Vionnet

Madeleine (1876-1975). French dressmaker. She sublimated the bias cut and brought many innovations into Parisian fashion between the two World Wars. She revolutionized dressmaking technique to the degree that she was compared, in the world of haute couture, to the protagonists of the avant-gardes painting in the twentieth century. Often, she would cut her creations in a single piece, sleeve included. She was especially interested in the perfect drop and drape of her outfits. In 1973, the Metropolitan Museum of New York held a major retrospective show of her work while she was still alive. In 1990, Editions du Regard published a biography: Vionnet by Jacqueline Demornex. She learned the trade in a little shop in the banlieue of Paris. At the age of 21, after a more-refined apprenticeship in a boutique of women’s underwear in the Rue de la Paix, a divorce, and the tragedy of a daughter’s death, she moved to London where she began working for the dressmaker Kate Reilly. When, in 1901, she returned to France she had sufficient credentials to be hired as a première by Madame Gerber, the fashion designer for the Callot sisters. In 1907 she went to work for Doucet and stayed there for five years, creating outfits that were moving against the grain, in contrast with the waning style of Art Nouveau. Her creations were light and airy, and they were modeled without corsets or busts (Poiret too had eliminated) and also creating shoes. In 1912 she opened her maison. Two years later, she was forced to suspend operations because the First World War had broken out. At the end of the war, her bias cut, her lavish drapery, which she tried and tried again on a dressmaker’s dummy 80 cm tall, and with a lavish use of fabric that made cost no object, ensured her a place in the spotlight. In 1922 the maison took offices at 50, Avenue Montaigne. Some ten years later, her success was documented by the existence of 20 ateliers on five stories and more than 1,000 employees, including premières, directors, sellers, tailors, seamstresses, administrative clerks, shop clerks, and delivery boys. The fashion designer had her alter ego in the dressmaker Marcelle Chapsal. She began working with her in 1912 and made her a partner, splitting the fashion house into two divisions. Her creations (almost always in crêpe, crêpe de chine, gabardine and satin) were so distinctive, destructured and draped, that often her clients required lessons in order to learn how to put them on. She was a trendsetter and was widely imitated, even when, in 1935, she shifted to Romanticism, with taffeta ribbons. She had closed up shop in 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War. She closed her business definitively in 1939 and retired for good, at the outbreak of the Second World War. She was 63 years old. She died 36 years later, just months short of turning 100 years old.