The party that exploded

Quentin Bell

Poiret Palmer White (Studio Vista £6.95)

"Corsets are quite exploded," exclaimed a fashion journal of the early nineteenth century. Other equally dramatic things were happening at the same time. Waists were

shooting up until they reached the armpits, hair was curtailed and confined either by a bandeau or by a turban (the Orient was very much a la mode), clothes were becoming lighter, simpler, the figure was revealed in all its natural grace (always supposing that there was any natural trace to reveal), there was an end to all padding and constriction, all overdecoration and artificiality.

About a hundred years later there was a second exposion, waists rocketed, hair was shortened, bandeaus and turbans were worn, oriental styles became immensely popular, the figure was again revealed and that padded, packaged whaleboned look of the late nineteenth century vanished, there was an end to all over-decoration and articificiality.

Fashion, like history, never repeats itself; it comes back to former positions not in a circular but in a spiral movement, so that the clothes of the Directoire and the Empire are, in truth unmistakably different from those of the year 1912; nevertheless there are striking similarities between the two periods, not only in the current 'line' but in the situation of fashion itself. The style of revolutionary France was inspired by artists, that is to say by antiquity, as translated by J. L. David and his school, and at this period there was a very high degree of homogeneity in the styles of the different visual arts. Then, with the Restoration begins an age of fragmentation. The crinoline and the bustle find but the faintest stylistic echo in the paintings of the romantics (who turned in horror from contemporary fashions). The realist might observe but would not design fashions and, for the couturier, was at best a recorder never a creator.

The reversion to something rather more like stylistic unity comes with the advent of art nouveau; but it was with the great resurgence of Fauvism, a painting style that could be harnessed to the purposes of decoration, that a grand alliance could again be formed between the painters, the decorators and the couturiers. At the same time there came a great change in the social position of the artist. The avant-garde which, for generations, had been a needy and nonconforming minority, the butt of the critics and the bugbear of the establishment, suddenly became prosperous, we entered upon the age of the modernist millionaire; it was ushered in by the smart world of Paris, by Diaghilev and by Paul Poiret.

Starting from a fairly humble home Poiret

made himself the greatest figure in the world of haute couture, the successor of Worth. This

he accomplished by industry and by pure technical skill, by a reckless and for many years a fortunate audacity and by a real

feeling,' a real flair for the arts. In a characteristically graceful preface Segonzac who, like Derain, Dufy and Matisse, was a

friend, describes Poiret's genuine affection, not only for modern painting and sculpture (his collection was impressive) but also for ancient works of art. He was himself a painter and no one was better fitted to celebrate the reunion of art and fashion which in the years between 1900 and 1910 became possible. Nor was the celebration a modest 'affair. Poiret knew how to make the most of it and for a time his success was prodigious. His fashions were denounced as ugly and indecent, they' were damned by M. Worth, they were condemned by the press and the Church in spite of which, or rather, to speak more accurately because of which (for conspicuous outrage is a necessary part of fashionable success) Poiret's clothes were bought and worn and imitated and admired by anyone with the faintest claims to fashion from Paris to St Petersburg and back again by way of San Francisco. Everything that he touched turned to diamonds.

His fantastically extravagant parties brought new sales and new publicityl he began to manufacture scents (an innovation for a couturier at that time) and his scents sold his clothes while his clothes sold his scents; he established a free school of design and it became a profitable factory of applied

• art; he adventured into the theatre as .a designer and his success there helped to es tablish his fame as a dress designer; he gave a dress show at 10 Downing Street which

became known as Gowning Street, thus causing a political scandal which gave him greater publicity than ever.

Despite some rather odd history, and some very odd English the author tells this

exhilarating story well enough and he gives us .a good index and a useful bibliography, things which are rare in books of this kind. He has

also found some excellent illustrations; as might be expected there is a good deal of Lepape and Paul Iribe who reproduce very

pleasantly in a large format, there are also a

great many excellent and hitherto unpublished photographs, mainly a Madame Poiret wear ing her husband's creations, and these are first-rate. One of the photographs is taken from the film which Poiret showed to illus trate his lectures; this film is not mentioned in the bibliography; one hopes that it is in existence somewhere. The many illustrations of

decorative art producedby Poiret's school, the Ecole Martine, will no doubt charm a great many readers, for this kind of decoration is today extremely popular, historically they are of considerable interest. In principle the students at the school were given a free hand, but in fact there is something like a house

style. The character of-that style is surprising, -it seems to have very little to do with the worlt.of the avant-garde in France in the pre war years, there is practicalry no trace of Braque or of Picasso, not much of Matisse;

even Dufy, who in fact worked a good deal for Poiret, is not much in evidence. The designs seem to look back to art nouveau and even to , the later Pre-Raphaelites at the same time they clearly pr6vide the basis for art deco; the

general effect is strangely conservative; if one compares the show room for Poiret's branch

house in Biarritz which was decorated in 1922 with the Omega show room, one feels that one is in a more sedate and less adventurous environment. It is probably for this reason that Poiret made money and the Omega did not, for even in his clothes Poiret's task was acceptably to translate the discoveries of the avant garde rather than to show them to the public in a crude unpalatable form.

He takes the bold lines, the startling patterns and colours of contemporary art and without losing them makes them sufficiently polite for the fashionable world. I think that this very delicate process of adjustment may have made it difficult for him to move with the times, as, for instance, Diaghilev did. At all events, after 1914 things began to go wrong. In the years immediately after the war

he seems to be moving with, but not leading, the fashion. He was n'ot in sympathy with the tlat-chested streamlined short-skirted fashions

of the mid 1920s and he denounced them, as

Worth had denounced his innovations twenty years before. Quite unable to manage money

he could live only by making it as fast as he lost it. Soon this became impossible. He began to miscalculate badly, fell into debt and bankruptcy; and at last after a series of pain ful misadventures, died penniless in occupied Paris. For many years before his death he had been forgotten and neglected; he had committed that sin which, in the world of fashion, is unforgiveable — he had become old fashioned.

Quentin Bell has recently published Virginia Woolf — A Biography.