Is woman a designer like the others?|Vanity Fair Fair Fairchevron Menu Close Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest Facebook Twitter Email Facebook Twitter Email Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest Widthvron

Is woman a designer like the others?|Vanity Fair Fair Fairchevron Menu Close Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest Facebook Twitter Email Facebook Twitter Email Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest Widthvron

The cause seems to be understood: fashion designers, pragmatic, would first think of the way women wear their clothes;Their male counterparts would embroider pure fantasies for unreal creatures.The presence, always parsimonious, of women at the head of fashion houses prevents definitive lessons."I was just as surprised as you are of my appointment to Dior, is still surprised Maria Grazia Chiuri, artistic director since 2016.Because I am the first woman [in this place] in the history of this house, I naturally started to think about our relationship to fashion.And, given my position, I decided that the time had come to approach the question of equality between men and women again."Since his arrival at Dior, this crucial subject seems to grab the spirits in major fashion houses: why so few women occupy the management of creation?As if to prove him right, Lanvin recruited Bouchra Jarrar in March 2016, followed a year later by Chloé with Natacha Ramsay-Levi and Givenchy with Clare Waight Keller.

The word "couturier" does not designate the same feminine function: one factory, the other invents.This distinction underlines a balance of power dating from the end of the 17th century, under Louis XIV, when the profession was set up, with its hierarchy and its governed corporations (already!) By the male gent.History remembers those who have given sewing its letters of nobility: Jeanne Paquin, the four Sisters Callot, or Lucile - alias Lady Duffon.Not happy to survive the sinking of the Titanic, the latter, visionary, imagined the first parade on a podium with models who paraded by taking the pose.Lucile herself announced then the names of the models presented during their passage, all against a background of live music led to the wand by a dashing conductor.

The next generation is even more sharp: each in their own way, Jeanne Lanvin, Madeleine Vionnet, Gabrielle Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli defend an elegance that would not give in to the functional.With all kinds of shades.Chanel dresses, Lanvin decorates, Schiaparelli Parade, Vionnet Pour.Each asserts its credo in clear terms: "a seamstress dresses human beings, not dreams", proclaims loudly and strong Madeleine Vionnet.

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Coco Chanel, quoted by Françoise Giroud, in L'Express in 1956, overborn: "We always start by making dream dresses.And then you have to shoot down;You have to cut;you have to remove.Never put back."And in her, in 1958:" I want to make dresses that give women the impression of being comfortable in their time, who help them live."In his autobiography Shocking (Denoël, 1954), Elsaschiaparelli does not say anything else:" A dress does not remain, like a painting, hanging on the wall, or does not lead, like a book, a long intact and preserved existence.She does not have a life of her, unless she is worn and, from then on, another personality takes and animates her, or at least strive, grows her, destroys her or makes a hymnbeauty."And Jeanne Lanvin, the dean, to add:" You have to be wary of the imagination.It must first be used to see in advance the faults of what we imagine.You have to create by cutting.On the door of his office, a plate is affixed.One word is engraved there: "Madame.Even Paul Poiret, the first male couturier superstar, seems convinced by these arguments: "These are the women who make fashion!"»»

Moon objective from the 1960s emerged a state of mind which bears in him protest and anti-conservative germs.Echoing the social mood of the time, a new wave of stylist women is known.These refute this hierarchy of ancient regime, modeled on the life before the Second World War, the panoply of class organized in lunch dress, afternoon outfit, set of dinner, big gala dress...Women want to simplify their lives, to throw out their object status, to participate in activities like men and to register the precepts of an increasingly assertive feminism in the tables of the law.Under their own names or behind the anonymous freelance mask for great manufacturers of the making, Emmanuelle Khanh, Christiane Bailly, Michèle Rosier and Sonia Rykiel hold the top of the pavement at that time."There was no fashion for youth;There were only ladies' clothes, "recalls Claude Brouet, fashion editor for more than half a century (she notably created the ready-to-wear pages of Elle magazine in the early 1950s)."*Because of all the dictates of the designers, women were very concerned with being fashionable, and not to feel good about them.*"At the threshold of the 1970s, the ambient discourse changes at all:" Be yourself!Take in fashion what you like, what suits you!»Proclaims Claude Brouet in his pages."We wanted them to be free of their choices, that they do not feel obliged to put themselves in a mold," she recalls today.

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