Unanimously admired by generations of historians, researchers, couturiers and designers, Madeleine Vionnet (1876-1975) was known as “the architect of couture” as early as 1923 when she moved her fashion house to 50 Avenue Montaigne. The power of her oeuvre, which was innovative and visionary in more ways than one, 1 has ensured that she has remained endlessly fascinating ever since. A rare case in fashion history, Madeleine Vionnet managed not only to redefine the art of haute couture but also to be a socially conscious employer who cared about the well-being and the working conditions of her 1,200 employees. Moreover, she became a benevolent mentor to many younger colleagues who set out to establish their own couture houses in 1939, when the house of Vionnet was closed down. A unique example of a fashion designer committed to transmission, conscious of her mission and invested in passing on her legacy, Vionnet took on a very active role in the constitution of a vestimentary heritage to pass on to future generations right up until she died in 1975 at the respectable age of 99. In 1952, she donated not only her carefully preserved and annotated archives to the Union Française des Arts du Costume (UFAC), a non-profit founded in Paris in 1948 by the professional organisations of the clothing industry to create a museum of fashion, but she also exerted herself to convince former clients and colleagues to follow her example, seizing every opportunity to publicise UFAC’s work. 2
In the sanctuary of the muses
The museum depot is where the remains of our history live on. This was where I first encountered the “Vionnet case”, in 1986, when Yvonne Deslandres had only just recruited me to reinforce the team at the brand new Musée des Arts de la Mode, established at the Pavillon de Marsan in the Palais du Louvre. Some parts of the collections of the Union Française des Arts du Costume had to be moved, and I had been given the task of classifying and storing a few cubic metres of fragile dresses, which meant packaging them and laying them down flat on standard-sized shelves. That was when, among the beaded gowns from the 1920s, I happened upon several designs that looked very different. These were distinguished by a tiny paper label sewn inside the hem, bearing handwritten references to figures. They were all dated and signed by Madeleine Vionnet. The first thing that struck me about Vionnet, whose name was unknown to me at the time, was those incredibly wide skirts that, once spread out on a table, formed a perfect half-circle. Next, I encountered her panelled dresses, seemingly made from scarves, which when laid out flat turned out to be constructions of cleverly assembled squares, lozenges and rectangles (figs. 1a-b). Yet another type of dress was incomprehensible to me. I struggled to determine the back from their front,
Contemplating this vast family Vionnet had gathered around her name, what the anonymous chronicler of La Gazette du Bon Ton caught on to in 1924 sounds today like a premonition: “Madeleine Vionnet stands above fashion. Not that she is beyond fashion, but rather she predicts the fashion of tomorrow.” The relevance of her concepts and the exceptional longevity of her influence and aura might best be explained in her own words: “If one can say that there is currently a Vionnet school, it is mainly because I have shown myself to be an enemy of fashion. There is, in seasonal, fleeting whims, an element of superficiality and instability that offends my sense of beauty... To return to my ‘school’, these are its four foundations: proportions, movement, balance, and truth.” By deliberately situating her work outside trends, she has ensured its eternal relevance. As Madeleine Vionnet had never been fashionable, she can never go out of fashion.
Motherhood – both as a physical state and a lived experience –gradually became more visible in twentieth-century fashion imagery. However, the significant influence of motherhood on fashion design, both as a creative practice and a commercial enterprise, remains underexplored by historians of fashion and dress. This essay delves deeper into the life and work of two prominent twentieth-century fashion designers who self-identified as ‘fashion mothers’: Jeanne Lanvin (1867-1946), the modern, sphinx-like couturière of whom no personal writings have survived, and Sonia Rykiel (1930-2016), the postmodern public intellectual, author and designer, most famous for her timeless, unruly démode approach to fashion. 1
Both these designers had symbiotic relationships with their daughters, Marguerite di Pietro and Nathalie Rykiel, which were strengthened by the absence of father figures, leading to a difficult psychic process of separation later in life. The daughters’ shifting roles – from source of inspiration, to central motif, to a projection screen for ideas, as well as creative or business collaborators – is an important evolution in the designers’ careers. By exploring and highlighting the impact of motherhood on the specific fashion trajectories of Lanvin and Rykiel, both in terms of their artistry and their business models, I aim to provide a stepping-stone for the interpretation of careers of fashion mothers in a larger sense, historically and today.
Jeanne Lanvin
The eldest of a modest family of eleven children, Jeanne Lanvin had to support herself as early as the age of thirteen. 2 As an apprentice in Parisian millinery ateliers at the age of fifteen, she started making doll hats from the scraps of fabric, selling them door to door with her brother after hours. In 1889, she had saved up enough money to start her own millinery business together with her brother, sister and sister-in-law; the House of Lanvin was conceived of as a family business, with Jeanne as a matriarch at the top.
With the arrival of her first and only child Marguerite di Pietro in 1897, when Jeanne was thirty, she felt reborn as a designer; she started to make children’s garments because no existing styles for children were to her liking (fig. 1). In 1908, she opened a childrenswear shop, selling luxurious garments together with custom chiffon miniature dolls, functioning both as children’s playthings and as publicity artifacts. 3 Marguerite was the raison d’être for her mother’s fashion business, the muse at the heart of the maison 4 When Marguerite attended her piano lessons, she not only looked ravishing in her little pale pink dresses but also elegant and relaxed whilst playing the piano. In 1909, in response to insistent requests from the other children’s
