Madeleine Vionnet - Beauty and Bias

Last Saturday C&TA members gathered for our first in-person event of the year at the Town Close Auditorium at Norwich Castle to hear ex-Chair Joy Evitt deliver a wonderful talk about French fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet.

​Joy has been researching the life and work of Vionnet with great enthusiasm, and clearly feels that although she is not perhaps a household name in the same way as Chanel or Dior, she has been equally influential in her impact on fashion and indeed on social attitudes to the female form, and should be equally well-known.  

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 She took us through a detailed outline of Vionnet's career, which started at the age of 11 working for a local dressmaker in Aubervilliers.  Her skill was recognised at an early age and she soon moved on to fashion houses in both England and Paris, spending time working on the lavish embroidery and antique lace favoured by Mme Gerber and her sisters at Callot Soeurs, before being poached from there in 1907 to work for Jacques Douçet.  However, by this time Vionnet, who had already experienced the collapse of an unhappy early marriage and loss of a child, was developing strong feelings about the female form, and refusing to use corsetry in her designs in the way Douçet demanded, she set up her own fashion house in 1912.

Vionnet using her sliderule

It was here that Vionnet's signature use of bias cut fabric and beautiful draping really came into their own; although it had been used by designers before her, she was a pioneer in the use of the bias cut for a whole garment, creating daring shapes using basic shapes in fluid fabrics such as silk, a silk/rayon mix and a Rosalba crepe designed specifically for her by the silk merchant Bianchini-Férier.  She refused to use interfacing as it made the garments too stiff, avoided darts and often designed dresses with no fastenings, which were just slipped on over the model's head.  Her dresses used some machine sewing for strength, but were all hand-finished with exquisite attention to detail.

As well as being an advocate for a natural female form, Vionnet was also a ground-breaking woman in other ways.  She was a thoughtful, considerate employer, and although wages in the fashion houses were fixed by agreement amongst the companies, she replaced the stools in her workshops with chairs, provided maternity pay, medical care, child day care and food for her employees, and encouraged them to specialise in particular areas of production in order to build their skills to the highest levels.  

Vionnet's fluid, sinuous shapes were extremely influential on many designs

Fabric flowers, especially roses, were another trademark Vionnet feature

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​Vionnet was also very influential in improving the legal rights of fashion designers over their products, making use of clever photography to record her designs and only allowing very few licensed copies to be made of her garments.  This began the establishment of copyright for Haute Couture.  In addition, by launching a collection of 'repeated original' labels in New York in the late 1920s, Vionnet laid the foundations for the creation of quality ready-to-wear clothing.

Joy's admiration for Vionnet was very clear.  The designer's skill was phenomenal: Balenciaga, whom she mentored,  called her 'his master' and her fashion house at 50, Avenue Montaigne was known as 'The Temple of Fashion'.  Designs such as the 'Greek Vase Dress' and the stunning 'Carnival Dress' are now iconic, and her influence on the graphically shaped and draped clothing of modern designers such as Issey Miyake is obvious.  Joy is of the opinion that Madeleine Vionnet should be much more widely fêted, and after hearing her fascinating lecture, we are inclined to agree.