Vogue World Paris, organized into sections by decade, opens in the 1920s with Chanel dresses from 2024 and three recreations from designs made 100 years before. The clothes we see and admire today are connected to this decade of modernity, the one in which the natural female form was finally set free within clothes. Support corsets might be worn, but the fashionable silhouette mostly followed the lines of the body and was no longer constructed from within and shaped with hoops and wires. Instead a dress was more like “a machine for living,” with the sleek simplicity of all Art Deco design. At this turning point, fashion wiped the slate clean: “This new simplicity-by-elimination,” wrote Vogue in 1924, wasn’t “in the least what Mrs. Littletowns’s [the American customer] mother’s generation had considered ‘French,’ they were too sensible.”
Introducing the “Les Années Folles” at Vogue World Paris are five designs by Chanel: two flapperish looks from Virginie Viard’s spring 2024 couture collection, and recreations of three 1924 dresses designed by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel that appeared in Vogue.
Chanel is the designer most associated with the streamlined, tubular look of the Jazz Age because she embodied the spirit and look of the age. (Writing of the designer’s spring 1924 offering the magazine said that “This collection constitutes the most serious temptation to any woman who loves to look as if she belonged to the best in her epoch.”) Chanel was a (business) woman on the move, whose rise was facilitated, in part, by growing acceptance of cross-class mingling in post-war society. The designer was able to create a link between the new look of the times and youth. Said Vogue: “There was a youthfulness about her creations that attracted a woman who still played a good game of tennis.” The dresses that Chanel remade for Vogue World Paris were intended for a night on the town rather than the court. They are “dancings” as such dresses were called, and they glitter like priceless treasures. This is how they first appeared in Vogue in 1924.
Chanel, Fall 1924 couture
The atelier provided descriptions of each of the recreated looks. This sheath features a round neckline and low-cut back. The base fabric is a mordoré silk charmeuse with an overlay of black tulle decorated with of gold-embroidery and patinate metallic scales of varying dimensions (between 5 and 10 mm). It’s constructed from a single length of fabric that is joined at the shoulders, “applied under a n embroidered fibula, as well as a flap inlaid with embroidered tulle.”
Chanel, fall 1924 couture
Sheath dress with “V-shaped inlay” in black cepe de Chine silk with Lesage embroidery of more than 2,000 pearl tassels in black and silver.
Chanel, fall 1924 couture
This black crepe georgette silk dress (see below left) has a graduated fringe made of black tubes and featuresan thin-strapped under slip with a crepe de chine upper and crepe georgette silk skirt.
