We all know Coco Chanel.
We've heard at least once one of his fast and nosy phrases such as
"Fashion goes by, style stays".
We saw a picture of him.
We have at least one of his famous models such as the little black dress, or the taller profiled to wear with the two-tone shoe. On Coco Chanel have been written books, packaged films, invented legends.
Madeleine Vionnet is much less known.
Yet the period in which Vionnet lived and worked is exactly the same as the mythical Coco and, between the two, she was the most experienced and refined creator.
Coco Chanel, by her own admission, could not sew.
Chanel deconstructed before she structured.
Pragmatic and decisive, she affirmed:
"A dress is not a tragedy, nor is it a painting."
He always wore a pair of scissors in his bag to darken imperfect hems or to dismantle little donor straps.
Gabrielle Chanel was able to create a style tailored to herself and her life.
A free woman, despite herself, who stole pieces from her many lovers' wardrobes.
And she was inspired by the fabrics and shapes worn by grooms and men of toil.
Chanel was able to give new meaning to the black uniform she had worn during her sad early years at boarding school, from the nuns to Obazine.
She deposited in the "little black dress" a new concept of minimal luxury that forever changed the way women dress.
She had ideas and style and introduced clothing suitable for the new type of woman she represented.
A woman who could and should dare because she started from nothing and had nothing, not even a family.
Madeleine Vionnet had a visceral relationship with fashion and fabric.
Vionnet is a point of reference for those who study fashion and packaging.
His draped and slippery clothes were revolutionary in the way they dressed the woman and her body, designed to enhance their shapes and movements.
Designed for timeless fashion and perfect craftsmanship.
Madeleine Vionnet had developed a unique packaging technique.
It began with a mannequin and pieces of fabric.
On the mannequin, he sewed and invented the model.
Which he then repeated, doubling the size of the fabric.
The fabric was stretched with weights and a complex system of tie rods, so as to make it non-deformable, and therefore more comfortable and durable, once worn.
"At first I was afraid, I thought that no one would love my clothes, I put them on, but since I was traccagnotta, I was not a good mannequin ... I liked them and put them for my comfort".
Madeleine Vionnet had an excellent tailoring technique and gave a new meaning to the drapery in which, even the seams, became part of the artistic design of the dress.
Thanks to the bias cut, that is horizontal to 45 degrees with respect to the direction of the weft and warp, extended to the whole dress was able to create an item of clothing that was not limited to cover the body but that naturally accompanied the forms.
His models exalted and liberated feminine beauty and were adaptable to any type of body (a truly innovative thing).
Because: "when a woman smiles, her dress must smile with her".
Madeleine Vionnet was no less important than Coco Chanel in the history of fashion.
In fact, maybe it was much more so.
Why then has one created a myth and the other is much less known?
Each Vionnet creation bore on the label, in addition to the logo designed by Thayaht, also the fingerprint of the designer.
Madeleine Vionnet was one of the first to work on the concept of copyright to legally defend her production.
She was burned, after a bad case of plagiarism by Demoiselle Miller who had copied the Vionnet models published in magazines (now we could say "found on the net").
One of his missions was to protect the right of creation and stop the illegal reproduction of copies.
It is to her that we owe the foundation of the association against copying (PAIS) in 1929.
Fortunately, she created a copyright album containing her only 75 models that have come down to us with some education.
To wear the clothes created by Madeleine Vionnet, in fact, we needed a knowledge of which only the designer was the custodian.
Those who inherited her creations often had no idea how to wear them.
Recently, after the discovery of a Vionnet dress, the help of the designer Azzedine Alaïa was requested to rebuild it.
It took Alaïa almost three days to understand what the result was originally like, and then to discover one of the most beautiful and significant Vionnet creations ever seen, which would otherwise have remained unknown.