The Great Fashion Designers (6 page)

Fashion historian Diana de Marly called Poiret ‘a liberator' (hobble skirts aside): his lean line marking the death knell of the restricted waist, his narrow styles reducing the need for layers of petticoats. Thanks to Poiret, clothes for women began the shift from burdensome impediment to lightweight and more practical adornment. For Met curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, Poiret ‘effectively established the canon of modern dress and developed the blueprint of the modern fashion industry.' Poiret was indeed the precursor for much of the contemporary fashion world. Fashion historians are fortunate to have plenty of insights into his design philosophy from the couturier himself, thanks to his many lectures, magazine interviews and a late autobiography. Never mind that his message is sometimes as contradictory as those awkward hobble skirts. At his best, he stripped away the absurdities of late nineteenth-century European fashion and ushered in a new age for his customers, urging women to, in his own words, ‘simply wear what becomes you.'

Further reading:
Paul Poiret summarised his own career in
My First Fifty Years
(trans., 1931). Biographers include Yvonne Deslandres,
Poiret
(1987); Alice Mackrell,
Paul Poiret
(1990); and Palmer White,
Poiret
(1973). Nancy Troy's
Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Culture
(2003) highlights the commercial acumen of the couturier. Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton's
Poiret
(2007), the catalogue to the
Poiret: King of Fashion
exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007, includes an illuminating reappraisal of his achievements.

Not without reason was Mariano Fortuny known as a latter-day Renaissance man. The Spaniard's span of interests was too broad for one-word descriptions. He was as much artist and inventor as designer: over three decades he registered more than twenty inventions in Paris. His great contribution to fashion, summed up in one dress, the Delphos, was to free the body from the restrictions of fashionable nineteenth-century dress. Created as early as 1907, the Delphos was a long, simply cut, pleated silk dress that hung loosely from the shoulders and could be scrunched up into ball for travelling. In an age when most women were tightly corseted and fitted, it represented a liberation, summed up best in photos from the period of the celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan in lithe, free-flowing garments. Fortuny recognised the importance of the Delphos, patenting one of the designs (with batwing sleeves) in Paris in 1909. Fortuny brought the worlds of art and fashion close together, as did his contemporary Sonia Delaunay. The interrelationship between art and fashion has been a theme in popular culture ever since, explored in the modern-day era by a host of designers, including Hussein Chalayan, Marc Jacobs and Viktor & Rolf.

Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo was born in Granada, Spain, in 1871 into a family full of artists and blessed with plenty of money. His father, Mariano, a distinguished painter, had married Cecilia de Madrazo, also from a family of artists. From 1872, they lived in Rome, where his father had a studio, and Paris. Mariano's father died of malaria in 1874 at the age of only 36, a loss that grieved the son throughout his life (he edited a book on his father as late as 1933). Besides the skills of a painter, Mariano inherited from his father a taste for collecting antiques and objets d'art from exotic places, particularly the Arab world. The family collection included a treasure trove of textiles, often displayed as wall hangings.

After his father's death, the family moved to Paris, where Fortuny began painting at the age of seven. He absorbed the work of the Old Masters, such as Rubens, learning the importance of colour that stood him in good stead in the future. The young Fortuny was plagued with asthma and hay fever in Paris, brought on by an allergic reaction to horses. So, in 1889, his mother moved with him and his sister, Maria Luisa, to horse-free Venice and the Palazzo Martinengo on the Grand Canal. Venice remained his base for the rest of his life. He attended night classes at the Accademia in Venice to improve his drawing and continued to copy the Old Masters, including Tintoretto and other great Venetian artists. Further inspiration came from a visit in 1892 to Bayreuth, home of opera composer Richard Wagner. The grand all-embracing vision of Wagner inspired Fortuny, who immersed himself in the world of theatre for many years, developing new lighting systems. Fortuny was as much technician as artist. All art forms had merit in his vision, and everything could be harnessed by the artist.

In 1897, Fortuny met a young Frenchwoman, Henriette Negrin, in Paris. Despite his mother's lifelong disapproval (Henriette was a divorcee), Fortuny adored her for the rest of his life as wife, lover, companion and muse. She moved to Venice in 1902, by which time Fortuny had relocated to his own home, the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei. This splendid
thirteenth-century palazzo, built on a truly Wagnerian scale, was the perfect stage for Fortuny to develop his ideas and inventions and display his antiques collection. A vast salon-studio was at the heart of the palazzo, though the private rooms were relatively small and simple. Here, Fortuny was able to play the host. A tall man with piercing blue eyes, he wore lightweight suits in dark blue serge with a white silk cravat and cut a dash in Venice, where a new generation of artists had been emerging since the 1880s. There was a sizeable foreign colony, attracted by this most romantic of cities. He got to know Italy's leading literary star, Gabriele D'Annunzio, whom he met for the first time in 1894.

However, any attempt to locate Fortuny within the context of artistic movements of the time is tricky because the man himself largely ignored the work of his contemporaries and rarely stepped outside Venice. His biographer, Guillermo de Osma, situated him most convincingly within the Aesthetic Movement, whose exponents thought clothing had become a prison. The Aesthete painters looked back for inspiration to classical Greece and the Middle Ages (the dress of that period was particularly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites). But these clothes were only featured in their paintings and never realised, with the single exception of some toga satin dresses produced by Liberty's of London, inspired by the work of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Fortuny's move into the world of textiles and fashion is thought to have begun in 1906 by experimenting with the printing of textiles at his palazzo. Some sketches for a play,
Francesca da Rimini
, were turned into costumes, receiving a lukewarm response. More promising were costumes for a ballet in Paris in the same year featuring his distinctive silk veils printed with geometric designs inspired by Cycladic art. These became known as Knossos scarves, which was a touch misleading because they were rectangular pieces of silk that could be used in all sorts of ways, as much clothing as accessory. They remained a feature of his work for more than fifteen years. ‘From these simple scarves, which showed him how to fuse form and fabric, Fortuny developed his entire production of dresses,' wrote his biographer Guillermo de Osma. The Knossos scarf was most impressively worn over the celebrated Delphos dress. Fortuny's patent registration described it thus: ‘Its design is so shaped and arranged that it can be worn and adjusted with ease and comfort.' To this day, there is some mystery over how Fortuny created the pleating on the dress. The folds are irregular and were probably developed by applying heat while the material was wet. With the exception of hand-blown glass beads from Murano, everything was made by hand at the Palazzo. To counter the stretchiness of the pleats, Fortuny sewed cords strung with beads along the sides of his dresses.

Fortuny began with silk, usually bought raw and in off-white and imported direct from China and Japan; later he added velvet, imported from Lyons. Both silk and velvet were used in countless variations. He experimented enthusiastically with printing, using wood blocks initially, then introducing hand-painting and developing his own high-quality stencils made of silk. He created his own colours, exploring ingredients from many sources and countries. Kennedy Fraser, writing in
The New Yorker
in 1981, commented: ‘The colors that Fortuny created are still rare and luscious after the passage of decades: blushing peach and apricot, purple grape and candlelit claret, blue of fountains and of peacocks' tails.'

Fortuny was never recognised as a creator of fashion by the couturiers in Paris. In the early years, his dresses were worn only at home, considered far too louche for formal outdoors wear. He stood outside the rigidly controlled couture system and chose instead to develop his own sales and marketing operation. This included a ground-floor shop at the Palazzo and a small network of shops and sales agents across Europe. Two of the literary giants of the period did their best to create an aura around Fortuny's work. Marcel Proust refers to Fortuny no less than sixteen times in his novel
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
(Remembrance of Things Past). Gabriele D'Annunzio referenced Fortuny beautifully for one of his fictional heroines, the Marchesa Casati Stampa: ‘She was enveloped in one of those very long scarves of Oriental Gauze that the alchemist Mariano Fortuny plunges into the mysterious dyes of his vats and withdraws tinted with strange dreams, and with his thousand
hand-printing blocks marks new generations for stars, planets, animals.'

In 1909, the arrival of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris marked the increasing dominance of Aesthete modes of dress; the costumes by Bakst were clearly inspired by Fortuny. Bakst had seen Isadora Duncan perform in a Fortuny dress on a tour of Russia back in 1906. Bakst reinterpreted her dress with loose, liberating costumes for at least three ballets in 1911 and 1912. This tribute turned out to be of great benefit to Fortuny, for it popularised his designs and boosted his order book to such an extent that he eventually opened a shop in Paris in 1920 at 67 rue Pierre Charron, not far from Paul Poiret. The ornate interior of the Palazzo was meticulously recreated. It seems likely that Poiret himself was influenced by the work of Fortuny; a green silk chiffon tunic made by Fortuny was sold in Poiret's shop as early as 1908. Other names who drew on the work of Fortuny included Maria Monaci Gallenga in Rome and Madame Babani in Paris.

By the early 1920s, fashion had moved on from the influence of the classical period, but Fortuny's emphasis on clothing the natural form chimed with the mood of the times. As Fraser Kennedy has noted, before the First World War, Fortuny's clothes essentially carried on the tradition of idealistic and artistic female dress begun with the Aesthetes and Pre-Raphaelites. ‘After the war, they seemed liberated, even slightly naughty, and totally modern attire for wear to cocktail parties in the Jazz Age.' That said, Fortuny continued to stand aside from the fashion industry. At the celebrated Art Deco exhibition of 1925 in Paris, Fortuny did not even show in the fashion pavilion.

The decade proved a period of spectacular success for the designer, fuelled by the opening of a factory for cotton textile production on the island of Giudecca near Venice, using long-staple Egyptian cotton spun in England. More significant in the long term than the opening of the Paris shop was the addition of a stockist in New York from 1923. The Brick Shop ordered Fortuny's cotton fabrics, which became popular interior furnishings for the elite of Manhattan. The silk and velvet dresses, meanwhile, achieved a classic status that reflected their classical inspiration. Looking back on the decade, Lady Bonham-Carter commented: ‘I think everyone I knew had a Fortuny dress … We all wore them, especially the “gels” with good figures. They clung a bit, you see, and they weren't quite so perfect on lumpy figures.'

The Great Depression of 1929 marked the beginning of hard times for Fortuny. He found crucial support from American interior decorator Elsie McNeill, later the Countess Elsie Lee Gozzi, who bought the rights to sell Fortuny in 1927 and opened a shop at 509 Madison Avenue. In quick succession, Fortuny endured the death of his mother in 1932 and the receivership of his Giudecca factory in 1933. Somehow he found the funds to buy the factory out of receivership himself. His sister Maria Luisa died in 1936, a troubled year in his homeland, with the Spanish Civil War under way. Elsie Lee continued to market Fortuny effectively in America, financing the rebuilding of the Giudecca factory. However, the advent of the Second World War forced its closure again. When it reopened after the war, it was on a much reduced scale. Fortuny's final years, until his death in 1949, saw his wealth significantly diminished.

During the 1950s, Fortuny's work was virtually forgotten, although from the 1960s and 1970s museums began to acquire his dresses and the word spread among costume collectors. The real explosion of interest in Fortuny dates from the 1980s. These days, Fortuny's status in the roll call of great designers is assured. His ability to thrive outside the fashion system of Paris makes him a very special case. Customers treasured their Fortuny dresses and returned time and time again, developing an emotional attachment to the clothes. Throughout his career, Fortuny worked with a handful of simple ideas and shapes developed in many different variations. It is famously hard to date his dresses because the themes did not evolve in a logical sequence, instead mutating according to his own interest. His biographer, Guillermo De Osma, wrote: ‘Fortuny invented fashion outside fashion, fashion that does not change, fashion as art.'