NEW YORK: Despite emancipating women from the corset and revolutionising early 20th century fashion, French designer Paul Poiret has largely been forgotten by time, overshadowed by rivals such as Coco Chanel.
But now, more than 60 years after Poiret’s death, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is hoping to change that with an exhibition devoted to a man best known for inventing the chemise dress and making bold colour mainstream.
“He is forgotten except by fashion specialists,” the museum’s fashion curator Harold Koda told AFP, adding that he hoped the show could help foster a new appreciation for Poiret’s groundbreaking designs.
He said that Poiret’s simple cuts, luxurious fabrics and saturated colours were just as visually appealing today as they were almost a century ago. “It’s eye candy and the general public is going to embrace it,” he said.
The 50 or so mannequins in the show offer a spectacular vision of shimmering colours in rich fabrics cut in what at the beginning of the 20th century was an adventurous and pioneering style.
An auction in Paris in 2005 helped raise Poiret’s international profile, with some of the world’s biggest museums fighting to snap up a slice of Poiret’s collection, which had been put up for sale by his grand-daughter.
An earlier Paris exhibition put on by Tunisian-born designer Azzedine Alaia had also helped renew the public’s acquaintance with the avant-garde designer.
“After Azzedine Alaia did his presentation, it created a great deal of excitement among the design community. Every major institution participated in the auction, it was an historic event,” said Koda.
For the Met, the retrospective offers an occasion to show off the 20 or so outfits that it acquired at the 2005 sale along with others loaned by institutions such as Chicago’s Historical Society and Paris’ Museum of Fashion.
The pieces reveal how Poiret introduced straight lines -- on pleated skirts, flared T-shaped blouses and Japanese kimono-influenced coats -- before 1915.
The exhibition also shows off some of his exotic orientalism, with the “harem” trousers, or pantaloons, and “lampshade” tunics that earned him the nickname of the “Pasha of Paris” for their Eastern flavour.
Poiret, who said he didn’t know how to sew, was particularly innovative in the art of drapery and working directly on the body.
The designer also experimented with bold colours and worked with French Fauvist painter Raoul Dufy, who came up with some spectacular prints, as shown at the exhibition in a black and white coat known as “La Perse”.
The simplicity of his cuts, with tops emphasizing the shoulders and not the waist, betray an astonishing degree of modernity, according to Koda.
The exhibition also pays tribute to the designer’s wife and muse, a “provincial girl having the audacity and the confidence to wear those designs,”said Koda.—AFP
