I am not often ashamed of fashion and the eternal search for the new that my profession involves. But looking at the artistic, timeless and magical clothes designed by Mariano Fortuny a century ago, left me, as a fashion editor, filled with shame and chagrin.
How is it possible that the Spanish-born Fortuny, emerging in Venice after the First World War, could have designed clothes in liquid colours and painterly surfaces that I, or any woman, could wear today?
Even though model and philanthropist Natalia Vodianova wore a Jeff Koons balloon dress at the recent Fabulous Fund Fair in New York, which her Naked Heart Foundation co-hosted with amfAR, she proved the eternal fashion reality of Fortuny when, in 2009, she wore an original Fortuny ‘Delphos’ dress in a waterfall of red pleats at the Met Ball and a cascade of sky-blue Fortuny at the British Fashion Awards later that year.
Those dresses are not on show at Fortuny, A Spaniard in Venice at the Palais Galliera in Paris. But pleats are everywhere, falling straight but shivering and quivering with light as they surf the shape of the female form.
And yes, you could wear every single outfit today – I had my eye on a velour top and skirt – without looking dressed for a costume party. This is because the shape is made by the body, rather than by stuffing the human form into a pre-ordained silhouette.
“Mariano Fortuny is the couturier who broke down frontiers the most. He revolutionised fashion by freeing the female body yet at the same time was inspired by the ancient Grecian periods,” says museum director Olivier Saillard about his last major show before he leaves his post in January 2018. What a way to go!
This Fortuny exhibition is “old school”, meaning not entirely didactic, but informative. And that is because, as well as showing the garments, it offers a close up of the extraordinary fabrics, many with treatments whose secret formula the designer and his wife Henriette Negrin took to the grave.
For my next visit I shall take a magnifying glass to marvel again at the silk velvet, with the “greenery-yallery” colours of the period or in midnight blue with flat golden leaves and undulating bunches of grapes.
Almost every piece on display, offered over the years by upper-crust ladies as a donation to the museum’s rich reserves, has details of the original owner. These were artistic women with a penchant for beauty rather than mere high society. “My” top and skirt were worn by the daughter of Élaine Greffuhle, later the Duchess of Gramont, who was said to be the model for Proust’s character, the Duchess of Guermantes, in À la recherche du temps perdu. The Duchess’ glorious wardrobe was brought to life in a previous Saillard exhibition at the museum in 2016, La Mode Retrouvée: Les robes trésors de la comtesse Greffulhe.
With the passing of time, it is difficult to know to what extent the wealthy and artistic clients collaborated with Fortuny, asking that the Cerulean blue of a Grecian gown might be faded to the shade of a rain-washed sky; or deepened to an azure Mediterranean mid-day. A display of silken skeins allowed the client to choose their preferred pigment.
Although the exhibition plus size shapewear provides information about how velvet was treated and the flat silk pleated, this can never speak for the relationship between creator and wearer. Some influence may have come from the client, yet it seems more likely that Fortuny, like painters of the Aesthetic Movement of the late 19th century, had a penchant for secondary colours and for mixes of nature’s green and princely gold.
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