How the king of Parisian illustrators made Vogue famous: Georges Lepap

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

At the dawn of the 20th century, the art of photography had not yet reached its current heights. The masterpieces of Parisian couturiers were preserved for posterity by fashionable illustrators - artists who were able to give the drawn image the charm of the real. And the king of Parisian illustrators was Georges Lepap …

Georges Lepap's story begins in the same way as many French illustrators of those years. He was born in 1887 into an ordinary Parisian family, since childhood he was fond of art, at the age of eighteen he entered the School of Fine Arts … And there he very quickly made a wide circle of acquaintances - which later served him well.

In 1909 Georges Lepap met his love - Gabriel Lausanne. A year later, during an art exhibition, another fateful meeting took place. This time - professional, but in a creative sense and it was love at first sight. His name was Paul Poiret, and he was a couturier. Starting as an artistic experiment, their collaboration will last for a decade. The star of Paul Poiret will rise in the Parisian fashion horizon and quickly go out - but his exotic oriental costumes will excite the imagination of young designers for almost a hundred years. And Georges Lepap will become a legend in fashion illustration and graphic design.

Their first joint work was the illustrated album Les Choses de Paul Poiret. Lepap presented the best outfits from Poiret from several angles and in complex storylines. He was the first to bring plot and movement to fashion illustration. Graceful ladies in long beads and tight straight dresses - an innovative silhouette! - flirting, spinning in front of the mirror, chatting with friends … and even slipping outside the format. Most often, these cute scenes were played out in Art Nouveau interiors. Luxurious decorations and beautiful outfits of the "lovely women of Paris" created a coherent whole. Lepap used well-known motifs popular among French engravers - the everyday life of a wealthy Parisian woman, but was the first to use them in advertising clothes. Over time, scenes in Lepap's illustrations will become more complex and even more dramatic.

In 1981, Soviet citizens also saw this edition - it was exhibited by the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A. S. Pushkin.

Following Poiret, Lepap's talent was also appreciated by other Parisian couturiers - Jacques Doucet, Frederic Worth, Jeanne Lanvin, Jeanne Paquin … Lepap was able to adapt his creative quest to the style and ideology of a particular fashion house - and the customers felt that they got exactly what they wanted.

He contrived to be friends with everyone, from the frantic Fauves to the impregnable rulers of the world of jewelry. And in the very first decade of the 20th century, Lepap, who did not miss a single bohemian party, met the famous Russian entrepreneur Sergei Diaghilev. This page in the life of a fashion illustrator is not so well known, but he worked a lot for Russian Seasons. He designed posters and theater programs. Here Lepap was extremely decorative, exaggerating the broken and sometimes aggressive, so unlike classical ballet, dancers' movements. Lepap will return to the theatrical theme in 1923, when he will create the scenery for the production of Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird.

In 1912 he expands the circle of his customers - there is a large Parisian publisher Lucien Vogel, and Lepap begins to illustrate the famous newspaper Bon Thon. Four years later, he painted his first cover for British Vogue - and that was destiny.

In the 1920s, Lepap was invited to the United States as the main cover illustrator for American Vogue.

It was during Lepap's artistic "reign" that Vogue significantly increased its influence in the fashion world. The oldest publication in its field, Vogue lost ground to younger competitors, but sales skyrocketed in the 1920s thanks to Lepap's delightful work. He has created over a hundred covers for his beloved magazine. They wrote about Lepap's drawings for Vogue: "from the very beginning, they were models of sophistication, simplicity and visual wit."

In those years, Lepap was just snapped up. He has worked in almost all areas of advertising and graphic design, painted covers for Vanity Fair and Harpers Bazaar, posters for the Hermes fashion house and the Wanamaker department store. Illustrated and thirty books - He illustrates about thirty books: Paul Geraldi, Sasha Guitri, Alfred de Musset and even Plato.

Over the years, Lepap's daring but elegant style has been influenced by Orientalism, Persian miniatures and Russian ballets. From the French version of Art Nouveau, from "pretty ladies", he moved on to depicting flappers, lovers of jazz, and strong women who can both hunt down a wild boar and saddle an "iron horse". His illustrations turned into whole stories, and the viewer wanted to unravel the secrets of his heroines, to look into their world, refined, unattainable … Georges Lepap knew how to be lyrical, he knew how to convey chiffon trembling in the wind and the tenderness of petals - and at the same time he was subject to hard brilliance chrome steel and sharp corners of trendy haircuts. Unlike his colleagues, who were painfully experiencing the end of the beautiful era, Lepap became an ardent admirer of the Art Deco style and significantly influenced the formation of its aesthetics.

Lepap was the owner of a wonderful villa in the mountains, which was then inherited by his son, Claude Lepap. He followed in his father's footsteps and became an outstanding engraver, book illustrator and symbolist painter known for his metaphysical portraits.

Georges Lepap lived a long life and until his last breath remained, if not the most, then one of the most significant fashion illustrators of the 20th century. He laid the foundations for the graphic language of fashion illustration, his style evolved and adapted to trends, his innovations became classics of graphic design. And today, Georges Lepap's drawings go for fabulous sums at auctions, collectors are ready to do anything for his watercolors, and museums carefully preserve the originals and first editions of the artist's works.

At one time, Asian motives were also popular in Vogue magazine. And for our readers a series of sophisticated photographs from the fashionable edition of Vogue.