On Tuesday night in Paris, MAD—as Paris’s museum of decorative arts is now known—inaugurated “Paul Poiret: Fashion is a Feast,” the first-ever dedicated exhibition about the couturier best remembered for freeing women from corsets.
Poiret learned about couture at the house of Worth, the subject of another exhibition over at the Petit Palais. Once he struck out on his own, he became the original multi-hyphenate couturier. Poiret dabbled in music, painting, acting, and restaurants. He was the first to scout out and support promising talents, initiate collaborations with artist friends like Paul Iribe and Raoul Dufy, and launch a perfume line, which he named after his daughter, Rosine. Inspired by the Ballet Russes, he drew from across the arts for his fashion. Soon, he reached the pinnacle of fame as fashion’s first all-powerful creative director and social arbiter.
“With the coming of Paul Poiret, fashion changed completely,” Christian Dior wrote in his autobiography, Christian Dior and I, published in 1957. “Paris in 1912 was like a harem, with Paul Poiret as the powerful but kindly sultan.”
At MAD, some 550 works span his couture creations, accessories, costume jewelry, images of famous clients like Peggy Guggenheim (shot in Poiret by Man Ray), and fine and decorative arts. But it’s the dialogue with contemporary high fashion—from Dior himself to present-day—that attests to Poiret’s reach.
Though a man of excess in practically every way, Poiret was also a man of his era, said Marie-Sophie Carron de la Carrière, MAD’s head curator of fashion and textile collections dating from 1800-1946, during a preview. “He had a new image of what women should look like. He had a rich creative universe that touched on the decorative arts, gastronomy, and perfume. He mingled with high society and spent extravagantly, whether on mistresses or parties.” Poiret’s over-the-top fashion blowouts were the talk of the town, breathlessly covered by the media.
“He was the first designer to understand the power of a fashion party as advertising,” Carron de la Carrière added. “He organized events so the press would talk about it, and he was really a celebrity in his own right.”
Such extravagance would also prove his downfall: exactly a century ago, having rented three barges on the Seine to illustrate his universe for the 1925 Universal Exhibition, Poiret was forced to sell his name. Things only went downhill from there, and he died destitute.
Yet Poiret’s influence remains. Over two floors, striking examples of his work include the Joséphine evening dress (a light, Directoire-inspired gown with a raised waist from 1907), a graphic evening dress from 1910 in black silk chiffon embroidered with glass tube beads and velvet, and an orange evening coat from the same year trimmed with fur, gold and silver thread, and green passementerie. That coat, and others, bear more than a passing resemblance to a coat Carron de la Carrière spotted at a showroom presentation by Alphonse Maitrepierre during Paris Fashion Week a year or so ago.
“It’s definitely not a highly commercial piece,” offered Maitrepierre of the coat, a black cashmere number with a faux astrakhan effect and a sculptural collar piece by the New York-based artist Gracelee Lawrence. “What I love about Poiret is that there was something contemporary about the way he envisioned clothing on a woman’s body,” the designer added. “It’s like he was thinking out of the box and going for volume.”
To illustrate Poiret’s trickle-down effect over the past century, the exhibition is interspersed with looks by designers ranging from Christian Dior in his day to Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Lacroix, Jean Paul Gaultier, Azzedine Alaia (a major Poiret collector), Rei Kawakubo, John Galliano, Dries Van Noten, Issey Miyake, and even Martin Margiela.
“Like Margiela, he was always recycling things,” Carron de la Carrière offered. “There are designers who have an extreme erudition but treat it lightly through fashion,” she added, nodding to a Pompeii dress designed by Karl Lagerfeld for Chloé. “Poiret’s heritage is everywhere—I hope [Miuccia] Prada shows up for this.”
