Vionnet
Judith Clark Costume Gallery
15 March - 26 April 2001

Madeleine Vionnet 15 Dresses from the Collection of Martin Kamer

Madeleine Vionnet was one of the most significant couturiers of the 20th century. She opened her first couture house in 1912, having already worked for a number of notable designers in London and Paris, and continued to design until she closed her salon on the outbreak of the Second World War. During this time her radical approach to draping and cutting fabric to encircle the figure challenged the way fashion is designed and suggested new ways to define and enhance the female body. Her clothing emphasised adult femininity rather than androgynous youth, and enabled women to negotiate the transition from private to public sphere in ensembles that were technically complex, while aesthetically streamlined. Thus she proposed a modern ideal of femininity that was confident and independent, with discreet daywear that hovered close to the skin and allowed the wearer to move with ease and fluidity, and eveningwear that was often daringly provocative and used lingerie as its main source of inspiration.

Vionnet's technical prowess, both in understanding fabric's potential and in cutting garments to work with the whole of the body, is unquestioned, but she is not well known today outside the fashion world. When Madeleine Chapsal interviewed Vionnet, she commented, 'C'est fragile, une robe,' to which the designer replied,

'Pas les miennes. Vu le matériau que j'utiliais, et par leur valeur artistique, elles étaient faites pour traverser le temps. Tout ce que j'ai fait, je l'ai fait dans cet esprit-là: pour que ca dure toujours.'1

The longevity of her designs is indubitable; stylistically many look as fresh and modern today as they did eighty years ago and the quality of her fabric and construction has indeed led many to survive. This exhibition brings together fifteen examples of her work from Martin Kamer's private collection. They cover the period from 1917 to the mid-1930s when she was one of the most sought-after couturiers in Paris. They demonstrate her technical and aesthetic skills, her delicacy of touch, her love of lingerie techniques like fagoting to create integral decoration, and her famous abilities with the bias cut.

These dresses enable us to celebrate her importance within early 20th century fashion and as a source inspiration to later designers like John Galliano, Azzedine Alaïa, and Issey Miyake and to ensure that the name of one of the most revolutionary designers of the last century will not be forgotten.

Vionnet and Classicism by Rebecca Arnold

Classicism presents a façade of effortlessness. It demands a return to the essential elements of fashion design: body and textile. It is revered within western culture as an emblem of simple, natural truths, the beauty of geometric forms draped upon supple flesh, yet it takes considerable skill to create and wear. Beneath the smooth lines of classically inspired clothing is a complex web of elaborate construction techniques and contradictory meanings. To try to understand the values and beliefs with which we invest classically inspired designs, the work of early twentieth century couturier Madeleine Vionnet will be considered as a cipher, linking mythologies of classicism and modernism within a specific historical context. Her designs encapsulate the significance of classicism's influence on fashionable dress during the inter-war period, yet they also offer more subversive readings, which undermine stable interpretations of classicised design as timeless, democratic and 'pure'.

Madeleine Vionnet's training at a number of couture houses in both London and Paris taught her to favour the natural body as the guiding motif in any design and led her to develop her well-documented technique of draping specially woven double width fabric onto an 80cm high mannikin. This process emphasised her radical view of dressmaking , which focused on the body as a 3 dimensional whole, not a fractured vision of back, front, top, bottom. She had been taught to foreground the body while premiere at Callot Soeurs in the early 1900s. There, she watched one of the couture house's maitresses Mme Gerber, whose ability to perfect her designs and adapt them to the needs and tastes of each client was to influence Vionnet's later creations. At Doucet, where she moved in 1907 she was to display her avant garde view of fashion, becoming part of the triumvirate of couturiers, along with Chanel and Poiret, who were to construct a new form of fashion and beauty that heralded the concerns of the modern era. By discarding the corset and quite literally stripping away the superfluities of fashion and contemporary notions of respectability, Vionnet became part of the revolution in fashion, evoking a new form of femininity that spoke of freedom, independence and experimentation. For Vionnet, this new spirit was linked to a search for purity of form and artistic expression that sprang, at least in part, from a thorough exploration of classical design.

A silk crêpe dress of 1918-19 from the collection of the Musée de la Mode et du Textile in Paris's encapsulates many of Vionnet's main preoccupations. Betty Kirke, in her book Madeleine Vionnet of 1998, describes how its form is created by drapes and folds of fabric that in turn cling to and pull out from the figure, thus enhancing some features while masking others. The diagonal jabot points at the hemline of the dress echo those at the hem of the Greek chlamys or cloak which will be discussed later. The swathed cowl neckline falls like the chiton in deep folds that curve around the neckline providing a light-reflecting frame for the face. The dress is fluid and mobile, comprising a tube of crêpe hung diagonally so that it hovers around the body, touching but not moulding it. It wraps around the frame, a third armhole doubled over one side of the body helping to hold the garment in place and adding to its swathed effect. The dress is a bold statement of Vionnet's skills - her commitment to experimental construction techniques which challenged both the acceptance of western tailoring and the need for applied decoration to add interest to a design. It also reflected Vionnet's desire for an alternative vision of femininity that gave women the confidence to go without corsetry and the restrictive idea of woman as culturally constructed artefact that it evoked. For Vionnet the pre-eminence of a sensual form of femininity was crucial to her work. While other designers, like Chanel and Patou, looked to masculine dress as a means to visualise a stronger, more independent and, importantly, more modern version of feminine dress, Vionnet always focussed on the curves of women's bodies as the basis of any design. Even her daywear and tailleurs owe less to men's tailoring techniques than those of other designers. For her, modern femininity meant just that: feminine, not androgynous dress, which relied upon radical construction techniques to reassess gender roles rather than appropriating the symbolism of status and power inherent in masculine tailoring.

Vionnet had established her own house in 1912 and during the teens she focussed her attention on geometric forms, in particular the rectangle, as a basis of exploring her belief in paring designs down to their most essential forms. As Caroline Milbank Rennolds noted, 'Vionnet was called the Euclid of Fashion, and geometric shapes predominate in all her collections as decorative and functional devices.'1 While such an approach may seem coolly aloof, the response to her garments had, from early on proved how revelatory this focus on fabric draped to the body was after centuries of seeing women only through the moulded mask of layers of restraining underwear.

While Vionnet was at the house of Doucet many of the vendeuses refused to show clients her designs, deeming them too risque and immodest with their revealing drapes and use of lingerie techniques such as rolltucked hems and fagoting decoration to disguise seams. It is no surprise that many of her clients were actresses and demi-mondaines, women who were already made dubious by their public lives and who favoured the inherent eroticism of dress that focussed on the body. Vionnet's work expressed the problems of femininity in a period of such rapid change and upheaval. As gender roles altered under the impact of the First World, women needed to renegotiate their relationship to public spaces; no longer closeted, literally within the domestic sphere, or metaphorically by restrictive clothing or rigid moral codes, younger women sought means to signal this change. Vionnet had been brought to the house of Doucet to add a youthful charge to its designs and began her career there by eliminating the heavy satinised black cotton dresses which all house models wore under the couture designs that they showed to customers. She was gradually peeling away the layers of stifling 19th century morality that had deemed no woman respectable who was not closed off from the world in corset and petticoat, her body a mysterious object encased in whalebone.

In this period of transition femininity was marked by ambiguity, likely to flip between seemingly contradictory ideas of public and private, moral and immoral. Classicism, the prism through which many designers were re-conceptualising the female form within a modernist context, was equally on the cusp. On the one hand it could be used by Mussolini as a right-wing vision of imperial dominance and military might through his appropriation of the imagery of Augustan Rome, yet on the other it provided a site for avant-garde experimentation, for example by Picasso. The mythologies circulating around classical source material, regarding its allegiance to transcendent ideals of pure mathematical form and eternal truths, ironically enabled it to be interpreted in radically different ways. In Vionnet's hands classicism provided a means to challenge and critique her own discipline, pushing at the boundaries of fashion by testing the limits of the classical ideal.

Other designers were also revealing the body through the lens of classical nudity. Mme Grès produced a series of finely pleated columns that were tucked and draped around the figure. But unlike Vionnet's work, her designs contained more structured underpinnings to sculpt and hold the figure within the fluid line of the light fabrics. They were images of classicism without the problematic display, albeit under a layer of crêpe, of naked flesh. While Grès's work was undoubtedly creative in its complex use of fabric, it did not represent the proto-feminist ideals that Vionnet's clothing explored. Both in her experimentation with the relationship between fabric and female body and with her advocacy of the rights of her (largely female) workforce, for whom she provided good working conditions and various benefits like paid holidays and medical care, Vionnet foregrounded feminine concerns.

Meanwhile Fortuny had followed a reformist line in his Greek inspired designs at the start of the century. They were symptomatic of a strand of dress that had run through the second half of the 19th century that sought an alternative to high fashion. Based on a healthier more natural form of dress, he built on ancient Greek ideals of beauty rather than the seasonal vagaries of haute couture. His Delphos gowns were worn by bohemians who recognised in his creations the ancient Greek peplos - a tube of fabric folded over at the neckline to produce a tunic effect at the top of the dress. His dresses were rendered in various soft jewel tones, their slim-line forms slipping easily over the wearer's head - a far cry from the complex layers of most early 20th century clothing which required a maid's assistance to get into.

Fortuny's crinkled pleats paid homage to the effects produced in Greek costume where linen, wool, cotton and later silk were draped in folds against the body or finely pleated to cling to the skin. The basic garment for women's dress was the chiton, a simple tube of rectangular fabric fixed at the shoulders and then caught with bands at the waist and sometimes also the bustline. The peplos that Fortuny was so inspired by was a variation on the chiton, which added depth to the garment in its folded over top section. The various ways in which such drapery could be worn added nobility to the figure and emphasised the fabric's feeling of movement as it shifted around the body, constantly falling into new formations

Anne Hollander in her book Seeing Through Clothes stresses the importance of imagery like this and the works of art it has inspired over the centuries, in creating a mythology surrounding the draping of the nude body. They have trained the viewer's eye to see the body as most harmonious when draped in cloth. Hollander writes:

'The nude body and draped cloth became essential elements of idealised vision; they came to seem correct for conveying the most valid truths of life, entirely through the persuasive force of their appearance in works of art rather than through the original significance attached to them in real life. The "natural" beauty of cloth and the "natural" beauty of bodies have been taught to the eye by art, and the same has been the case with the natural beauty of clothes.' 2

It is this mythologising of Greek dress as "natural" that plays an important part in its appeal to Madeleine Vionnet and other designers, who like her saw classical dress as the most appropriate form to adopt and adapt in the first half of the 20th century. It represents an already legitimised reverence for the human body which was newly revealed in the fashions of the period and this indisputable heritage helped to deflect criticism from those who found the revealing nature of such fashions immodest. Vionnet's work seeks to weave new mythologies around the body, adding to the meanings that art has attached to the classical body, by linking her designs firmly into the contemporary modernist, rather than seeking to replicate classical dress precisely.

The other garment that was particularly influential on Madeleine Vionnet was the chlamys or cloak which consisted of a rectangle draped over the shoulders and allowed to flow vertically down the body creating dips and points at the hem. The importance of being able to wear such free form garments was significant in demonstrating the status of the wearer, since as Hollander points out:

'Sophistication, sexual allure, power and austerity could all be expressed by the style in which simple rectangles woven of different stuffs were disposed around the body.' 3

The complex drapes made by this most minimal of garments and the need to move while keeping the chlamys in place heightened the dynamic tension between body and fabric. It also acts as a metaphor for the complex meanings that western culture attaches to the deceptively simple lines of classical dress.

It was not just fashion designers who were looking to ancient Greece for new modes of expression. The American dancer Isadora Duncan used the highly recognisable forms of Greek art and dress to create performances of revolutionary freedom and experimentation. In Paris in 1907 she appeared in classical tunic, bare legs and sandals, a lithe form that symbolised both the stripped down dynamism of modernity and the authenticity of ancient cultures. Her style represented both past and future. Her improvisational dance and draped body were emblematic of a period on the cusp of change - the classical reference point once again a means of imagining and authenticating the toned and revealed body that was to gradually emerge from the constricting fashions of the early 1900s and which was to come to dominate western fashion for the century to come.

For Madeleine Vionnet classicism was a starting point from which to create dramatically pared down forms that exploited the natural elasticity of the fabric to the full. Her designs were mobile, hanging free from the body anticipating each movement in their daringly simple shapes. One example from 1919-20 is notable for its use of rectangles of springy silk crêpe which drop on the diagonal from the shoulders, thus working on the bias of the fabric to produce a dress of geometric forms that appears sculptural and fluid as it pulls towards the curves of the wearer's body. Vionnet was known for her use of bias-cutting to increase the drape and movement of the fabric. While bias-cutting had existed before, in the 19th century its use had been restricted to trimmings, or the drapes of material had been fixed to an immobile lining. Vionnet used this technique to release the potential of the fabric and explore its relationship to the 3 dimensional forms of the body further. She said:

'My efforts have been directed towards freeing material from the restrictions imposed on it, in just the same way that I have sought to liberate the female form. I see both as injured victims...and I've proved that there is nothing more graceful than the sight material hanging freely from the body. I've attempted to create an element of balance in my material so that the lines of a dress are not marred by any movement, but emphasised.'4

In Vionnet's eyes, fabric had been limited by traditional cutting techniques, which literally restricted the female form, but were also symptomatic of woman's restricted role in western culture. By freeing the fabric she was also freeing the woman, enabling her body to be revealed and celebrated, unhampered by bourgeois notions of modesty and decorum. Like Isadora Duncan, expressive movement was the guiding motif and classicism the heroic prototype for a starkly modern image of femininity.

Bruce Chatwin, who interviewed Vionnet in 1973, three years before she died, spoke of the seriousness of Vionnet's commitment to her work. During her career fashion was still deemed a frivolous profession,

'But for Madame Vionnet, who was once penniless, couture is not a minor art. Like the dance it is an evanescent art, but a great one. She sees herself as an artist on the level of say, Pavlova. She was single-minded in the pursuit of perfection, and even her exemplary common sense is tinged with a streak of fanaticism.'5

He went on to recall the sparse modernist interior of her Paris apartment, saying,

'On [the fireplace] stands a photo of the Parthenon: a talismanic photo, for Madame Vionnet has always turned to classical Greece for inspiration.'6

This theme was continued in the new couture establishment in avenue Montaigne which she moved to in 1923. Frescoes by Georges de Feuve depicted mythical scenes alongside classicised renditions of women wearing her best selling garments, enabling her clients to measure themselves against heroic templates of perfected beauty. Models presented her designs in this brightly-lit salon, whose creation was overseen by M. Chanut, who found that

'What she wanted for the décor of her new salon was the same as what she wanted for her clothes: the space should be harmonious and classically inspired, but modern.'7

Even the logo of her house expressed these themes in a simplified form - with a figure holding up a curving drape of fabric atop a classical column.

While the Vionnet dresses already discussed used classicism in an abstract way as a means to re-evaluate the space fabric creates around the body, some designs used Greek motifs in a more decorative manner. Genevieve Dufy, who worked for her after the first World War, recalled how Vionnet would make trips to the Louvre to study Greek vases and the couturiere discussed the influence these had on her work,

'I like to look at old costumes and fashions of times gone by, because of what they say about their times. They tell so much about their era and the people in it. My inspiration comes from Greek vases, from the beautifully clothed women depicted on them, or even the noble lines of the vase itself.'8

It is notable though that this interest in historical costume is never interpreted as nostalgic - partly because Vionnet's radical approach to construction methods continually broke new ground. But also because of our attitudes towards classicism - which is seen as a pure form, an eternal measure of excellence that transcends the period of its creation. Yet, surely there is a longing in this evocation of the past, a yearning for the ideals of balance, proportion, harmony and symmetry, which have themselves become mythologised in western culture. This cultural mythology reflects a desire to believe in stable 'golden ages' of the past as a means to find hope in the present. It is telling that classical reference points often resurface in periods of political and economic turmoil, for example in late eighteenth century France, and inter-war Europe in the twentieth century. While European artists and designers in the 1920s and 1930s sought to break with the past and find expression in the here and now, historicism played a role in reformulating contemporary representation, with classicism, as a signifier of the eternal, a key site for inventing a vision of newness.

An article from the Werkbund journal Die Form of 1930 emphasises the role of white, a key element of both classical and modern design in adding to a sense of the present, by stating that the white walls so favoured by modern architects,

'Expose any error and control any space. Furthermore, everything is being painted white because white establishes the sense of the present. White is the modern state of mind. It is both a colour and an organising principle of modern life. Something to be seen and a way of seeing.'9

The sweep of clear white fabric that dominates so many of Vionnet's designs may certainly be read in terms of control of both fabric and flesh, since, despite having freed the body from the restraint of the corset, there is still a sense of control of the self through exercise and diet to produce the requisite toned modernist body. Control is also implicit in the desire for pure geometrical rationality in Vionnet's work and that of modernist architects like Le Corbusier, who could be seen as searching for a controlled and contained representation of the body/home/workplace to mitigate against the impending crisis of the contemporary period. Classical whiteness therefore states allegiance to an all conquering eternal set of truths, yet inevitably reflects the present, fixing designer and designed object in their own cultural and historical context, as products of their time as well as creators of the way that period is viewed and interpreted.

Meanwhile Vionnet did not just use whiteness to refer to classical sources. Her 'Little Horses' dress of 1924, which was shown in the Musee des Tissus Madeleine Vionnet exhibition in Lyons in 1995, saw her integrate decorative embroidery - so popular in the twenties - with her usual rigorous exploration of new techniques. The dress is cut on the bias to add fluidity and lightness to the silhouette and normally applied embroidery would have weighed down the design, working against the diagonal cut of the fabric. Albert Lesage therefore developed a new technique to follow the bias grain and enable the dress to maintain the elasticity that Vionnet's construction methods required, covering the dress in tiny blue bugle beads that filled in the negative spaces of the design like a Red Figure vase. Cecil Beaton spoke of Vionnet's modernist view of classical source material during the twenties in his book The Glass of Fashion:

'When the fashionable silhouette was flat, Vionnet worked in the round, evolving a harmony between the supple curves of the feminine body and the hang of drapery that was to be fluted as a Hellenic column. She made a Greek dress in a way the Greeks could never have imagined; there was nothing archaic about her lines. Everything Vionnet created had a cling or a flow, and women dressed by her were like moving sculptures.'10

While modernism spoke of standardisation in most areas of design, with mass-production sowing the seeds of a standardised body, Vionnet's couture was set firmly within the old world of individually fitted fashion. However, it also hinted at the standardised fashionable body that was to dominate the twentieth century with the designer's adoration of the lithe, toned figure that became the iconic, model ideal.

The bias cut was the foundation upon which Vionnet's design philosophy was built. It enabled her to smooth the link between structure and decoration, body and fabric to create a contained and unified image. The wearer's body was revealed and yet concealed by the smooth layer of spiralling fabric. As the thirties began, French couture began to feel the impact of the Depression - 1927 had been the peak year for couture sales but now the economic climate had radically changed and Vionnet predicted a shift towards the simpler styles that she had always favoured. From the early to mid 1930s she focussed more and more on white fabric. Her colour palette had always been fairly limited - indeed it was left to her assistant Marcelle Chaumont to add colours to her designs - but now white seemed strangely appropriate. White is associated in the west with purity, it speaks of cool statuary - a protective layer of classical imagery to idealise and mythologise the female figure.

The images which best encapsulate the importance and meaning of classicism within Vionnet's work are Hoyningen-Huene's 1931 photographs of her favourite model - Sonia dancing in silk crêpe romaine pyjamas, replicating the graceful moves of dancers depicted on Greek vases. Sonia was filmed dancing in this manner - her image preserved by 20th century technology as she recreated the spirit of classical antiquity. Anne Hollander has suggested that the advent of moving pictures irrevocably altered the way that clothing was perceived,

'Women, once thought to glide, were seen to walk...The various dance crazes of the first quarter of the century undoubtedly were an expression of this restless spirit, but its most important vehicle was the movies.'11

Film emphasised and enhanced the impact of movement on the relationship between fabric and body. In the footage of Vionnet's model Sonia, it is the fluidity of the material floating around her limbs that is most striking. What is also noteworthy is the way that Sonia seems to glow. The pale colour of her garments, the white of her skin and blonde hair transforms her into a glowing streak of light that inhabits the dark backdrop. Her form at times seems to have turned into an electrical current signalling movement and flux, as the fabric of her evening pyjamas settles and reforms constantly as she dances. The impact of such bright, white fashions and hairstyles was not lost on Hollywood, where screen stars like Jean Harlow were lit to maximise the glitter of their shiny white gowns, their pale skin and hair as shorthand for feminine allure and sexuality. The relationship between such filmic images and fashion in the thirties also tends to 'fix' such imagery in a particular period. While the dresses worn nod towards a timeless ideal of beauty and dressing, they capture the period's fascination with whiteness, at the aesthetic level of cinematography, reflecting what Hamman wrote above concerning white as a way of 'seeing', but also as a product of cultural unease about race, when whiteness was still an unproblematic marker of superiority and dominance.

Like the so-called 'goddess' dresses that Vionnet was making during the same period, the model becomes an ideal. Her smoothly made-up face and carefully curled blonde hair make her into a vision of sculptural perfection. Vionnet sought for 'true beauty' in her designs - an eternal or at least classical ideal that relied upon Platonic notions of proportion and wholeness. Each feature must be carefully balanced with the other - the harmony of facial and physical features extended and merged with the proportions of the dress. The model becomes the embodiment of an idea - an ideal of impossible perfection a dream of completeness - an invulnerable body with flaws smoothed away to construct an untouchable goddess of aloof physical unity.

There is a Roman myth that tells of Tuccia, a vestal virgin whose chastity is called into question. To prove herself she prays to the goddess Vesta and then goes to the river Tiber and dips her sieve in the water, filling it to the brim and then miraculously carrying the water back to the temple of Vesta as proof of her continence. As Marina Warner points out in her discussion of the iconography surrounding Tuccia in her book Monuments and Maidens,

'Tuccia's sieve, miraculously made whole by the power of her own wholeness, provides us with a symbol of ideal integrity, that puns on the semantics of virtue, and constitutes in itself a kenning on the inherent properties of goodness.' 12

Warner goes on to show how this allegory has echoed down the centuries, with feminine virtue being repeatedly associated with notions of completeness. Women's bodies are seen as ambiguous, and made culturally and morally acceptable, only when they appear to be clean, smooth and impenetrable. Warner continues:

'Tuccia's sieve is an unsound vessel that becomes sound by a miracle, like the body of a woman, which, with its open orifices, dangerous emissions and distressing aptitude for change, can yet become preternaturally sound when representing the good.' 13

During the 19th century this soundness was provided by the cuirass of the corset, which held in women's dangerous flesh, shielding the problematic natural body beneath a whale-boned layer that culturally defined the body with its unambiguous firm lines. The figure was therefore quite literally contained and made whole in order to denote the virtuousness of the wearer and assuage collective fears of the female body.

In Vionnet's designs the corset is discarded and the natural body revealed yet smoothed out and contained by a film of bias-cut fabric, a perfected second skin that makes the wearer's body once again miraculously complete. The reflective pale tones of the silk crêpe merges with her milky skin. She is a sculpture, an impenetrable whole. Yet Vionnet has added a warm sensuality to her figure, which although 'protected' by the completeness of her image speaks more of a celebration of femininity than fear of the realities of the female body. Vionnet's goddess dresses rephrase the allegory of Tuccia's sieve, by enabling the whole body to be free and to move - at once evoking ideals of the 'soundness', while at the same time making the figure a mobile plastic creation of flesh and fabric.

The heroic, monumental image of the 'goddess dress' was evoked by other designers like Paquin, and imposing classical features provided backdrops for numerous fashion photographs of the thirties. Women were encouraged to use the classical proportions of the sculptures's faces as a measure of their own beauty. Mary G. Winkler commented, 'these images [in fashion magazines] are secularised remnants of a very ancient practice: the use of images as the foundation for self-reformation through empathy and emulation.'14

The face itself became a focus for the classicising trend. Fashion photographs and importantly, Hollywood, encouraged women to use make-up to perfect their features, to make them photogenic, ready for the spectator with cosmetics that could achieve far more natural effects than ever before. The mask-like decoratively made-up face of the previous decade was replaced by a coolly chic vision of 'natural' i.e. classical beauty that like the well-proportioned classical body was worn as an emblem of goodness.

Kate de Castelbajac sees this form of make-up as symptomatic of women's desire to present an image of control and calm to escape both the desperation of the Depression and also as a glamorous mask for the sense of confusion surrounding women's role in a period of economic and political crisis. De Castelbajac writes,

'This emotional need could be approached only by an idealised femininity, which planted the seeds of an obsession that would affect the appearance of women of the rest of the century. The ideas of 'looking good' and 'feeling good' became inextricably connected for the first time, and the identification of goodness with beauty is crucial to the understanding of thirties woman.' 15

The bias cut required a slim toned body, which has become familiar as the standard model figure. As Madge Garland recalled,

'In fact, what the new fashion required was nothing less than a perfectly proportioned body with a naturally indented waist, small rounded breasts which needed no support, perfect shoulders, an absolutely flat back, and exceptionally slender thighs ending in extra long legs.' 16

With underwear kept to the minimum, dresses like the one worn by Meredith Frampton's sitter in her 1935 painting in the Tate Gallery revealed the body to an unprecedented degree. The young woman shown wears a bias-cut dress of palest pink, the fabric hovering on the surface of her skin, revealing prominent hipbones and slim legs beneath its folds. Madeleine Vionnet stated that the bias cut was elastic enough to accommodate various body sizes, but as she noted in an interview for Marie Claire in 1937,

'I feel that my profession must enable me to bring out the best in the most varied types of women. Throughout my life I've always tried to be a 'doctor' of the female form. As such my aim has been to teach my clients to respect their bodies, to exercise and to have a disciplined approach to their health, discarding any items which might constrict and deform them.' 17

During the 1930s numerous exercise programmes were devised to discipline and control the body, sculpting the muscles into the desired lean form. Nutritionists also produced diet regimes that were popular at health and beauty spas. Increasingly there was a need to produce a culturally acceptable idealised form that spoke of a healthy, that is to say carefully controlled intake of food, and exercised figure. Once again, there was a classical precedent to be followed. As Susan Bordo discusses in her book, Unbearable Weight,

'Aristocratic Greek culture made a science of the regulation of food intake, as a road to self-mastery and the practice of moderation in all things.' 18

This creation of a public self that intimated a rational, perfected inner self spoke of status, spirituality and virtue. Once again we see the natural body being mastered to make it 'sound' and impenetrable, with firm muscles and toned skin. In the thirties slim bodies were equally symbolic of social and cultural value.

The body created rejected the continually changing silhouettes of the previous century and the corsetry that had artificially sculpted women's figures. The classical toned body was viewed as timeless, superior to transient fashion fads and, since control was invisible, with exercise and diet shaping the body from within, as a return to the 'natural'. Foucault linked the strengthening and controlling of the body through diet regimens and exercise to the development and care of the 'self'. Such practises, he argues, were developing during the Class

Roberto Menichetti talks about Vionnet

Madeleine Vionnet had a great vision of the future, coupled with great energy ...she really harnessed the energy that was around at the turn of the last century. Vionnet was very much a woman of her time, she must have speculated what the future might promise for woman, what would they do or what they might become, what would it be like to clothe the future and how to translate this into dress-making methods... these questions must have always informed her technique, the shapes she generated. ....

....She really revolutionised sartorial technique, couture standards at the time, she simplified them, but not in an industrial way, that was a trend of course running parallel to hers with the possibility of increased mass production, hers was simplicity of line, meticulously crafted, everything in fact that is not mechanically reproducible. Taking inspiration from a more streamlined, mechanised environment. There is an incredible interactivity between her and her environment, in a way similar to the futurists' dream, where clothes are somehow projected into the urban space around them. ...She really trod the creative line between minimal, or rather, I think, essential, and incredibly sophisticated - both extreme simplicity, harmonious and evolved rupture with the past, or tradition.

....By reducing the number of components she transformed the individual pattern shapes dynamically - and of course she made the fabric work for her. The sophistication belongs to an art which is by definition applied, not conceptually free, based on her love of fabric - I know, it has always been so important to my work - there is a practicality about it, material reality separate from pure concept which you can get away with as an artist which as a designer you can't, it is important to remember this - we have to take into consideration, the protective aspect of fabric for example. The balance between each dress as an individual garment and a larger project, Vionnet maintained this throughout her work.

....Decoration, it was a huge project, decoration, essential shapes, spirals, interlocking circles, meticulously and executed in minute detail., she had amazing taste in colours, really subtle, yes, she really understood the power of colour, structural planes provide play with the light, luminosity emphasising subtlety.

....I love her famous wrapped gowns, that come from the centre and fold outwards, as though from her soul, a spiritual centre, the whirls, her roses, intimate unfolding, or the outside coming in. She had the confidence to let her project evolve to its logical consequence.

....She had a strange and tough life, but remained an incredibly strong and determined woman, I think, dreaming of the whole, her project was always about wholes, her dreams must have been of new worlds, ones that were in part dawning around her creative environment. She fused body and dress, perhaps soul, seams reduced to the essential, themselves sometimes providing the decoration, as you have in the show.

....Research, conversations about the future, the future of her environment, informed by her inspiring environment - you just have to see Thayaht - she encorporated the zeitgeist into her clothes. Her clothes were her manifesto. Her questions are still relevant, lessons we are still learning from her not only about cut but about interpreting our environment, she is truly contemporary.

....I love looking at the photograph of Vionnet taken by Louise Dahl-Wolfe in 1952 - look how strong she is, what a life... When we look back to the last century in hundreds of years her importance is always going to have such potency, she is really one of the 20th Century's great Couturiers. I am glad to have been inspired to look and think about her work again today..."

Roberto Menichetti, Creative Director Burberry's was speaking to Judith Clark from his studio in Gubbio, Italy.