Grès

Pseudonym of Germaine Krebs (1903-1993). French designer. Her mastership in draping is unmatched, a real bearing structure of clothes entirely based on concentric pleating, degenerating spirals, intertwined, winding, or sculpted on the figure as by a geometrizing wind. Born in Paris, precious art studies, forced to quit sculpture, she transported the expressive sculpting into the models of a high fashion proudly rigorous and characterized by a sophisticated intelligence for women with classic tastes, allergic to the simple external appearance. Her favorite fabrics included jersey, thin wools, voluptuous silks, raw materials for evening dresses with their draping continuously reinvented, a result of an unmatched ambiguity, and a stubborn patience. Her coats had extraordinary asymmetry and she used intense oblique cutting. She started her career in 1933, making a partnership with Julie Barton and opening the fashion house, Alix. In 1941 the partnership split and she carried on alone, anagramming, for the boutique’s sign, Grès, her husband’s name, the painter Serge Cezrefkov. In 1960 she closed the boutique. An unusual personality in the world of the French couture, reserved but polemical, retreated in her look of exquisite elegance, bare but very elaborate, her designs brought international fame to her maison. She often attended the official manifestations of the Chambre Syndicale du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des createurs de mode, wearing her characteristic turtledove turban, of which she was President from 1972 to 1991 and later honorary President.
The fashion house was reopened by the Japanese designer Koji Tatsuno.
In Bourgoin-Jallien, France, an important retrospective dedicated to the work of Madame Gres by the Textile Museum.