Fashion before Chanel: How Madeleine Vionne, the inventor of the bias cut became famous and forgotten

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

Even before Chanel appeared on the fashionable Olympus, Madeleine Vionne, a style icon and goddess of cut, lived and worked in Paris. She owns many inventions - cutting along the side, clothing without seams, the use of labels. She urged women to be free, like her idol, Isadora Duncan. However, the name Madeleine Vionne was forgotten for many years …

She was born in 1876 in Albertville, a small provincial town. As a child, she dreamed of being a sculptor, but the dream was not destined to come true - at least the way little Madeleine imagined. Her family was poor, and instead of an art school, twelve-year-old Madeleine went to school for a local dressmaker. She did not even receive a full-fledged school education, having studied for only a few years. A talent for mathematics means nothing if you have to earn your living from a young age.

At seventeen, Madeleine, who mastered the art of sewing, got a job in a Parisian fashion house - and her fate awaited, in general, completely ordinary. Some time later, she married a Russian emigrant and gave birth to a girl, but the child died and her husband left her. Since then, Madeleine no longer tied the knot.

Shortly after this tragedy, Madeleine lost her job. Completely crushed, she went to England, where at first she agreed to any hard work - for example, as a laundress, and then mastered the business of a cutter in a workshop that copied French outfits for English fashionistas.

Returning to Paris at the turn of the century, she took a job as a cutter at the fashion house of the Callot sisters, who saw her potential and promoted her to assistant chief artist. Together with the Callot sisters, Madeleine came up with new models, silhouettes and decor. Then Madeleine began working with couturier Jacques Doucet, but the collaboration was short-lived and not particularly successful - Madeleine was seized with a thirst for experiments that turned out to be too extravagant.

She was a passionate admirer of Isadora Duncan - her freedom, audacity, liberated plasticity, and sought to embody in her models that power, that joy of life that she saw in the great dancer.

Even before Chanel, she started talking about giving up corsets, drastically shortening the length of the dresses and insisting on the use of soft dresses that accentuate the natural curves of the female body. She invited Doucet to hold fashion shows, but the very first show caused a scandal - even bohemian Paris was not ready for such innovations. Vionne advised fashion models not to wear underwear under her tight-fitting dresses, they walked barefoot on the catwalk, like the gorgeous Duncan. Dusse hastened to part with the too active assistant, and then the First World War broke out.

Madeleine opened her own business back in 1912, but gained fame only in 1919 - and immediately gained widespread popularity. She fought counterfeiting using her own labels and a specially designed logo, which is now quite common in the fashion industry. Each dress from Vionne was photographed from three angles using a special mirror and placed in an album - such albums for more than thirty years of existence, the House of Vionne has released seventy five.

Madeleine believed that clothes should follow the lines of a woman's body, and not the body should be disfigured and broken with special devices to match the fashionable silhouette. She loved simple shapes, draperies and cocoons. It was Madeleine Vionne who came up with the oblique cut, which allows the fabric to slide around the body and lie in beautiful folds. Invented the collar-hood and collar-collar. She often experimented with seamless clothing - for example, creating a coat from a wide cut of wool without a single seam.

She often made sets of coats and dresses, where the lining of the coat and the dress were made of the same fabric - this technique was reborn in the 60s.

"When a woman smiles, the dress should smile with her" - this mysterious phrase Vionne repeated very often. What did she mean? Maybe Madeleine wanted to emphasize that her dresses follow the natural movements of the wearer and emphasize her mood - or maybe some kind of modernist charade lurked in these words.

Vionne was inspired by the sculpture of Cubism and Futurism, as well as ancient art. In the photographs, her models appeared in the poses of ancient vase painting and ancient Greek friezes. And the ancient Roman statues served as a starting point for draperies, the secret of which designers and engineers cannot unravel to this day.

Vionne was indifferent to color, although a new fabric was created especially for her - a mixture of silk and acetate in a soft pink hue.

Madeleine Vionne practically did not leave any patterns - each dress was created individually using the tattooing method, so it is simply impossible to repeat her outfits exactly. She did not leave any sketches. Madeleine believed that it was necessary not to design a dress, but to wrap the figure with fabric, allowing the material and the body to do its work, she preferred to adapt to the individuality of the clients, and not dictate her will to them. She wanted to open up, liberate women.

True, no matter how beautiful the dresses from Vionne were, the customers often returned them to the creator - because they could not figure out the folds and draperies on their own. In the box and on the hanger, dresses looked like shapeless rags, and only on a woman's body did they turn into real masterpieces. Madeleine had to give her clients dressing classes. It is surprising that these difficulties arose precisely with the dresses of the artist, who dreamed of giving women the freedom of ancient nymphs and bacchantes!

Madeleine never called what she does fashionable. “I want my dresses to survive time,” she said.

The Second World War left Vionne practically without a livelihood, her fashion house was closed, and her name was forgotten for many years. However, Madeleine Vionne's achievements were used by fashion designers around the world - stolen from the one who so protected her works from fakes. Only in the 2000s did the Vionne fashion house resume work with young ambitious managers and designers.

For anyone interested in the history of fashion, a story about how Japanese Yohji Yamamoto conquered European fashion for his mother.