Architect of couture

She may not be as iconic as her peer Coco Chanel, but the great French designer Madeleine Vionnet is arguably as influential, as a spellbinding exhibition of her work in Paris demonstrates, writes DEIRDRE McQUILLAN

THE GREAT BALENCIAGA called her his master. Dior declared that with her, the art of couture was never taken higher or further. Her contemporary Gabrielle Chanel was better known, but today fashion designers such as Yohji Yamamoto, Azzedine Alaïa and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons acknowledge the genius of Madeleine Vionnet, “the couturier of couturiers”, who is the subject of a spellbinding exhibition currently at the Louvre in Paris. It is the first major retrospective of her work.

“There is not a single designer who has not been influenced by her, but she was the most difficult character I have ever had to work with,” says curator Pamela Golbin, who spent nearly two years assembling the show from a donation made by Vionnet herself in 1952, which contained more than 250 outfits, 800 patterns and 3,000 images.

“She was very rigorous and very disciplined and also complex and quite sophisticated. A dress was conceptual for her. She was very intellectual in her approach and close to the purists like Le Corbusier, for whom structure and form were important, not decorative ornament,” explains Golbin.

What is so striking about this array of astonishingly beautiful dresses from the 1920s and 1930s (she closed her business in l940) is that each one was based on three architectural shapes, the square, the rectangle and the circle, the manipulation of which she stuck to for her entire career.

Vionnet experimented with designs on an articulated wooden doll, the sort used by sculptors, which is on display, and which “was absolutely central to her work,” says Golbin. “Any decor was only for structural reasons. The technical aspect is overwhelming and incredible.” What was also innovative about these dresses was their lightness and lack of fastening. “Draping the garment completely on the bias meant you didn’t need lining, so it made the garment extra light – everything was lined then and was extremely heavy. So these slip-on dresses had consequences for travelling,” says Golbin.

A yellow dress from 1919 made from rectangles looks simple, but is actually very complicated in construction. The herringbone fringes on a crêpe de Chine evening dress were inserted individually to follow body movement. “A body has no seams,” she used to say, so her silhouettes required no corsetry, no trimmings, no padding.

Vionnet was a pioneer in business as well as fashion. At the height of her success in 1923 she employed 1,200 people in her Paris workrooms. Her premises on the Avenue Montaigne had air conditioning, bay windows to let in natural light, an elevator, phones and a canteen as well as a resident doctor, dentist and gynaecologist.

She expected her workers to be as demanding as she was and guarded her designs meticulously, taking pictures of each one and patenting it, developing a trademark thumbprint on her labels. For her, copying was stealing. “The laws in place today in France are her laws,” says Golbin. Vionnet, who came from a modest background, was born in a suburb of Paris in 1876 and left school at 11 to be apprenticed to a seamstress. After working for a dressmaker in London, she returned to Paris and joined the couture house of Callot Soeurs as head seamstress. In 1907 she joined Doucet, where she banished boning and frills and started to make the fluid clothes for which she was to become famous, striking out on her own in 1912.

Golbin believes that the designer was “quite obsessive about her work and finding perfection in her art was her fulfilment. Fashion is a complex language and she brought a new vocabulary to it.”

Madeleine Vionnet died in 1975 at the age of 99.

Madeleine Vionnet, puriste de la mode runs at Les Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre until January 31st, 2010