The dress designs of Madeleine Vionnet are a revelation. Created between 1912 and 1939, they look as though they could have been walked down the runway yesterday.
Vionnet (1876-1975) was a legendary French designer who was the first to exploit the bias cut. She opened her house of couture in 1912 and revolutionized the world of fashion. Although she closed her house in 1939 at the onset of World War II, her work continues to fascinate other designers.
Women's Wear Daily once asked a list of top contemporary designers to name the 10 greatest fashion designers ever. The top three were Chanel, Christian Dior and Vionnet, not necessarily in that order.
Through Jan. 27, the Kent State University Museum is exhibiting Vionnet, a handful of new dresses designed by the recently reborn house of Vionnet, based on the work of the early 20th-century couturier.
But the real stars are the original Vionnets, which can be seen in the recently re-issued Madeleine Vionnet, by Betty Kirke through Chronicle Books, on sale in the museum lobby for $100.
On Thursday's opening night for Vionnet, the museum held talks by Arnaud de Lummen, chief executive of the House of Vionnet, and by Kirke, whose 20 toile reconstructions of original Vionnet designs were shown on runway models and were the hit of the evening.
It's too bad those toiles (dressmaker's muslins) couldn't have been exhibited along with photographs of how they were eventually realized in expensive fabrics and accessories; they far and away outshone the new Vionnets that are the subject of the show.
The thing about the Vionnets is that they have complete integrity, from shoulder to hem. No detail is too small, no technique too difficult to make Vionnet's original designs.
They were made to be worn without a corset, a scandalous idea when Vionnet introduced it (yes, it was she, despite history giving the honor to Paul Poiret; he stole it from her when they both worked at Doucet), And they were made to be slipped on over the head, another scandalous idea in an age when women needed at least one assistant to help them get dressed every day.
Kirke's book on Vionnet is the first and so far only one in English to reveal how she arrived at her famous integrity, how she used the bias cut and where she derived her inspiration.
Kirke, a clothing designer turned costume conservator, discovered Vionnet in 1973 when the Metropolitan Museum, where she worked, had Inventive Clothing, 1909-1939.
Passing by the exhibit one day as it was being assembled, Kirke was struck by the contemporary look of a certain evening dress slated for the show. Short in front, long in back, "it could have been worn out that very evening," Kirke recalled.
At first she thought it was a Balenciaga, but Vionnet had made it in 1917 when Balenciaga was still apprenticed to a provincial dressmaker in his native Spain.
Kirke began to look at other Vionnet dresses. She already knew that the couturier was famed for inventing the bias cut approach cutting and hanging the fabric at a 45-degree angle from the direction of the threads in the fabric.
But, Kirke discovered, it's not so much that Vionnet invented it as that she learned what it did. She devoted her working life to experimenting with cloth and studying the way it behaved.
"Vionnet began to think of ways to handle fabric to achieve a maximum suppleness," Kirke writes.
Vionnet once told Kirke, "Maybe because everyone else made dresses that flowed in the same direction, I saw that if I turned the fabric on an angle ... it gained elasticity."
Her discovery of the "integrity of the bias" added to the enhancement of the female form.
What she learned allowed her to do things with fabric that never occurred to other dressmakers. Her dresses slide over the body, wrap, fall, flow, swirl in a way that looks natural, effortless. Vionnet's designs freed the fabric to do what it was meant to do naturally.
Her designs came on the heels of an upswell of ideas and innovation following the end of World War I.
Technological advancements were being made in the textile industry, including the ability to piece dye, rather than yarn dye, fabrics, which in turn made it possible to give yarns more twist the more twist to a yarn, the suppler a fabric would be. That, plus the ability to combine clockwise and counterclockwise twists in the same fabric, enhanced the use of crepes and the bias cut.
"When fabric was put on the bias, with one yarn twisting in one direction and the other in the opposite, the elasticity of the weft and warp sides was balanced," Kirke writes. "The value of this characteristic for Vionnet was immeasurable. She now had a workable medium for her innovative cuts."
Along with the development of technology was the development of the arts, in particular Cubism. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had adapted Paul Cezanne's dictum that all realism is based on nature and all nature could be reduced to simple geometric shapes. The Cubist (and later Constructivist) influences are quite apparent in Vionnet's designs.
But influences from classical Greek styles come to the fore. Classical Greek attire for women the chiton (dress), the chamys (cloak) and the peplos, a variation of the chiton are based on a rectangle.
Vionnet based her new approach on geometry rectangle, square, triangle and circle or quarter circle. Indeed, it could be said that Vionnet's interest was more on structure than on style, resulting in a pattern technology that changed the silhouette of the dress.
And while Vionnet is known for inventing the bias cut dress, according to Kirke, she mainly cut on the grain.
Except for the neck and shoulders, her dresses are largely "cut and sewn on the grain, but hung on the bias," Kirke writes, "thus forcing the seams to spiral around the body."
Another of her innovations was the handkerchief dress, rectangles of fabric draped from the corners, with a 180-degree twist at the shoulders, and allowed to hang freely so it formed a zigzag, or handkerchief, hem.
Some of her designs are based on the wrapped closure, derived from the Japanese kimono, such as the "dress with three armholes," which, by inserting an arm into each consecutive armhole, was wrapped around the body and simply buttoned and belted into place.
Videos were taken of Thursday's runway event, and it is hoped they will be available to view in the exhibit, as the dress designs are a revelation.
The new Vionnets are notable as well, but not for the same reasons as the old.
One particularly rococo creation, a pale pink dress of layered and gathered and sculpted and tucked chiffon, has been widely seen on the cover of Vogue. There are interesting draped jackets as well. But nothing particularly innovative.
Strangely, they seem to be more influenced by a variety of other contemporary designers than by Vionnet, in that they don't always use the naturalistic draping, tying and gathering that Vionnet pioneered, in some cases relying on awkward hooks and eyes to achieve the same effect.
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