School of stylish images and ideas. Madeleine Vionnet - "fashion architect" Life in the UK

Even before Chanel appeared on the fashion Olympus, the style icon and goddess of cut Madeleine Vionnet lived and worked in Paris. She owns many inventions - bias cutting, clothing without seams, the use of labels. She called on women to be free, like her idol, Isadora Duncan. However, for many years the name of Madeleine Vionnet was forgotten...

She was born in 1876 in Albertville, a small provincial town. As a child, she dreamed of being a sculptor, but the dream was not destined to come true - at least as little Madeleine imagined. Her family was poor, and instead of art school, twelve-year-old Madeleine apprenticed with a local dressmaker. She did not even receive a full school education, studying for only a few years. Math talent means nothing if you have to earn your own living from a young age.

At seventeen, Madeleine, who had mastered sewing skills, got a job at a Parisian fashion house - and a fate awaiting her was, in general, completely ordinary. Some time later, she married a Russian emigrant and gave birth to a girl, but the child died and her husband left her. Since then, Madeleine has never tied the knot again.

Shortly after this tragedy, Madeleine lost her job. Completely crushed, she went to England, where at first she agreed to any hard work - for example, as a laundress, and then mastered the work of a cutter in a workshop that copied French outfits for English fashionistas.

Returning to Paris at the turn of the century, she took a job as a cutter at the fashion house of the Callot sisters, who saw potential in her and promoted her to assistant to the head artist. Together with the Callot sisters, Madeleine came up with new models, silhouettes and decor. Then Madeleine began working with couturier Jacques Doucet, but the collaboration was short-lived and not particularly successful - Madeleine was overcome by a thirst for experiments, which turned out to be too extravagant.

She was a passionate fan of Isadora Duncan - her freedom, audacity, liberated plasticity, and sought to embody in her models the strength, the joy of life that she saw in the great dancer.

Even before Chanel, she talked about abandoning corsets, decisively shortened the length of dresses and insisted on using soft dresses that emphasized the natural curves of the female body. She invited Doucet to hold fashion shows, but the first show caused a scandal - even bohemian Paris was not ready for such innovations. Vionnet recommended that models not wear underwear under her tight dresses; they walked barefoot on the catwalk, like the magnificent Duncan. Doucet hastened to part with his overly active assistant, and then the First World War broke out.

Madeleine opened her business back in 1912, but gained fame only in 1919 - and immediately gained wild popularity. She fought against counterfeits using branded labels and a specially designed logo, which is now a completely common phenomenon in the fashion industry.
Each dress from Vionnet was photographed from three angles using a special mirror and placed in an album - over more than thirty years of its existence, the Vionnet House has produced seventy-five such albums.

Madeleine believed that clothes should follow the lines of a woman’s body, and not the body should be deformed and broken with special devices to fit a fashionable silhouette. She loved simple shapes, draperies and cocoons. It was Madeleine Vionnet who came up with the bias cut, allowing the fabric to slide around the body and lie in beautiful folds. She invented the hood collar and cowl collar. She often experimented with seamless clothing - for example, creating a coat from a wide cut of wool without a single seam.

She often made sets of coats and dresses, where the lining of the coat and the dress were made of the same fabric - this technique received a rebirth in the 60s.

“When a woman smiles, the dress should smile with her” - Vionnet repeated this mysterious phrase very often. What did it mean? Perhaps Madeleine wanted to emphasize that her dresses follow the wearer’s natural movements and emphasize her mood - or perhaps some kind of modernist charade was hidden in these words.

Vionnet was inspired by the sculpture of cubism and futurism, as well as ancient art. In the photographs, her models appeared in poses of antique vase paintings and ancient Greek friezes. And ancient Roman statues served as the starting point for draperies, the secret of which designers and engineers cannot unravel to this day.

Vionnet was indifferent to color, although a new fabric was created especially for her - a mixture of silk and acetate in a soft pink shade.

Madeleine Vionnet left practically no patterns - each dress was created individually using the tattoo method, so it is simply impossible to reproduce her outfits exactly. She didn't leave any sketches. Madeleine believed that it was necessary not to design a dress, but to wrap the figure in fabric, allowing the material and the body to do their work; she preferred to adapt to the individuality of her clients, rather than dictate her will to them. She wanted to open up and liberate women.

True, no matter how beautiful the dresses from Vionnet were, customers often returned them to the creator - because they could not figure out the folds and draperies on their own. In the box and on the hanger, the dresses looked like shapeless rags, and only on the female body they turned into real masterpieces. Madeleine had to conduct dressing workshops for clients. It is surprising that these difficulties arose precisely with the dresses of the artist, who dreamed of giving women the freedom of ancient nymphs and bacchantes!

Madeleine never called what she does fashionable. “I want my dresses to survive time,” she said.

The Second World War left Vionne practically without a livelihood, her fashion house was closed, and her name was forgotten for many years. However, the achievements of Madeleine Vionnet were used by fashion designers around the world - stolen from the one who so protected her works from fakes. Only in the 2000s did the Vionnet fashion house resume working with young, ambitious managers and designers.

Madeleine Vionnet(Madeleine Vionnet, 1876-1975) is still little known to the general public, although her contribution to twentieth-century fashion cannot be overestimated. Born into a poor family, Madeleine was forced to work from the age of 11 as an assistant dressmaker. Her early years cannot be called cloudless - she moved from place to place, worked in London and the suburbs of Paris, got married and experienced the death of her little daughter. But in 1900, luck smiled at her for the first time - she went to work at one of the most famous French fashion houses at that time - the Callot Soeurs sisters, where she soon became the right hand of Madame Gerber - the eldest of the three sisters, who was responsible for artistic direction. Home. Vionnet always recalled this collaboration with gratitude: “She taught me how to create Rolls-Royces.” Without her, I would have produced Fords. This was followed by work in another fashion house - Jacques Doucet, after which in 1912 Vionnet was ready to open her own house.

M. Vionnet at work, second half of the 1930s.

Real success came to Madeleine Vionnet after the First World War, when women appreciated the true elegance of her extremely elaborate dresses. Madeleine could not draw, but had brilliant mathematical abilities and special spatial thinking. She “sculpted” her dresses on a small mannequin half human height, pinching the fabric hundreds of times, achieving a perfect fit with a single seam.

Model of the second half of the 1920s gg. Vionne demanded that the fringe of such dresses, intended for dancing, be attached not in a single piece, but in separate fragments, so as not to disturb the plasticity of the material.

Her most famous invention, without which it is difficult to imagine the most refined and feminine fashion of the last century, the fashion of the 1930s, remains the bias cut (at an angle of 45 degrees relative to the base of the fabric), which she used from the second half of the 1920s for products in as a whole, and not for individual small details, as was the case before it. This cut involves the use of flowing, flowing fabrics - silk, satin, crepe. From her supplier, the largest textile manufacturer Bianchini-Férier, Vionnet ordered fabric two meters wide; For her, the factory invented a special material made from a mixture of acetate and natural silk, pale pink in color.

Dresses from the 1920s Wedge-shaped inserts that make the hem “rattling” appeared with the participation of Vionnet in the second half of the twenties, breaking up the clear geometric lines of la garconne style.

Madeleine was indifferent to color, but had a passion for form, which she understood as devotion to the natural lines of the female body. “When a woman smiles, the dress should smile with her,” she said. Most of her creations look formless and limp while they are hanging on a hanger, but when put on, they come to life and begin to “play.” Her achievements include the creation of things assembled using a single seam or knot; invention and popularization of the neck-collar, pipe collar; cut details in the form of rectangles, rhombuses and triangles. Often her dresses were one piece of fabric, fastened at the back or had no fastening at all, and her clients were forced to learn how to put them on and take them off.

Such models were the pride of Vionne. The design of this blouse is held solely by a bow tied in a knot at the chest.

Once found, Madeleine used the idea many times, honing it and bringing it to perfection. “Country” dress, model No. 7207, 1932

Model No. 6256,1931. A crepe dress with a bodice that is very difficult to make, woven from strips of fabric, is complemented by a cape with cape-like sleeves. Drapes were in great demand from 1930, while cap sleeves came into widespread use in 1932.

Perhaps the most famous image of Vionne's creation. The model imitates a nymph from an antique bas-relief in the Louvre, which inspired Madeleine. 1931 Photograph by George Goyningen-Hühne.

In the 1930s, she gradually abandoned bias cut in favor of classic draperies and antique aesthetics, thereby sharing the passion of designers such as Augustaberbard and Madame Gres. Often her models imitated ancient models and, along with fluid forms, could include plaits, knots and complex draperies, and models depicted celestials against the backdrop of antique masks, columns, ruins and other antiquities.

Pleated silver lamé dress with rhinestone cowl neckline. The curtain in the background imitates the flutes of Greek columns and echoes the light pleated fabric of the dress. 1937

Ivory viscose satin dress crafted from a single piece of fabric secured with precious bow brooches. 1936

Fearing fakes, Madeleine documented each of her creations by photographing the models on the mannequins in front of the trellis (front, sides and back) and placing the photographs in albums. During the work of her House, 75 such albums accumulated, which Madeleine later donated to the Paris Museum of Fashion and Textiles. Vionnet closed her House in 1939 and lived for another 36 long years in almost complete oblivion. Madeleine Vionnet was the most talented innovator of her time; there is no other designer who can match her contribution to the technical and technological treasury of fashion.

Madeleine Vionnet

Queen of cut

Her unrivaled cutting skills, unique style, truly revolutionary approach to women's clothing and delicate taste still inspire designers all over the world: Cristobal Balenciaga and Azzeddine Alaïa called themselves her students, and Fernand Léger said that Vionnet's dresses were the most beautiful thing he saw it in Paris.

As often happens, the woman who became famous for her innovative ideas, sophistication and unsurpassed taste did not grow up in an atmosphere that could instill in a child a desire for beauty. Madeleine Vionnet was born on June 22, 1876 in the small sleepy town of Chier-aux-Bois in the Loire department, into a poor family where children were not taught the ability to see beauty, were not honed in taste, and were only taught to work from an early age. Madeleine loved to play with dolls, making dresses for them from handkerchiefs and old rags, and could wander through the surrounding forests for half a day. Once, already in her mature years, Madame Vionnet said that the bust of Marianne, a symbol of France, traditionally standing in all public places of the country, seen as a child in the city hall, made such an impression on her that she certainly wanted to become a sculptor: the bust was the most beautiful a thing she saw in life. In search of a better life, the family soon moved to relatives in Albertville - Madeleine enjoyed going to the local school, where she showed good abilities in mathematics, but she had to finish her education too early: the parents considered the girl old enough to earn a living on her own, and in At the age of eleven, Madeleine was apprenticed to a local seamstress. This was the fate of many girls from poor families, but only a few come along this road to the very top. Who could have known then that Madeleine was destined to become one of them?

At eighteen, Madeleine married a local guy and moved to Paris with her husband - they both thought that they could achieve much more in the capital. Madeleine was lucky: she soon got a job as a seamstress at the famous Vincent Fashion House. Soon she became pregnant and gave birth to a long-awaited girl... But her daughter did not live even six months. Madeleine’s marriage died with her...

The death of her beloved daughter was an unusually heavy blow for Madeleine. Who knows what efforts it took her not just to live on, but also to decisively change her destiny. In 1894, Madeleine dared to take the first decisive step in her life: she divorced her husband - for that time, for the circle to which Madeleine belonged, this was an unthinkable act! Having received her freedom, she resigned and went to England.

Dress by M. Vionnet in the “Greek” style

Not knowing the language and having no friends, Madeleine agreed to any job: at first she got a job as a seamstress in a London hospital for the mentally ill. The constant monotonous work was dull, but at that time Madeleine didn’t need anything else. But while working in a hospital, she became acquainted with the basic principles of hygiene and labor organization - all this later was very useful to her in her own business. A few months later, Madeleine, following an advertisement in The Morning Post, got a job as a seamstress in Kate Reilly's atelier, which specialized in copying Parisian models: Mrs. Reilly bought dresses from famous fashion houses, which she unsealed in her atelier, took off patterns and offered clients Parisian models, trimmed according to their needs. wishes. Today this sounds very strange, but then this practice was the most common thing: not all clients, even if they had enough money and taste to sew with French tailors, had the opportunity to regularly come to Paris for fittings. Madeleine, who has an excellent command of the French school of cutting, quickly rose to a leading position in the Reilly atelier - a year later it was she who headed the production, being responsible for both copying patterns and working with clients. Working in Kate Reilly's atelier, Madeleine Vionnet became part of the upper echelons of society: it was she who dressed, for example, the richest bride of her time, the beautiful Consuelo Vanderbilt, when she married the Duke of Marlborough in 1895. This wedding was such a significant event in social life on both sides of the ocean that the prestige of the Reilly atelier grew to incredible heights. When Madeleine returned to Paris in 1900, she easily found a job in one of the most famous Parisian fashion houses - the House of Callot Soeurs, owned by the four Callot sisters, which specialized in luxurious evening dresses. Vionnet became the main dressmaker and first assistant to the eldest of the sisters, Marie Callot Gerbert, who was responsible for the development of all new models of the company. Madame Gerbert worked in the then accepted technique of “tattooing”: she improvised her models, draping fabrics on “living mannequins”, and Madeleine’s duties included, among other things, transferring draperies into patterns. For five years, Vionnet improved her cutting, modeling and tailoring skills under the guidance of the Callot sisters: “It was here that I realized that fashion is an art,” Madeleine later recalled. “If I hadn’t gotten here, I would have continued to sew Fords, but now I’ve learned to sew Rolls-Royces.”

In 1905, Madeleine Vionnet was invited to work by the famous couturier Jacques Doucet - with her help, he wanted to bring a “fresh spirit” to the collection of his fashion house: Doucet himself actively used elements of the 18th century style in his models, in particular, Rococo, and the skill of the head seamstress At home, Callot, who had perfected the ability to sew dresses in the latest fashion, was very useful to him. However, Vionnet did not intend to simply imitate the style of Madame Gerbert or copy Charles Borth: her ideas were truly new and original. Working with Doucet, Vionnet developed a bias cut that allowed the fabric of the dress to literally flow around the body, creating a sophisticated, close-fitting silhouette without traditional darts and reliefs. The bias cut, which over time became Vionne’s trademark and brought her real fame, of course, was not her invention: this cutting method had been used before her, but no one had previously dared to use it so widely. If earlier one or two details, a collar or sleeves, sometimes skirts, were cut on the bias, then Vionne boldly used this cut throughout the entire dress, ultimately achieving a completely extraordinary effect. Dresses cut on the bias did not involve the corsets, padding, overlays, boning and other tricks that were traditional for that time, changing the female figure for the sake of fashion; moreover, they did not require the help of maids for dressing, but independent dressing was at that time the lot of the poorest layers who did not have money for servants - Vionnet offered simple silhouettes with refined but laconic lines, so different from the whimsical fashion of the Art Nouveau era. She believed - and tried to convince her clients of this - that a truly beautiful figure should be formed not by a corset, but by exercise and a healthy lifestyle. In order to emphasize the smoothness and fluidity of the lines of her new dresses, Vionnet refused any layers between the fabric of the dress and the body and demanded that fashion models demonstrate outfits to clients at home almost naked, which even in frivolous Paris caused an extraordinary scandal. But Madeleine attracted clients who were able to appreciate the innovation of her models: famous actresses and ladies of the demimonde, feminists and suffragettes, among whom were Cecile Sorel, Gabrielle Réjean, Eva La Vallière, Liane de Pougy and Nathalie Barney. Madeleine called them "prominent members of the frivolous Amazon tribe." All of them remained faithful to Vionne when she finally decided to leave Doucet and found her own atelier.

Dresses by Madeleine Vionnet

Madeleine herself would not have had enough money or determination for this, but one of her devoted clients, Germaine Lila, the daughter of the owner of one of the largest Parisian department stores, helped. In 1912, the House of Vionnet opened its doors to clients on the Rue de Rivoli. However, in the fall of 1914 the enterprise had to be closed due to the outbreak of World War II. Having locked the studio, Madeleine Vionnet went to Rome.

In Italy, Madeleine tried to make up for the shortcomings of her education: she studied art history, painting, architecture, history, and spent days wandering around museums. In ancient statues and drawings, she saw her ideal - clothes that did not restrict movement, did not constrain the body, but fit it freely, emphasizing natural beauty and plasticity. This is exactly the kind of clothing Madeleine always dreamed of creating. When Vionnet returned to Paris in 1919 and reopened her fashion house, she offered her clients clothes in an antique spirit: laconic dresses with drapes, cut on the bias. The history of fashion knows more than one period when ancient fashion was taken as a model, but only Vionne did not just try to imitate the shapes of tunics and peplos - she created modern clothes that corresponded to the spirit of the time. Remembering her unfulfilled dream of becoming a sculptor, Vionnet began to create real sculptures from fabric: she sculpted her dresses, achieving an extraordinary, unprecedented effect: her dresses lived and breathed with their owner. “If a woman smiles, the dress should smile with her,” Vionnet liked to say.

Sketch of a coat by Madeleine Vionnet

She created her models by draping thin fabric on a special wooden mannequin 80 centimeters high. She took a piece of fabric, wrapped it around a mannequin, securing the whimsical folds, and received a surprisingly balanced design, worthy of an architect and engineer, only due to the cut. Starting from the simplest geometric shapes - square, circle, triangle - Vionnet created dresses that amazed both with the simplicity of the lines and the complexity of the cut, which together created an extraordinary harmony of appearance. Vionnet made all the decor of her dresses so that it did not violate the elasticity of the cut and did not distort the lines of the body: embroidery, for example, was done only along the main thread of the fabric, and Vionnet’s fringe, which was incredibly popular at that time, was not sewn on with braid, but was carefully sewn on each thread separately. Vionnet ordered special fabrics for her dresses: the Bianchini-Ferier company produced silk crepes especially for her and

chiffons more than two meters wide; they were the first to create fabric from a mixture of silk and acetate, commissioned by Vionnet. And the Rodier company produced woolen fabrics and velvet more than five meters wide especially for Madeleine. Madeleine was of little interest in color: most of her models were made in shades of white, light pink or gold, reminiscent of the marble shades of ancient statues.

Over time, Vionne tried to simplify the cut: in her best models there is only one seam running diagonally, there are no fasteners or darts, and all the curves of the figure were modeled exclusively through draperies and knots. She even managed to create a coat without a single seam! Sometimes the models turned out to be so complex that clients had to take lessons on how to properly put on Vionnet dresses - when unfolded, they looked like a piece of fabric of a complex shape and took shape only on the body. If over time the secret was lost, the dresses again turned into mysterious and useless pieces of fabric...

Taiyat. Images of Madeleine Vionnet's dresses, 1920s.

Her models were truly revolutionary for that time: Vionne rejected symmetry, excessive decoration, and the need for side seams: “Does a person have seams on the sides? Why then is it considered that they are so necessary for his clothes? - she said. Vionnet believed that clothing should not be an artificial, imposed shell of the body, but its natural continuation, subordinate to human movements. And if earlier these same aspirations did not find understanding among the public, in the twenties, when a real cult of the body arose, they elevated Vionne to the pinnacle of recognition. Her style was considered the pinnacle of elegance, and for the next twenty years it was Madeleine Vionnet who set the tone for European fashion. Among her clients were the most notable aristocrats of Europe, from the Duchess of Marlborough to Italian countesses, and the brightest stars of Hollywood - Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn. It was Vionne’s dresses that largely created that Hollywood glamor that haunts us to this day: flowing satin dresses, open shoulders and sexy bodies under thin fabric...

Madeleine Vionnet in the process of creating a model

Over time, there were so many orders that Vionne’s company could barely cope. In 1923, Madeleine moved to Avenue Montagne, to the so-called “temple of fashion” - a luxurious building built according to the designs of Ferdinand Chanu, Georges de Fur and Rene Lalique, where, in addition to dresses, furs and underwear were also sold. That same year, Vionnet presented her collection for the first time in New York, and two years later she became the first Parisian couturier whose house opened a branch in the United States. Her Repeated Original dresses were sold in a Fifth Avenue salon: they fit any size, and only the length could be adjusted directly in the salon - in fact, it was one of the first ready-to-wear lines in the history of haute couture.

Vionnet was often compared to Coco Chanel - she also came from the very bottom, and also revolutionized tailoring, using new fabrics and silhouettes. Both of them despised the vagaries of fashion, preferring style and craftsmanship. However, if Chanel created “basic” things, those very “Fords” that Madeleine so did not want to sew, then Vionnet made exceptional, timeless dresses. She dreamed that her dresses would remain in art history, but she considered fashion trends an empty phrase. “I have always been an enemy of fashion. There is something superficial and fleeting about the seasonal whims of fashion that offends my sense of beauty. I don't know what fashion is, I don't think about fashion. I just make dresses."

Models of evening dresses from Vionne

Unlike Coco and many of her colleagues who lead an active social life (including to advertise her own brand), Madeleine Vionnet was a homebody. She did not like to be in public, preferring to spend time in the company of her closest friends; almost nothing is known about her personal life. In 1925, she married a second time - to Dmitry Nechvolodov, the son of a Russian general and the owner of a factory for the production of fashionable shoes, a very impressive man, but frivolous. It’s hard to say whether they were connected by passion, the fashion for Russian aristocrats (around the same time, Coco Chanel, for example, had an affair with the Russian Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich) or business. The couple separated in 1942 and never told anyone the details of their marriage. True, Madeleine’s unsociability and isolation did not prevent her from communicating and even making friends with artists - futurists, cubists and avant-garde artists - whose work had a significant influence on her. She was friends, for example, with the architect Le Corbusier, the sculptor and designer Jean Dunant and Charlotte Perriand, known for her avant-garde furniture designs. While still in Italy, she met Taiat (real name Ernesto Michaele), an artist and designer who developed a corporate logo for Vionnet, and also created sketches of fabrics, accessories and jewelry for her house. In 1924, the architect and designer Boris Lacroix became the creative director of the house, who for fifteen years created accessories, furniture, bags, textiles and perfume bottles for the House of Vionnet.

By 1925, Vionne employed 1,200 people - for comparison, Schiaparelli employed 800 people, and the Houses of Lelong and Lanvin - a thousand each. At the same time, Vionnet, who herself went all the way from an apprentice to the head of a fashion house, knew perfectly well what her workers needed. The working conditions that she created for her employees were truly revolutionary: mandatory short breaks were provided for at work, employees were provided with paid vacations, maternity leave, benefits in case of illness or injury, the workshops had a dining room, a hospital in which there was a dentist, and even a travel agency!

Vionnet did not forget about herself. Her models were so incredibly popular that they were copied almost everywhere. Trying to defend her uniqueness, Madeleine Vionnet began to fight for copyright for the first time in history. Vionnet was one of the founders of the world's first copyright protection organization, the Society for the Protection of Fine and Applied Arts (L'Association pour la Defense des Arts Plastiques et Appliques), created in 1923. All her models were photographed from three sides, and the photographs and detailed descriptions were pasted into a special album - during her life, Madeleine created 75 such albums, almost one and a half thousand dresses! Each dress had a signature label sewn onto it, bearing Vionne's signature and her thumbprint. But her models were still stolen - the “pirates” were not stopped even by the fact that many of Vionne’s dresses could be copied, just by ripping them apart. The dressmaker of the Russian House of Adlerberg, P.P. Bologovskaya, recalled: “Once Countess Adlerberg went to the House of Madeleine Vionnet to buy some of his old shirt models at the seasonal sale. Vionnet created models as if she were dressing ancient statues. We tore open the Vionnet shirt, put it on the carpet in the living room and saw real geometric shapes, there was not a single wrong line. Where there should have been a braid, there was a braid, and where there was a straight cut, the line ran perfectly straight. And using this pattern we sewed wonderful nightgowns and robes.”

But Vionnet's innovation was not limited to social benefits or copyright protection. It is believed that it was she who came up with the cowl collar and top with ties, dresses without fastening and a hooded collar, she was the first to sew an ensemble of a dress and a coat, the lining of which was made of the same material as the dress - such ensembles would come back into fashion in sixties and remain relevant to this day.

Photo of a model in a Vionnet dress, Vogue, 1931,

When World War II began, Madeleine initially wanted to move production to America, but then changed her mind. She was already over sixty, and the world around her was changing too quickly. Vionnet decided to close her house: in August 1939 the last collection was demonstrated. Soon Madeleine left Paris, only to return there almost forgotten a few years later.

She has spent recent years lecturing and teaching courses on bias cutting. The public did not remember her, but the new generation of fashion designers was ready to literally pray for her. In 1952, she donated her collection of dresses, sketches and model albums to the Paris Museum of Decorative Arts - the largest such collection ever donated. Cristobal Balenciaga learned the art of tailoring from her - he was one of the few who was friends with Vionne in her last years. Christian Dior called her work the unsurpassed pinnacle of haute couture and admitted that the more experienced he became, the more fully the perfection of Vionnet’s skill was revealed to him. Issey Miyake recalled that when he first saw Vionne’s dresses, it was “as if the statue of Niki had come to life again.” He said that Vionnet “captured the most beautiful aspect of classical Greece: body and movement.”

Madeleine lived to see her name remembered again: in 1973, her dresses were presented at a retrospective exhibition of European fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Journalists were surprised to notice that visitors paid much more attention not to the models of famous couturiers, but to the dresses of Madeleine Vionnet. Since then, the Americans Halston and Geoffrey Beene, and the Japanese Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo have considered themselves Vionnet's students.

Madeleine Vionnet died on March 2, 1975. Thirty years after her death, businessman Matteo Marzotto tried to revive the brand, but so far all attempts have been unsuccessful: the queen of the cut has remained unsurpassed, inimitable, unique...