Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
Charles Frederick Worth, the designer from the nineteenth century often regarded as the pioneer of haute couture, was far from humble. “Madame, who has referred you to me?” he is reported to have queried a potential customer at his Paris salon, a lady prepared to pay the steep prices typically associated with his services. “If you desire to be dressed by me, you require an introduction,” he elaborated. “I am an artist of the caliber of Delacroix.”
Worth had ample justification for his self-assurance. His most significant client throughout a remarkable fifty-year career was an empress, yet tsarinas, social elites, actresses, and courtesans also came to depend on his skill. His gowns, characterized by an “upholstery-style” filled with drapes, frills, embroidery, and fringes, exemplified to an extraordinary extent the sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s notion of “conspicuous consumption.” At a time when the ownership of property was severely limited for married women, a Worth dress indicated that the wearer was connected—by blood, marriage, or the allure she could evoke—to at least one significant fortune. This was no trivial matter in a swiftly evolving society, where wealth, concentrated among a select few, could be gained or lost in an instant.
Today, visitors from our own greedy age can traverse Paris’s lavishly adorned Pont Alexandre III (which is itself a product of the Belle Époque) and enter the spacious galleries of the Petit Palais, where “Worth, Inventing Haute Couture” will be displayed until September 7th. Organized in collaboration with the Palais Galliera, the exhibition showcases over four hundred seldom-seen pieces. Garments, paintings, photographs, and objets d’art outline the history of the House of Worth from its inception by Charles Frederick during the crinoline era, through its revival in the Edwardian period when his sons Jean-Philippe and Gaston took charge, and into the 1920s and 1930s, when his grandson Jean-Charles brought Worth’s extravagant style into the Jazz Age, while launching perfumes, befriending artists, and posing nude in a series of photographs by Man Ray. The exhibition contends that the house established the framework for many of the conventions and myths that still dictate the creation of high fashion today.
Photograph of Jean-Charles Worth, 1925.Photograph by Man Ray / Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, Paris / Image Telimage, Paris
“Opulence, theatricality, and historicism” defined Worth’s aesthetic, as fashion historian Sophie Grossiord, who co-curated the exhibition alongside Marine Kisiel and Raphaële Martin-Pigalle, articulated one morning at the Petit Palais. She stood beside a day jacket with a cinched waist, high collar, and puffed sleeves, crafted from midnight-blue velvet and adorned with arabesques of pale-violet satin. (On its expansive Renaissance-style collar, the design is inverted: the arabesques are blue, while the background is violet.)
This splendid jacket may have been something that Renée, the tragically extravagant protagonist of Émile Zola’s novel “The Kill,” would have adored. Ensnared one winter in Paris in a reckless romance with her stepson, Renée requests from her couturier, Worms, “a complete Polish suit . . . in velvet and fur” for ice-skating with her young lover in the Bois de Boulogne. Zola conducted thorough research at the House of Worth to craft his portrayal of Worms as a temperamental artist serving a society ruled by wealth and addicted to luxury. Renée spends hours at “the couturier of genius to whom the grand ladies of the Second Empire bowed down,” waiting alongside “a line of at least twenty women.” When she finally stands before him, holding her breath, he “pondered with furrowed brows” before sketching an outfit for her while exclaiming in brief phrases, “a Montespan dress in pale-grey faille . . . puffed apron of pearl-grey tulle.” Much of the novel is dedicated to the merciless machinations of Renée’s husband, Saccard, a property speculator intent on capitalizing on the vast geographical transformations occurring in Haussmann’s Paris. However, Zola devotes the final words of the novel, following Renée’s abrupt death, to a bill from Worms.
Sourse: newyorker.com