Hoosta Magazine

From June 24th, 2009 to January 31st, 2010, the Arts Décoratifs Museum celebrates the daring genius of the dressmaker Madeleine Vionnet through a magnificent retrospective. Enlightened and visionary designer, she brought new aesthetic to the fashion world and has successfully established herself in the collective consciousness as the symbol of a liberating and transgenerational art.

Dress, summer 1937, © Patricia Canino – Photographie de dépôt de modèle, collection summer 1937, Les Arts Décoratifs, Union Française des Arts du Costume © DR

The adventure begins in 1912 at the corner of rue Rivoli. Her small fashion house quickly becomes a microcosm of a new “social aesthetics”. The “feminist from the very beginning” sublimes women and frees them from the shackles of fashion by scrolling her models barefoot and without corsets. The conceptual and pictorial models claime a singular visual beauty throught a “dynamic symmetry” with very clean lines. Forerunner of the bias cut, she reinvented a new style, a body architecture in motion.

Dress summer 1922, Les Arts Décoratifs, Union Française des Arts du Costume
© Patrick Gries – Photographie de dépôt de modèle, collection summer 1922,
Les Arts Décoratifs, Union Française des Arts du Costume © DR

Putting her genius in the interest of everyone is a project dear to the designer. She entrusts in 1952, a phenomenal wealth of 122 dresses and 75 photo albums to the French Union des Arts du Costume. An exceptional testimony raised with elegance by the Arts Décoratifs Museum. In search of eternal beauty, «dressmaker’s dressmaker» still inspires the great names in fashion today.

Madeleine Vionnet, puriste de la mode – Arts décoratifs museum
107, rue de Rivoli
75001 Paris
France
T. : +33.(0)1 44 55 57 50
Metro: Palais-Royal.
From Tuesday to Friday, from 11am until 6pm, on weekends from 10am.
Night opening on Thursday until 9pm.
Prices from 6,50€ to 8€.

Photo credit

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