ThéÀtre de la Mode

Promotional French high fashion event organized at the end of 1945 to reaffirm, after the wartime hiatus, the French monopoly which as, at the time, worldwide and unquestioned. Maria Pezzi described it: “Two hundred wire dolls, descendants of the mannequin-dolls of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ‘piavole de Franza’ as the noblewomen of Venice used to call them, told the world that the haute couture of Paris was still alive. They stood 70 centimeters tall. The Catalonian sculptor Joan Rebull had shaped their heads. The great couturiers, from Lelong, Patou, Piguet and Schiaparelli to Vionnet, Balenciaga, and Fath had dressed them. Cartier and Van Cleef Arpels bejeweled them. Christian Bérard, Cocteau, and Boris Kochno designed little stage sets. The dolls debuted at the Pavillon Marsan of the Louvre. It was the ThéÀtre de la Mode. In the first year of peace, it went on tour: London, Barcelona, Stockholm, New York.” It was rediscovered in the archives of an American museum, and was restored and, in 1990, exhibited in Paris, New York, and Tokyo.