By SUZY MENKES
Published: July 13, 2009
Everything about Madeleine Vionnet seems utterly modern, from her emancipation of the female body to her timeless, uncluttered clothes.
To look at one of the designer’s creations from 1936 — a bias-cut white crepe dress cinched with a gilded leaf belt — is to see the soul of her style and understand her self-definition: “What I did is not fashion — it was designed to last forever,” she said much later in 1960.
Perhaps the Vionnet vision was the most illuminating aspect of last week’s haute couture shows. While current designers seemed to flail around to justify the existence of high fashion in hard times and its relevance to modern life, the answers to this brow-beating lay in the 130 outfits at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs.
No wonder that John Galliano — whose career was built on a revival of the bias cutting for which Vionnet was famous — is not only passionate about this new Paris exhibition, but is also urging all his staff to go see it.
Nor that Karl Lagerfeld, the re-interpreter of Chanel, is prepared to acknowledge the importance of the Vionnet inventions, even if fashion history has crowned Coco as women’s liberator.
“Madeleine Vionnet, Puriste de la Mode” is an intelligent and illuminating exhibition and an example of excellence from its curator, Pamela Golbin. For she tells the story of a determined woman with a visionary attitude entirely through the clothes — adding a touch of technology in small computerized screens, each of which shows an illustration of a garment in its historical context.
The last room of this two-floor exhibition has, on a large screen, a slide show of the Vionnet oeuvre from 1912 until 1939, when the couturier, at age 63, closed her house, although she lived on until 98 in 1975.
This fashion purist might have had some trenchant comments about the hippie era, judging by her pithy pronouncements displayed on the museum’s walls and in the beautifully realized accompanying book.
The first object to catch the eye is not a dress, not even the extraordinary experiments with a new geometry in Vionnet’s early career. It is the articulated wooden doll on which the couturier, who did not sketch or draw, tried out the shapes and drapes that reinvented the way that women covered their bodies.
This worn working tool manages to exude the emotion behind the life of the independent young woman, who started work as a seamstress at age 12, was married at 18, and left Paris, her husband and her baby (who subsequently died) to work for five years in England. On her return, she was hired to modernize the dusty couture house of Jacques Doucet, but was asked to leave when she removed boned corsets, draped the freed body and had the models walk out barefoot.
The concept of Grecian grace runs through the exhibition, as though Vionnet held that vision in her mind as she created her draped dresses (some actually with Greek-vase embellishment).
Although the show does not dwell on the fussy, constraining Belle Époque clothes that Vionnet rejected, it shows the new fashion aesthetic rolling out, with a 1920s handkerchief skirt, then as geometric experiments with squares, rectangles and, by 1929, with circles of fabric.
The simplicity of the display, created by Andrée Putman, the modernist female architect, frames the gentle ease with which Vionnet’s work developed. Yet, the designer was an absolute revolutionary, using crepe-de-chine lining material against the straight grain of conventional cutting. By the end of the first displays, you see not only how a “toile” or pattern was laid out, but also slithering evening dresses, twinkling with embellishment — although, as Vionnet said: “I only like decoration if it plays second to the architecture of a dress.”
Vionnet also said: “I am more of a sculptor than a painter — more sensitive to form than color,” although she could make a rich, billiard-table-green velvet gown or a rust-red fringed dress.
Perhaps it was an objective analysis of her own strengths that makes the designer’s oeuvre seem still so crystal clear.
The exhibition’s upper floor has one beautiful dress after another, reflecting a honeyed harmony. Perhaps fewer pieces in some vitrines might have been a virtue. But Ms. Golbin responded to the chance to display the finest of the 122 dresses Vionnet herself donated in 1952, along with 750 patterns and 75 photo albums. Among her many innovations, Vionnet understood the importance of creating a fashion archive.
The fruits of two years of restoration by the Natixis foundation bring back to life dresses that might otherwise have been a droop of silken fringing or a crumple of sheer organdy.
What can couturiers of today — especially young designers taking over established houses — absorb from this show? “Purity” is, as the title suggests, the essence of Vionnet. But it was not only in her work, but in the clarity of her mind.
Ms. Golbin has created in the book an imaginary conversation between herself and Vionnet, using precise comments the designer actually made.
“Taste,” Vionnet said, “is the feeling that permits one to tell the difference between what is beautiful and what is merely spectacular.”
The couturier said that fabrics are “primordial” to design; that the clients were “an indispensable stimulation”; and that any couture house needed two elements to be viable: “technique and administration.”
But mostly, Vionnet talked about beauty, which is the defining goal of her work and the essence of this must-see exhibition. “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.”
Photo::Patrick Gries
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