A beautiful dress can flow down a woman’s body like delicately fashioned color and fine, scented oil. It can flourish upon her, literally, so that she looks like a flower, or many flowers gathered together with lush taste. It can arrest the heart of the person looking at her. The dress can swirl about her, caressing her. It can lead you to the conviction that someone truly cherishes the woman who is wearing it.
So I was not surprised, looking at the catalogue for the recent Paul Poiret show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, by how important a woman's shoulders are. I've always had a keen appreciation of shoulders, especially those that support weight. The weight of a summer dress, for example. Or perhaps that of a light bag designed for an evening by Vera Wang or Elliott Lucca or some such.
Those kinds of shoulders.
But now that I've seen this amazing, beautifully produced book, my education has been made much more complete. Because at least now I've seen the clothing that Poiret designed for his wife Denise. Judging from the way these dresses look in photographs of her by Man Ray and others, Denise had lovely shoulders indeed. And, I imagine, so did the hundreds of other women who also dressed themselves in his work.
This may sound a little insouciant. But according to Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton, who wrote the preface to this catalogue, "[Poiret] dethroned the primacy and destabilized the paradigm of Western fashion."
When you look at the couturier that preceded Poiret's, with its corsets, bustles, gewgaws, high-necked severity and overall very complicated and conservative design (the kinds of things that Edith Wharton's and Henry James's heroines wore), and compare it to a dress like his 1922 "Irudrée" evening gown you see the radical nature of the change.
“Irudrée” evening gown, 1922
This entire book supports the argument that Paul Poiret was indeed a revolutionary. But one seldom encounters revolutionaries that have the taste, eye and helpmates that this man had. Throughout most of his career, for example, Poiret designed clothing for one woman, Denise.
Denise Poiret at The Plaza Hotel, New York, 1913
They had known each other since childhood, and he once said of her "My wife is the inspiration for all my creations, she is the expression of all my ideals." When you see the photographs of her wearing his designs, you understand how this could be so. She is attractive in a very informal way, and is a natural in front of the camera. She accents his radical and gorgeous designs with such lively humor that her wearing of them to parties, receptions, the theater and so on must have caused a sensation every time.
Article comments
1 - Kevin Kohout
Excellent point on clothes matching one's body. Never actually thought of it that way.