Madeleine Vionnet
(1876-1975)
Madeleine Vionnet was born in Chilleurs-aux-Bois, Loiret, France on June 22, 1876. She came from a poor family and began her apprenticeship as a seamstress in a little shop in the ban lieue of Paris, at the young age of eleven. At the age of twenty-one, she worked for a more refined boutique in the Rue de la Paix, which sold underwear. She later moved to London where she began working for the dressmaker Kate Reilly.
In 1901, she returned to France with excellent credentials and is immediately given a position as premiere by Madame Gerber, the fashion designer to the Callot sisters. In 1907, she joins Doucet and remains with him for five years. In 1912, she opens her own fashion house. Two years later she is forced to close, due to the outbreak of World War I.
In the 1920s at the end of the war, Vionnet creates a stir by introducing the "bias cut," a technique for cutting cloth diagonal to the grain of the fabric enabling it to cling to the body while moving with the wearer. In 1922, the Maison took offices at 50 Avenue Montaigne. About ten years later, Vionnet had twenty ateliers on a five story building, and more than one-thousand employees including premieres, directors, sellers, tailors, seamstresses, administrative clerks, shop clerks and delivery boys. Madame Vionnet created her designs on a miniature model, draping the fabric in sinous folds. She dispensed with the corset and used diagonal seaming and faggoting to achieve her simple, fluid shapes. Many of Vionnet's clothes looked limp and shapeless until they were put on the body.
During the 1920s to the 1930s, Vionnet reached the height of her fame. She was credited with the popularization of the cowl and halter neck. She favored crepe, crepe de chine, gabardine and satin for evening dresses and day dresses, which were often cut in one piece, without armholes. Suits had gored or bias-cut skirts; wraparound coats were made with side fastenings, and many garments fastened at the back or were pulled on over the head without a fastening of any kind. Bands of grosgrain often acted as lining and support for the insides of fine crepe dresses. A smooth shape and fit were very important to achieve the ultimate in dress designs; a dress that fitted "just so" to the body.
Madeleine Vionnet retired in 1939 and closed her business in the same year at the outbreak of yet another war, World War II. No other designer has equaled her enormous technical contribution to haute couture. She died thirty years later on March 2, 1975.
