” the couturier used to say. She even seldom used print or pattern which she thought would interfere with the clever seam lines in her use of cut, and was also very careful with color: “Above all, the purity of solid colors. Black, white and good, clean tones. Blues and greens that set off eye colors, reds that echo lips, but no poorly defined colors.” She was really no colorist and in fact her use of neutral and flesh tones was more interesting, relying on shading and play on light that was captured in her intricate use of drape.

Her quietly sensual creations meant one had to have a certain confidence and sophistication to wear them. The fabrics were luxurious and the proportion and technique, perfectionist. An inimitable combination of comfort and glamour made Vionnet’s clothes a favorite among European nobility and Hollywood royalty from Mrs. Edouard de Rothschild and Mrs. Robert Lazard to Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Princesse de Faucingy-Lucinge and Begum Aga Khan. “Her clientele were women who didn’t need all the frills you could find at other fashion houses,” says Pamela Golbin, curator of the exhibit. “And she was unapologetically the most expensive in Paris.” Socialites and other trendsetters from as far away as South America would make the pilgrimage to her shop in a lavish townhouse on Paris’Avenue Montaigne.

Opened in 1923, this second shop of Vionnet was called the “Temple of Fashion,” a collaboration of architect Ferdinand Chanut, decorator George de Feure and crystal sculptor René Lalique, incorporating a spectacular Salon de Présentacion, a fur salon and a lingerie salon. By 1932, it consisted of a five-storey building housing 21 workshops employing an astonishing 1,200 petites mains – seamstresses, embroiderers, specialists in fur and lingerie. The conceptual and highly technical designer was prolific — putting forth 600 designs a year, a considerable amount for today’s standards. But she was also a socially and ethically committed woman, providing paid holidays, maternity leave, day-care, a dining hall, a gymnasium, a resident doctor and dentist for her staff. Her motto: “Good health creates good work”.

She was also progressive in other ways: creating a school where she could teach her skills to apprentices in 1927 and laying the groundwork for intellectual property protection in the world of fashion by attaching her name on a label on every one of her pieces, even going so far as to mark them with her own thumbprint in an attempt to guarantee the authenticity of the garment.  She campaigned passionately against fashion plagiarists later in her career and was heavily involved in the founding of L’Association pour la Défense des Arts Plastiques et Appliqués in 1922.  “Death to copyists!’ was her famous cry. She devised a copyright system where pictures were taken of every style that came out of her design studio with a special set-up that allowed a front, side and back view of her designs. Everything was numbered and archived, a legacy that served this exhibition well as the full history and anatomy of a dress can be viewed in the digital monitors provided.

But despite all her dedication to the industry of fashion, she actually expressed a dislike and contempt for the very hand that was feeding her: “Insofar as one can talk of a Vionnet school, it comes mostly from my having been an enemy of fashion. There is somethingsuperficial and volatileabout the seasonal andelusive whims of fashionwhich offendsmy sense of beauty. What I do is not fashion — it was designed to last forever.”

 She was never concerned with being the “designer of the moment” and remained a very private individual, avoiding public displays and mundane frivolities. She preferred to just concentrate on her work and remain true to her mission: “The final aim of our métier is to create dresses that make a harmonious body and a pleasing silhouette,” Vionnet said. “It is about making beauty. That’s what it’s all about.”

And what beautiful dresses did she make indeed. But the Depression took a serious toll on French couture, affecting even the House of Vionnet. Even when the economy improved, it never regained its former momentum. In 1939, with the coming of World War II, Vionnet had to close shop and even when the war ended, she decided not to reopen, declaring publicly that “she had said everything she had to say.” She knew that she could never regain the glory that the house had and it was the perfect time for her exit. At least at that time, she had a legacy of excellence to pass on and thanks to her discipline and foresight was able to keep a proper archive that all fashion lovers can learn from and appreciate today.