The Great Fashion Designers (7 page)

Further reading:
Guillermo De Osma's biography,
Fortuny
(1984, updated ed.), did much to remind the modern era of Fortuny's talents.

The First World War was a cataclysmic event. Fashion, like every other sphere of creativity, was turned upside down from 1914 to 1918. Couturiers were obliged to respond to years during which women had worn overalls and trousers as they worked to support the war effort. In the wake of the war, Paul Poiret, still believing in the allure of orientalism, never touched the heights of his pre-war career.

The new stars were
Gabrielle
(‘Coco')
Chanel
and
Jean Patou
, fierce rivals in business although they shared similar outlooks on fashion in design terms. They both set up their houses in 1919 and responded to the post-war mood, reacting against ostentation and focusing on more practical style.

New freedoms for women were also reflected in the growing influence of America—everything from Hollywood movies to jazz and cocktails influenced Europe. Hollywood costume designer
Adrian
became an important name to watch for the clothing trade on New York's 7th Avenue. But American designers mostly followed the lead of Paris. Thus, the social freedoms of America were reflected in Parisian style and sold back to the Americans.

The belle époque social mores, which dictated that even a flash of leg was unseemly, were now but a distant memory. In the early 1920s, hemlines began to shorten and a boyish, almost androgynous, silhouette became fashionable. A novel,
La Garçonne
, gave its name to the garçonne look. Sports clothes for women now drew the attention of couturiers. In 1921, Jean Patou stirred up a sensation by dressing the tennis player Suzanne Lenglen at Wimbledon in a straight white sleeveless cardigan and a short white silk pleated skirt. Skirts (and hair) were at their shortest by 1926. A sweltering summer in Europe in 1928 was a boost for swimming costumes and the new fashion for a suntan. The art deco movement thrived, peaking at the Expo in Paris in 1925.

The twenties set in motion many of the trends that have continued to permeate fashion ever since. American designer Norman Norell commented in 1960: ‘Women are still wearing, and throughout this century will continue to wear, the changes that came about in the twenties.'

Running counter to all this—and reminding us that fashion has often been nostalgic rather than aggressively progressive
—Jeanne Lanvin
produced robes de style, loved by the many women who would not dream of wearing flapper dresses. Fashion changed decisively with Jean Patou's collection for the winter of 1929. Dresses flowed from the waist rather than the hip, while hemlines dropped to mid-calf. It was the year of the Great Depression: American buyers and customers fell away from Paris, not returning in numbers until 1933. The couture houses trimmed their staff and struggled to stay afloat.

In the 1930s, Jean Patou faded from the scene, and Coco Chanel had a new rival,
Elsa Schiaparelli
. While Chanel developed her cardigan jackets and understated sense of chic, Schiaparelli enjoyed the grand gesture, the inspired joke, blending her love of art with her fashion sensibility.

In Paris, a number of individualistic names began to emerge in the period after the First World War. The perfectionist
Madeleine Vionnet
drew inspiration from classical influences and emerged as the
great purist of Parisian fashion.
Mainbocher
proved that an American could also succeed in Paris.
Salvatore Ferragamo
returned from Hollywood to his native Italy in 1927, founding his legendary shoe business. Technology continued to drive fashion forward: in 1939, America began producing nylon. But then war intervened and fashion in Paris came to a near standstill.

The founder of the oldest surviving couture house in near-continuous existence, Jeanne Lanvin was established as one of the most commercially successful couturières in Paris by the 1920s. Until recently, she has been neglected by fashion historians: her romantic, nostalgic approach to design was considered backward looking, contrasting with the resolutely modern styles of Gabrielle Chanel or Jean Patou. Renewed interest in Lanvin has been boosted partly by the success of Central Saint Martins-trained designer Alber Elbaz, from Israel, at the helm of the design studio in the early twenty-first century but more fundamentally by the research of fashion historians such as Nancy Troy, who treats commercial achievements with the same seriousness as creative influence (and, indeed, explores the interlinkage between the two). And, although Jeanne Lanvin does not fall easily within the conventional narrative of the development of modern fashion design, her success raises important questions about the very nature of that narrative, highlighting the nostalgic and retrospective characteristics of much of the greatest fashion.

What is not in doubt is that Jeanne Lanvin made exquisitely beautiful clothes that celebrated traditional concepts of femininity. Her finest designs were her robes de style, full-skirted evening dresses typically in silk taffeta that looked back to the eighteenth century and were a reaction to the garçonne look of the 1920s. Renowned as a sensitive colourist, she created her own Lanvin blue and through her dyeworks developed a palette of harmony and exceptional delicacy. Lanvin was a pragmatic designer who responded to the varied needs of a woman's wardrobe and delivered time after time what her customers sought most. Furthermore, she created modern children's fashion, designing clothes specifically for her daughter, Marguerite. But her influence on fashion history has less to do with pure design and more to do with the evolution of the concept of a designer as it is known today. She ran her business like a modern designer: the Lanvin story is a case study in brand management and development that still has lessons for today's designer brands. She also researched like a modern designer, scanning museums, art galleries, history books and any resource that might provide inspiration.

Lanvin was also a lifestyle designer, creating a sophisticated fashion house that covered a broad array of products, invariably brilliantly marketed. The achievement is all the more remarkable because the couturière was a retiring, taciturn woman, reluctant to meet her clients. This reticence should not, however, be confused with lack of confidence. She had an iron will and a strong belief in her own abilities, based on a long apprenticeship and thorough immersion in her craft.

Born in 1867, Jeanne-Marie Lanvin was the eldest of ten children fathered by Constantin Bernard Lanvin, a staunchly middle-class journalist. In the manner of the times, she was in employment from the age of thirteen, initially as a dressmaker's errand girl. She was careful with her money from an early age: one story recounts how, when asked to deliver parcels and given her bus fares, she chose to run behind the bus and save the money. She worked for most of her teen years as an apprentice milliner at Madame Felix in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré,
followed by a spell at Talbot, a dressmaker, where she learned about fabrics, before setting up her own hat workshop at the age of just eighteen, initially in the rue du Marché Saint-Honoré. Saving money from a three-month stint working for a Barcelona-based dressmaker, Madame Maria-Berta Valenti, Lanvin opened her own millinery shop in 1890 at 16 rue Boissy d'Anglas.

In 1895, Lanvin married the Italian nobleman Henri Emile-Georges di Pietro, their initial encounter predictably occurring at the Longchamp racetrack, one of the primary locations for the fashion-aware to strut and court in late nineteenth-century Paris. Although the marriage lasted only eight years, it did result in the birth of a daughter, Marguerite Marie-Blanche, in 1897, who was dressed more beautifully than perhaps any child in history by her adoring mother. In 1907, four years after her divorce, Lanvin married again, this time to Xavier Melet, a journalist like her father, who later became French consul in Manchester, England. This marriage was businesslike, rather than romantic, with Melet playing the role of loyal husband. It meant that Lanvin was no longer a single mother, which then had a status of some social shame.

Focusing initially on millinery, Lanvin's business grew organically, each achievement leading logically to the next. Clients' admiration for her dresses for Marguerite encouraged her to open a children's department by 1908. A year later, it made sense to extend this to women's clothing too, creating empire-waist chemise frocks in Fauvist colours and showing an assured use of black and white. She also emphasised her ambition by swiftly joining the Syndicat de la Couture. The First World War proved little more than an interlude in the development of the young fashion house; by the end of 1918 Lanvin had secured the entire building at 33 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, comprising nine workshops, including two for embroidery—an innovation as this highly skilled work was usually passed on to outsiders, who had both motivation and opportunity to plagiarise. Keeping embroidery in-house did not solve the problem of copying, although it did prove over time to be a shrewd business move. Lanvin's exquisite beadwork was at the heart of the fashion house's reputation in the 1920s and beyond.

Lanvin visited America as early as 1915, so she was well aware of the opportunities across the Atlantic for her house to grow. Her instinct for business was finely tuned, developing steadily through the 1920s but always closely monitored with a strong personal touch that gave Lanvin the stamp of heartfelt authenticity. By the 1920s, Lanvin was a wealthy woman, commissioning Armand-Albert Rateau to design her shops at 15 and 22 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré as well as her town house at rue Barbet-de-Jouy and her villa at Vesinet. Rateau became a friend, designing the spherical bottle of Lanvin's celebrated Arpège fragrance in 1927 and managing her Lanvin-Sport business. With Rateau, she created Art Deco-inspired decorative objects for the home. Her bedroom, boudoir, and bathroom, commissioned from Rateau, are now installed at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Her daughter, Marguerite Marie-Blanche, was a true muse to her, always immaculately dressed in clothes that were both beautiful and practical. Previously, children from society families used to wear watered-down versions of adult clothing, but by 1921 Lanvin's influence on children's fashion was noted by
Vogue
—'loose and simple clothes … easy to put on and take off again.' Through the 1920s, Lanvin attracted many actresses, including Mary Pickford, the American silent screen star, and Yvonne Printemps, for whom she designed costumes. A stage set was created in her atelier for fittings for costumes. The year 1923 saw Lanvin create costumes for seventeen shows.

In 1924, Lanvin's daughter married the Comte Jean de Polignac, and she shortened her name to Marie-Blanche. This event was more than personal: it took Jeanne Lanvin and her family into a new social circle, elevating her status with knock-on benefits for the business. The Polignac family became important customers, adding social cachet to the company. A year later, Lanvin herself was made Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in recognition of her achievements. While Chanel and Patou stole the headlines, Lanvin simply went on expanding, with clothes that were beautiful and renowned for their exceptionally intricate seaming, beading and embroidery. Her career might, indeed, be hailed as the ultimate celebration of the work of
les petites mains
, the French name for the hard-working
women who laboured in the couture workshops of Paris.

Lanvin had a number of signature touches, including a penchant for ribbons flowing at the hip, spiralling ruffles, taffeta applied to tulle for a floaty romantic effect. Flowers, ribbons and sunbursts were repetitive motifs that she adored. Over the years, she built up a memory bank of motifs, including the daisy (or marguerite) that was her daughter's keepsake, a series of three-part Japanese
mons
(family crests), and symbols that reflected her Catholic faith. ‘A design inevitably reflects the artistic motifs stored in one's memory,' she said, ‘drawing on those which are the most alive, new and fertile all at the same time.' Her robes de style were produced throughout the 1920s, in defiance of the rise of the flapper or garçonne, and right up to the late 1930s, when wartime austerity frowned on such lavish use of fabric. Artist Paul Iribe sketched Lanvin and her daughter in robes de styles (the sketch was actually based on a 1907 photograph), a sweet image that was refined by Armand-Albert Rateau to become the Lanvin signature, reproduced on labels.

Lanvin herself was already well into her fifties when the 1920s dawned. Thus, she was not strictly a contemporary of Chanel. Decades later, Karl Lagerfeld said: ‘Her image was not as strong as that of Chanel because she was a nice old lady and not a fashion plate.' Looking at it from another perspective, it might also be instructive to compare Jeanne Lanvin's achievement in building a business founded on her own financial means and unrelenting hard work with Chanel's opportunism as mistress to a succession of wealthy lovers who certainly smoothed her path to fortune. As biographer Dean Merceron puts it, which of them is the greater exemplar for the modern woman? Although Chanel was the ultimate modernist, obsessed with function, Lanvin did not believe in creating clothes that were too practical. ‘Modern clothes need a certain romantic feel,' she argued, reflecting her teenage years in belle époque Paris. Couturières, she said, ‘should take care not to become too everyday and practical.' Speaking to
Vogue
in 1934, she said: ‘I act on impulse and believe in instinct. My dresses aren't premeditated. I am carried away by feeling and technical knowledge helps me make my clothes become a reality.'