SYMHC Classics: Paul Poiret

This is a revisit of our 2013 episode on the often avante-garde French designer Paul Poiret. He got rid of corsets, introduced the concept of lifestyle branding, and used draping rather that tailoring to create his dramatic designs.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Last week we name dropped French fashion designer
Paul Poiret and are behind the scenes on Is It
or a Duncan? Holly talked about his designing clothes for
her and her daughter and I was kind of like, yeah,
that makes total logical sense. It seems like a good
time based on that's a poll our episode on poire

(00:23):
Out of the Archive. Yeah, and this episode originally came
out on jun We hope you enjoyed. Welcome to Stuff
You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,

(00:43):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I
am Tracy. Today we're talking about one of my favorite
designers of all time. Yes, yes, who is that Paul
poire I thought it might if you really want to
friendship up, but I won't do the full pronunciation throughout
the podcast because it starts to get a little His
famous quote from was I am an artist, not a

(01:07):
dressmaker like he He's one of those people that when
you study him, you wonder if he came off to
people around him as super conceited and blustering. Yeah, I
was gonna say that doesn't sound pretentious at all. But
he also was a really hard worker and he really
did innovate, So maybe his confidence was just all built
off of knowing that he was going to plow through

(01:27):
and some actual success and not just grandiose statements. Yeah,
and indeed, I mean his work, which was often very
outant guard for the times, changed the fashion world in
really significant ways. And people may not know his name
unless they're really into historical fashion, but odds are you
would recognize his designs. Um. You know, his silhouettes tend

(01:48):
to be very long and narrow skirts sometimes pants topped
off with these very dramatic tunics that tended to be wider,
so the top portion of the silhouette tended to be
wider than the bottom um and they were really the
height of fashion in the nineteen teens, in the early
heading into the early nineteen twenties. A lot of his
his designs are actually done by other artists at the time.

(02:10):
He collaborated with a lot of them. So if you
look at drawings by Erte, a lot of those are him.
Uh Aribe who he worked with him, we'll talk about briefly.
Uh those drawings that are sort of famous, and they're
like just pre flapper era people recognize, but they may
not realize that a lot of those are Paul Poire,
and even the ones that aren't are often influenced by

(02:32):
the things that he was doing in fashion. So he
was born in eighteen seventy nine and Laisal. His father
was a cloth merchant, so he got a lot of
exposure to fashion in his early life while his family
was working class. Yeah, and his father sent him at
a very early age to apprentice with an umbrella maker
because as a working class family, they wanted him to

(02:53):
have a skill. Uh. But young Paul would actually gather
the small scraps left over at the end of the day,
the little pieces of silk left over from the umbrella cuttings,
and he would make clothes for his sister's dolls. So
he was doing fashion and small scale pretty early in
his life, and that's a pretty perfect use for umbrella scraps.
In his fashion career officially started Couturier Madeleine Chari brought

(03:19):
twelve of his designs, and shortly thereafter Poire was hired
by Couturier Jacques du Say as a junior assistant, and
he quickly worked his way up to head of tailoring
in that group, and he was so successful in his
position that he was eventually tapped by Doucet to take
on jobs designing costumes for stage actresses, and he made

(03:41):
a really big name for himself doing this. Um there's
one particular garment that's often referenced, which is a mantle
he made for a play entitled Zaza, which was worn
by actress Gabriel Jean, and it was black tool layered
over black taffoda, and it was painted with white irises,
and it made a big splash and it was um

(04:02):
allegedly very impactful in terms of the emotional moment of
the scene in which it appeared, and Poiret sort of
started to realize that he could actually be using the
stage as a runway to showcase his own designs and
build a following. So he kind of became famous for
these garments he was making for actresses. It's kind of
double a double edged sword, though, because it's rumored that

(04:24):
when he was working with celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt, that
he was overheard by the actress while he was making
fun of her and she had him fired. But that's
again kind of a cloaked in rumor. Part of history.
Some histories of him will say that happened, some we'll
not because at the same time, which was nine undred,
Poiret also had to report for a military service, which

(04:47):
was mandatory. So it's entirely possible that the Bernhard stories
just gossip that took advantage of that timing. Regardless of
how he left, the job to say had been really
encouraging of his activity and his style. So it was
pretty tragic that he left the world for a while. Yeah,
I mean, any creative type that gets a lot of encouragement,

(05:08):
that's like a perfect situation. So to unfortunately step out
of that is not ideal. But he only had to
do his year of mandatory service and when he returned
to Paris in nineteen o one, he was hired almost
immediately by the House of Worth, and that was one
of the most prominent design houses in Europe. Um if
you look at fashion plates of the Victorian and Edwardian
eras many of them, many of the styles and fashions

(05:31):
will be credited in the House of Worth. I mean
they were huge, uh, And at the time Poiret was
hired into the firm, Charles Frederick Worth, who had founded
the fashion house had already passed away, and his two sons,
Jean Philippe and Gaston, had taken over. Unlike his time
working under du Say, he didn't get a lot of
encouragement at Worth. Instead of taking advantage of all this

(05:51):
theatricality and dramatic style that he had really cultivated, the
brother's Worth put him to work on pretty mundane stuff.
He tried to inject his style. Don't know what he
was doing, but that was not really what the Worth
clientele were looking for. They were used to getting stylish
clothing that was guaranteed to be seen as stylish and
not just experimental stuff. They were not ready for the

(06:13):
avant garde. No. The good thing, though, is that he
did have an incredible confidence. Even through the rough times
at House of Worth. He was certain that he was
going to move on to better things, and even when
clients were complaining that he was making ugly, crazy clothes,
he was really unflappable about it, which is pretty impressive
and astonishing. Uh. And in nine three he finally took

(06:36):
his future into his own hands and he opened his
own shop. And because Pare had charmed many clients, uh,
he actually had a great many fans in high places.
The King of Portugal allegedly sent two white mules to
the designer for the opening of his boutique in Ruabart,
and they stood outside on opening day, like the doors

(06:56):
were just flanked by these two mules. Just kind of
wonderfully odds. They're perfectly theatrical to his designs. In nineteen
o three, broke with a major fashion rule by ditching
petticoats entirely. Yeah, I mean that's huge. We think of
it today and it seems like, well, you don't need
a petticoat, but you did then. Yeah, Well, and that's that.

(07:19):
This was if you were out without a petticoat, It
wasn't just that your clothing didn't look right. You were
being immodest and indecent without petticoats on. Yeah. Uh. So
he carried on for a couple of years in his
new shop, and in nineteen o five Pare married his
wife Denise, and the pair had really known each other
since childhood. She was not exactly known to be like

(07:41):
a great beauty. She had really been kind of a
simple girl from simple beginnings, because remember his childhood started
in very simple places. But through her marriage with Paul,
she really became something of a style icon, and she
served as his muse. Uh. And she would wear her
his fashions as the pair toured Europe and eventually other
places together. Um. And they had five daughters together throughout

(08:03):
their marriage and later in life. Uh. Paul would say,
sort of unkindly of Denise. She was extremely simple, and
all those who have admired her since I made her
my wife would certainly not have chosen her in the
state in which I found her. That makes me angry.
It's a little snarky, but things did not. I did
not say Rosie with the two of them forever, but
for a while she was his muse, and I think

(08:25):
she became the style director of his design house for
a while. And you know, he really clearly loved the
female form and love to dress it and wanted to
free it from a lot of the things that people
were kind of watted up in terms of the rules
of clothing. Yeah, there were lots and lots of layers,
and Denise was a huge pardon kind of that movement

(08:46):
towards a freer mode of dress. In Pre produced an
album of fashion designs. It was illustrated by Paul Iribe
called simply rope. To Paul Plory. At this point in

(09:08):
his career, Grecian clothing and Japanese kimonos and certain caftin
styles from Middle Eastern and North African cultures were really
influential in Paris designs. He wanted to make garments that
used simple rectangles instead of really complicated shapes. He developed
lots of designs that celebrated the so called Direct War revival.

(09:28):
Slouett so very columnar and n six was also the
year that he did something again controversial, when he replaced
the corset as a foundation garment for his designs with
a much less restrictive girdle. And this is a huge deal. Um,
this is like a kin to women burning their brawls

(09:48):
in the sixties, except it was a man doing it
for fashion. Well, and it really happened. But you know,
in terms of like the cultural touchstones that people think of,
this is really big to basically say the undergarments are
stupid and wrong, let's get rid of those. We're going
for a more natural shape. Um, no petticoats, no corsets,
complete mayhem. Really in terms of what had gone before, Yeah,

(10:11):
and again it wasn't just about what the clothes looked
like it was about all these ideas of modesty that
were tied to it and in decency and like what
what good ladies of quality wore when they were going
out and he threw those out the window. And he
wasn't the only designer, we should say, doing these things,
like Vienna was doing similar stuff, but he was kind

(10:34):
of so outspoken about it, and he had such a
flair for the dramatic that he got the most attention
in the press and societally for what he was doing.
But when you mentioned the modesty issue, that brings us
to a scandal that took place. Yes, there was a
scandal in nine nine involving uh Poire and British Prime
Minister H. H. Asked With and his wife. The story

(10:56):
goes that lady asked With was a fan of Paris
work and invited him to show his designs at ten
Downing Street. As is sometimes the case with fashion shows,
things got a little bit out of hand. Rumors started
to spread of really wild happenings and models running around
the famed residents in various states of undress. The scandal
really nearly caused ask With resignation, and it came to

(11:20):
be known as the Gowning Street scandal. And then um,
once that blew over and we moved forward a little
bit to nineteen eleven, we really hit what is in
the history of Paul Pore a huge, huge year. First,
he did something that had never been done before, which
is that he expand his brand, and that's not something

(11:42):
we normally attribute to things that were going on in
the early nine hundreds, like the idea of a fashion
designer having a brand. Uh. And he produced a fragrance
line that was named after his daughter Rosine, and it
was really successful and it eventually became Fragrances and Cosmetics
and continued to selve very very well. He he also
opened a decorative arts school for underprivileged girls, which was

(12:03):
called a Cole Martin, and that was named after another
of his daughters. He used the artwork the girls produced
to create fabric prints, which they sold in a shop
adjacent to the school. This really delights me. Yeah, I
feel like it was the spoon Flower of the kind
of and it really ended up becoming like a lifestyle
brand at that point because it also they also sold

(12:25):
things like stationary and you know, small little house items
there that had often used the designs of these girls,
and so his sort of home line became known as
the Martin Group. After this school and the the attached
store just really cool, uh. And then he invented around

(12:46):
in nineteen eleven what was called the Robe de Minute,
and this is again one of those things that is
so simple but really mind blowing for the time. It
was basically a simple column of silk cut almost like
a T shirt, and it allegedly took only thirty minutes
to assemble, so compared to the structured Edwardian fashions that
were still pretty prominent at the time, this was basically

(13:07):
like walking around in a nightgown. So to show up
at an evening party in this, which was usually what
his wife did, she was like wearing his really kind
of cutting edge designs before anyone else did, which is
why she became a fashion icon. Really was pretty brazen
and took a lot of bravado and it was um
ultra revolutionary. But again we should point out that it's
not on its own. He's not the only one doing

(13:29):
these sorts of things. This is also around the time
that Italian designer Mariano Fortuni was producing his really ultrasimple
Grecian style silhouettes that took advantage of his secret and
famous silk pleading techniques. So there was this um aesthetic
developing in fashion circles for simpler but really beautiful garments

(13:50):
um in this Grecian columnar style. Yeah, and if you're
not really familiar with with what Edwardian fashions look like,
we can just they were very fitted and think of Titanic. Yeah,
think of Titanic, very fitted, many layers of underpinnings underneath
that there's just a laggling on. Yeah. Fussy's a great word,

(14:10):
like you really had to have help to get into
your clothes, and not so much the case even though
the lines were simpler. I think people think of Edwardian
clothing is being simpler because it's the next phase after Victorian,
which was very fussy and everything had a Brazilian tassels
on it. Um, the clothing got the lines got simpler
and sharper, but and there wasn't as much crazy embellishment,

(14:33):
but all those layers were still there. So you still
had on your bloomers and your pantaloons and a chemise
and a corset and possibly a corset cover and then
a gown, possibly an undergown, you know, petticoat, I mean all.
And he basically got rid of all of that and said,
just wear a simple silk sheath. It's fine, I mean
And everybody was like, what, that's bold to do? What?

(14:58):
He was sparked by a just an exoticism after traveling
to Moscow in nineteen eleven. This was a huge influence
on his work from this point. Shortly after he came
back to Paris on June nineteen eleven, he hosted the
historically famous party called the thousand and Second Night. There
was allegedly a new translation of The thousand and one

(15:19):
Night's making the round in Paris at the time, although
we haven't really been able to confirm that. In time
for this episode, guests were required to attend in Persian
styled clothing or they had to be Uh. They had
to allow the host to dress them once they got there. Uh.
This was actually a ploy on Poires part. He was
dressing his guests in his new line of designs that

(15:40):
were inspired by his travels um specifically a production of
Scheherazade he saw at the Ballet Roust and his newfound
interest in Orientalism, and it's it's really sort of where
I think this party and this line of clothing is
really where his style kind of gets put under the
magnifying class in terms of the future, Like that's what

(16:01):
a lot of people associate with him or the is
that line of clothing, and that's actually where he debuted
the harem pants that he became famous for and the
lampshade dresses that he is also known for today. The
lampshade dresses really, when you say that, I think sometimes
people that might not know have a hard time picturing it.
They really were these tunic style dresses that had wire

(16:22):
in the hem to pull them out from the body
so it looked like a lampshade um. And these less
confining shapes actually became incredibly popular and they kept Party
very busy filling client orders. Even though they were completely
crazy and way beyond what had been going on in
fashion previously. People just really jumped on it. They loved
it well if you had a chance not to be.

(16:43):
And of course it was all those layers of clothing. Yeah,
because we've we've talked a lot before about how what
people think of is. Of course it's often not how
they were actually worn, right. It was not really a
tight lacing thing that we think of today, but it
was still a lot of clothing. All that stuff that
you're wearing is really heavy and and once you get

(17:04):
out of all of that and realize that you can
walk around your life without twenty five pounds of fabric
hanging off of your body, it's pretty liberating. Well, and
it's also worth mentioning I think that this was all
happening in the summer. Like the idea of suddenly being
free of all of that extra clothing in the hottest
time of the year, which it would have been for
Europe at the time. Um, that's got to be pretty appealing,

(17:27):
and I'm sure that factored into the success the quick
acceptance of these very new styles poire and and He's
traveled to the United States, where they were received with
great delight by the fashion crowd. He gave a series

(17:50):
of lectures in Manhattan, and the two of them toward
department stores and showed off all the latest designs from
their collection. It's interesting to know I was looking at
something while I was prepping for this that said that
he found um American women too thin and not very fashionable,
but they seemed so eager. He was fine with it.
He was, we can work with this. Also in nineteen thirteen,

(18:12):
he turned once again to his roots in the theater,
and most notably he designed costumes for Jacques Rochepin's Laminarette,
and he once again saw the opportunity to use the
stage as a runway, and he put his lampshade to
Knicks front and center. So even though it had been
a couple of years at that point, those were still
very popular and he was still pushing them, uh and

(18:33):
you know, doing very very well as a theatrical designer.
But then nineteen fourteen changed everything for the House of Bore.
He had come to be known as La magnifique for
his innovative and original creations. But World War One saw
him once again called into military service, this time as
a military tailor, and he said to have streamlined the

(18:53):
production of uniforms during that time. But because he was
busy with his service and wasn't pretty seeing any new designs,
his fashion house was using the handful of ideas that
he had left behind when he went back to the army,
So they were kind of just recycling this handful of
concepts that he had to try to push out new stuff,
but they really without him at the home. It's a

(19:15):
bit of a struggle. In nineteen fifteen, while he was
still serving, he was able to return to Paris for
a little bit of time to design a new collection,
but two tragedies struck his family right at the same time.
His daughter Rosine died after contracting an ear infection and
his daughter Gaspar died from the Spanish flu. The new

(19:35):
collection didn't happen because of these two events. No new
designs came from the Poire brand until after the war
was over. This was really a turning point in Pare's life,
although it wasn't apparent how much impact it had until later.
So once he returned to his work in fashion after
the war in nine, he picked up exactly where he
left off, designing these high waisted gowns that were inspired

(19:58):
by other cultures and that featured a lot of dramatic detail.
He continued to produce his same style of design, but
because his aesthetics seemed to have really frozen at the
period right before he left to serve in World War One,
his lick was too outdated. Coco Chanelle had arrived on
the scene with her Little Black Dress in and the
overworked theatricality of Pire's designs was immediately seen as old

(20:22):
fashioned and out of mood. So that same year that
Chanelle debuted The Little Black Dress, Pire, who was desperate
at that point to save his fashion house, sold the
rights to his company to financial backers. He still worked there,
but he didn't own it, and his design really struggled.
He continued to attempt to innovate, but it seemed like
he didn't have the inspiration, so it was very forced

(20:45):
and his design when people describe his designs at the time,
they sound like they're kind of overworked, in a little
bit lacking. Uh. And in an effort to rekindle public
interest in his work because he wasn't bringing in customers,
he staged this huge spectacle of three decorated barges on
the banks of the sin for an art Dakaratif's exhibit,

(21:08):
and you know, it was this huge, big event for
part of his housewear line. But because his theatricality, which
served him really well in times of plenty, it nearly
bankrupted him when in this period when he didn't have
that much ready money and it was you know, a
period of struggle for the designer, so he couldn't pull
off those same big, crazy things that he had been

(21:29):
doing before because it was too expensive and people weren't
into what he was doing anymore now, especially once you
get into the twenties and the thirties, people were not
about extravagance anymore. So this is really a downward turn.
After and then after twenty three years of marriage, Denise
Pare filed for divorce in claiming that he was just

(21:53):
relentlessly cruel to her. And the following year, in ninety nine,
the backers who had bought the poor a design house
just four years before, closed the shop's doors. They had
already had it with the spending and they knew that
they couldn't sustain the business, and they sold off every
assets scrap, which is sort of heartbreaking, like it was

(22:13):
literally sold by weight. Sad. It's really upsetting, um, but
we didn't lose everything. Pori was also unfortunately forced to
sell most of his personal assets, so the furniture and
paintings that he had had in his townhouse at the
time were sold off and he had to move to
a much smaller apartment. At this point, he turned to
writing for a couple of years. He published on Dressing

(22:34):
This Age in nineteen thirty and his autobiography King of
Fashion in ninety one. The publications didn't get him back
on his feet, and by nine thirty three he was
designing dresses in department stores for housewives. Yeah, quite a
step back from what he had been doing, And by
six he was discovered working in a bar. But people
that talked to him found him as confident as ever.

(22:57):
He really thought he was going to make a comeback
in fashion. Paul Pot died in n in poverty. He
had been living on public assistance, and Elsa Shipparelli, who
he had befriended and encouraged when she was young and
starting out, paid for his burial. And so even though
it seems that he has a sad ending, it kind
of turns around later after he's gone for a bit. Uh.

(23:21):
In May of two thousand five, Denise's wardrobe, which it
turned out had actually been carefully preserved by the family,
so thank goodness, it was not sold off in that
bulk um clear out that the backers had done was
auctioned off. And when this happened, it suddenly put Poiret's
designs back in the public eye, and so even though
he had been marginalized at the end of his life,

(23:42):
the interest in his work was like instantly reignited. People
saw these designs and it was like, how did we
ever forget this person? Like how did we let this
fall into obscurity. Then in two thousand and seven, the
exhibit poire King of Fashion opened at the met To
Great Fan Fair in ps Uh. And while party is
long gone, his impact on fashion still remains. He was,

(24:05):
of course the first couturier that used draping rather than
tailoring to create gowns. Uh, you know, freeing women from
restrictive corsets that have been de rigger up to that point.
And in fact, you know, in getting rid of all
of those fussy layers, he just completely changed fashion forever.
Like now, you know, of course, garments are draped, and
you know, if you watch Project Runway, you see people

(24:27):
that do a lot of draping techniques to create these
really flowing, beautiful gowns. That's still happening, and he was
the first that really did it commercially. He's also the
person that debuted the idea of nude stockings. Instead of
black tights. Yeah, just quite revolutionary. And now we have
options for both, but at the time it was black
tights or nothing. Both are neither, Both are neither or

(24:48):
does not having co drink? And he, as I said,
was the first designer who really had a brand, so
fragrance home design, lifestyle products. He was doing this in
the early nineteen hundreds, like what Ralph Lauren does today
wouldn't ever have happened without this kind of idea. Sparking
and fashion marketing was also something that he really pioneered.
He was a person that was out there doing his
own pr telling people how great he was promoting his brand,

(25:13):
which no fashion houses were doing that way at the time.
Some have said that we would not have the avant
garde designers of today if there had been no poor A.
Imagine a world without Jean Pon Jean Paul Gautier. I
think you don't want us to do that. I wouldn't.
I would cry, I love and pants for ladies. Yes, um, yeah,

(25:34):
that wasn't really happening. Prior to that. There were some
sporting costumes in late Victorian an early and Wardian era,
but it usually involved bloomers that were cut a little
more like pants under a full dress, so you could
do sporting things and not expose anything, but you still
add on a jillion layers and yards and yards and
yards of fabric. So he just completely revolutionized the way

(25:56):
we dress. And it's sort of interesting because we think
today of core um as being other. I think most
people on the street don't think of that as being,
you know, the thing that really influences their day to
day fashion. But he was kind of doing this influencing
even though it was in more tour circles, and it's
echoed out you know since then. It reminds me of

(26:19):
Downton Abbey, and there's an episode in which Lady Sybil
comes to dinner. Yes, yes, Paul, I love, I love
I love his work. I highly encourage anybody to um
go googling and looking for pictures of it because some
of it's just mind blowing. He also did do some

(26:39):
really really skinny skirts that were hard to walk in. Yeah,
we wor't forgive him of we were talking about that earlier.
But have we have all of these getting rid of
restrictive layers and getting rid of course it's and getting
rid of all these things that bind people, and but
then having these skirts that were so so tight that
you couldn't really walk in them. I have a theory
that is unsubstantiated. I haven't done the reas to prove

(27:00):
or disprove it, but I wonder because he was so
influenced by Asian cultures such as he knew them um
and you know, it's considered very um much a part
of like Geisha culture, to take the very tiniest steps.
It's part of like the delicate and graceful way that
Geisha move and their shoes are actually designed to kind

(27:20):
of promote this sort of movement. And I wonder if
he was trying to mimic that a little bit in
a more western style. But I don't know. I'm I'm
just speculating it. I hate skirts like that because I
am tall lady. I take very giant steps all the time.
You're a long striker. I have two skirts that I
bought at the same time, not realizing when I tried
them on that they were going to cause me not

(27:43):
to be able to do that. I have never worn
them since getting them home from the store. So, for you,
pants or things that don't have a hymn that keeps
me from blocking. There you go. They so much. Bring
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