Belle Époque and Poiret

French Fashion & Haute Couture

Course 1 · Chapter 3 · The Belle Époque and Paul Poiret

The years from about 1890 to 1914, later called the Belle Époque, were the first great age of the couture houses. They dressed an international clientele in elaborate gowns, and then one designer, Paul Poiret, turned away from the corset and made himself a celebrity. This chapter covers the great houses, the corset and what its end really meant, Poiret's career, the influence of the Ballets Russes, the new fashion illustration, and the effect of the First World War. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

The Great Houses

Doucet and Paquin

Jacques Doucet's house in the rue de la Paix dressed actresses and aristocrats, and he was also a great collector of art (check). Jeanne Paquin opened her house in 1891 with her husband, and was among the first to open branches abroad, in London and elsewhere (check). She is also remembered as the first woman to lead the trade body.

Callot Soeurs and Lanvin

The Callot sisters opened a house in 1895 that was known for lace and for fabrics from the East (check). Jeanne Lanvin began as a milliner in 1889 and grew a house famous for children's and women's clothes, with a family logo of a mother and daughter that is still used (check).

The British houses in Paris

The English tailor Redfern had a house in Paris from the 1880s, known for tailored suits (check). Lucy Duff Gordon, who worked under the name Lucile, had branches in London, Paris and New York (check). Paris was international from the start.

A trade run by women Many of the successful houses of the period were led by women: Paquin, the Callot sisters, Lanvin and Lucile. Dressmaking had long been a trade open to women, and the couture houses show that a woman could run a large international business before she could vote (check). The "great male designer" story, which this course tests in Chapter 10, hides this fact.

The Corset and What Replaced It

The shape. Around 1900 the fashionable silhouette was the S-bend: a corset pushed the chest forward and the hips back, creating a curved line. It was widely criticised by doctors and reformers as harmful (check).
The claim. Poiret later said that he freed women from the corset with a high-waisted, straight-hanging line from about 1906 (check). Dress reformers had called for rational dress for decades, and other designers moved in the same direction.
The reality. The corset did not disappear. The new line needed a different, longer corset or a girdle, and the hobble skirt, which Poiret showed in 1910, narrowed the hem so much that women could barely walk (check). "Freed" is a claim to test, not an accepted fact (Chapter 10).
The change. Even so, the shape of dress moved away from the extreme curve, and the idea that fashion should allow movement became part of the language of the next decades (Chapter 4).

Paul Poiret

Point (check each)	Detail
Training	Born in 1879, Poiret was the son of a cloth merchant. He worked for Doucet and then for the Worth house before opening his own in 1903.
The style	Colour, loose lines, tunics and turbans. His name is linked with a vivid, Oriental look, with harem trousers and lampshade tunics, in strong colours.
The Ballets Russes	The Russian company led by Sergei Diaghilev arrived in Paris in 1909. Its production of Schéhérazade in 1910, with designs by Léon Bakst, helped to set off a fashion for Eastern colour (check).
The showman	He held parties such as the "Thousand and Second Night" in 1911, toured Europe and the United States with his models, and sold perfume and decorative objects under the names of his daughters (check).
The decline	After the war his business lost out to new rivals such as Chanel, and he closed the house in the 1920s and died in poverty in 1944 (check).

Poiret's memoir, En habillant l'époque (1930), is a colourful but interested account written after his decline (check), and it should be read with other sources.

Pictures and Magazines

Fashion illustration. In 1908 Poiret commissioned the artist Paul Iribe to draw an album of his designs, and in 1911 Georges Lepape did another (check). The drawings treated clothes as art, with flat colour and strong lines.
La Gazette du Bon Ton. This magazine, founded in 1912, brought together couture and illustration, and sold the idea of Paris as the centre of taste (check).
The effect. Fashion illustration shaped how people imagined the clothes, and was often further from the real garment than a photograph would be (Chapter 8).

The First World War

The war closed many houses and sent designers to the front, including Poiret, who made uniforms (check). It also changed the way women dressed. Women took jobs in factories, hospitals and offices, and skirts rose to the calf and became simpler, and the demand for practical clothes grew (check). The black of mourning was common. Houses that survived turned to a market that was more international, and the American buyers became central. The way was open for the designers of the next decade (Chapter 4).

A British comparison The British link in this period is Lucile, who dressed the British stage and aristocracy and opened a house in Paris, and who survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 as Lady Duff Gordon (check). A Scottish link is the Glasgow School: the Glasgow designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his group were shown in the Vienna Secession in 1900 and influenced the Wiener Werkstätte, from which Poiret took ideas for his own decorative arts school after a visit to Vienna in 1910 (check). In the other direction, British suffragettes used colour, in purple, white and green, as a political statement in their dress (check), another case of clothes as politics in the same years.

Check the details Poiret told his own story, and many books repeat it. Dates of his collections, his claims about the corset and the number of his guests and clients should be checked against museum catalogues and independent histories. The same applies to the houses of Paquin, Callot and Lanvin, whose own archives give a house's point of view.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Test the claim "Poiret freed women from the corset" with the six questions.

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Exercise 2

Treat Poiret's memoir En habillant l'époque as a source: what can it tell you, what are its limits, and what would you set beside it?

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Exercise 3

Write a short research note on one house of the period (Paquin, Callot Soeurs, Lanvin or Doucet): what to find out, where to look, and what to treat with caution.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

Houses: Doucet, Paquin, Callot Soeurs, Lanvin, Redfern, Lucile
Poiret: own house 1903; Orientalism and the Ballets Russes; the hobble skirt 1910 (check)
Pictures: Iribe, Lepape, La Gazette du Bon Ton
War: shorter, simpler skirts and practical dress