The Great Fashion Designers Read Free

and created the model for the fashion house that dominated throughout the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first. Although his dresses reflected the restrictive ethos of their time, his achievement as the founder of the modern fashion system remains undiminished.
    The late nineteenth century saw the first stirrings of women’s emancipation. British tailors Charles Poynter at Redfern and Henry Creed, who both flourished with shops in Paris, had introduced tailoring to women’s fashion. But Pre-Raphaelite artists and the Aesthetes promoted a new kind of dressing, drawing on ancient Greek models that followed the natural silhouette. Most of their ideas remained theoretical, but the guidelines were in place for change. Women were also beginning to find a place for themselves in the business of fashion. In the 1890s,
Jeanne Paquin
founded her own couture house, while Marie Callot Gerber and her sisters established the house of
Callot Soeurs
.
    By 1900 and the dawn of the twentieth century, the core fashion message from Paris showed few signs of moving forward. The S silhouette, which thrust a woman’s breasts forward and her derrière backward, was the fashionable look of the period.
Mariano Fortuny’s
loose Delphos Dress, created in 1907 and worn by the dancer Isadora Duncan, hinted at a radical shift in direction, but it was
Paul Poiret
who had the biggest impact, promoting a natural silhouette, loosening the constricted waist and doing away with the more severe versions of the corset. His emergence came as the brassiere received a mention in
Vogue
for the first time.
    Both Worth and Poiret believed their expertise gave them the right—and duty—to dictate to their customers. A woman must be guided in her desire for a new fashion, they thought. But couturières such as Jeanne Paquin and Callot Soeurs were more inclined to listen to their customers. The first decade of the twentieth century concluded with Paul Poiret at his peak, inspired by orientalism, which drew influence from all points east.

1 CHARLES FREDERICK WORTH (1825–1895)
    Charles Frederick Worth, an Englishman from the quiet county of Lincolnshire, was the first couturier of modern times. His one rival to that title, Rose Bertin, milliner and dressmaker to Marie Antoinette, was from a different era, the late eighteenth century. The story of how an Englishman rose from unpromising roots to international renown is one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of fashion. Before Charles Frederick Worth, only women were dressmakers; men were tailors or haberdashers. Before Worth, a customer would purchase fabrics separately then take them to a dressmaker to be made up. Before Worth, clothes-makers were not society figures. Worth focused on fit and construction, the qualities that are at the core of haute couture. He was, said his biographer Diana de Marly, ‘like an engineer or an architect for whom the soundness of the construction was the fundamental consideration.’
    For four decades, Worth was the dominant force in Western fashion, developing many of the fundamental components of the modern fashion system. These ranged from the creation of a collection in advance of the season, to the development of styles that typically endured for around five years, and the creation of the fashion label (stamped, at the house of Worth, in gold on silk petersham ribbon). Charles Frederick Worth’s apprenticeship in London and Paris was long and hard, but when the breakthrough came with a coveted order for a dress from Empress Eugénie of France, his career was made virtually overnight. To appreciate fully his achievements, it is helpful to understand the mindset of high society in nineteenth-century Europe. The concept of a man fitting clothes to a woman’s body was not merely unusual, it was considered immoral, indeed thoroughly shocking. The English, who did not have a word to match couturier, reported that