Madeleine Vionnet

Lino portrait by Carine

Madeleine Vionnet was a French fashion designer whose clothes gave women more freedom to move and whose seamstresses got social support. Her fashion house offered workers child care, free lunches, health care and holidays.   

Madeleine was born in a suburb of Paris in 1876 into an unprivileged family. At the age of 12, she started working as a lacemaker’s apprentice, in order to contribute to her family’s income. After a stint as a laundress at an asylum, she moved to London to work for the court dressmaker Kate Reilly, who like other English fashion houses of the time, specialised in copying French fashions. Madeleine learned her craft of dressmaking from Kate, working as a fitter. In 1900 she returned to France to work for Callot Soeurs, a prestigious couture house led by three sisters. Under the eldest sister, Marie Callot Gerber, Madeleine developed her dressmaking and tailoring skills further.

From there, seven years later, Madeleine was hired by the house of Jacques Doucet to rejuvenate the brand. With her first collection for her new employer, she tuned into the avant-garde look, a less structured aesthetic. Just like Paul Poiret and Mariano Fortuny, Madeleine presented un-corseted dresses and her models walked the runway barefoot. For Doucet and its conservative clients this was an incredibly radical and liberal approach.

In 1912 Madeleine opened the doors to her very own fashion house at 222 Rue de Rivoli. Once the House of Vionnet grew out of its first premises, she got additional investments to open at 50 Avenue Montaigne. This five-storey building featured over twenty ateliers, each assigned specific tasks such as dresses, coats, furs and lingerie. Although her fashion house temporarily closed with the outbreak of World War I and ended with the outbreak of World War II, she ran a successful business with a dedicated clientele for well over two decades.

I remembered the horrible work conditions when I was a girl and I wanted ours to be the best…in that way you get the best work.

Madeleine Vionnet

By 1923 Madeleine had 1200 people working for her, with her as lead designer and owner of the business. Though she was a relative recluse, mainly staying in her workshop, she did take proper care of her workers. She was a pioneer when it came to social welfare. Not surprisingly for a business that relied on sewing, Madeleine employed mostly women. These women had doctors and dentists on hand, a fund for babies, access to care for elderly parents and a daycare centre for the workers’ children. Working for her also meant you got a free lunch, coffee breaks and paid holidays (1 week in winter and 3 weeks in summer). For younger seamstresses there were classrooms to develop their skills and, at a time when stools were common for the workplace, her business offered chairs with backrests for her entire staff.

Madeleine’s work was architectural as well as sculptural. She chose to work with materials that had a fluidity, allowing her designs to follow a woman’s natural curve. This gave her work a sensuality and offered the wearer more freedom of movement. Madeleine’s work fit into the post-war zeitgeist in which there was a sense of newfound independence for women.

In her design work, Madeleine’s use of the ‘bias cut’ is particularly notable. By cutting, draping and pinning straight onto a wooden doll, she worked in the round instead of on a two-dimensional surface. This meant she could work with the shape of the wearer’s body and there was no need for complicated undergarments and corsets. The simplicity of her designs was underpinned by a structural complexity. Madeleine was a technician, someone who innovatively used the bias cut and could be mathematically precise with her patterns. She in fact preferred being called a dressmaker rather than a designer, signalling her appreciation of the craft.

My inspiration comes from Greek vases, from the beautifully clothed women depicted on them, or even the noble lines of the vase itself.

Madeleine Vionnet

Madeleine was inspired by two types of art: the fluid shapes and drapery of classical art and the geometric shapes of cubism. She would visit the Louvre to study ancient marble sculptures and artefacts, the inspiration of which can be seen in her draped gowns. But she would also use basic geometric shapes as starting points for her designs, especially in her earlier work. Her four principles of dressmaking – proportion, movement, balance and truth – reference these classical ideals of purity and beauty. She also got inspired by some real women, such as the Italian-born Maria Ruspoli, Duchesse de Gramont, who was a client of hers.

Though forward-thinking in her designs, she was a little more conservative when it comes to the female form. Women, in her eyes, should keep their natural form. She felt short or dyed hair went against nature. She urged women “to study themselves and to be consistent” and separated women into four divisions: “fat women, thin women, tall women, and short women. I am equally interested in all of these” (1924, New York Times).  

When a woman smiles, her dress must smile also

Madeleine Vionnet

Though she took good care of them, Madeleine rarely saw her employees or the ateliers where they worked. She spent her time in her own studio, sharing her creative responsibilities with Marielle Chapsal, who also had her own studio on the other side of the fitting rooms. They both worked with 80cm high wooden mannequins, on which they designed the garments before they were ready to send to the ateliers.

The salon, where clients were introduced to the new collections, was a space with crystal ceilings and wall frescoes painted by Georges de Feure. The women featured on these frescoes wore Madeleine’s most popular designs and each represented an aspect of her ideal woman.

One of Madeleine pain points was copying. In her plight against copyright infringement, she created copyright photo albums. Additionally, every garment got a unique name, number and a label bearing Madeleine’s signature and thumbprint. In 1921 she co-founded the anti-plagiarist Association pour la Defense des Arts Plastiques et Appliques. This organisation aimed to fight the illegal production and ambiguous advertising by businesses copying her work. She even published the following threatening statement:

The Madeleine Vionnet models are registered and published in France […] She will pursue any copyright or counterfeit, even partial, made in this regard of her rights.

A statement made by the Fashion House of Madeleine Vionnet

While taking affirmative action to protect her work from copying, she did also profit from a wide-reaching mass market. She licensed agreements and produced ready-to-wear collections for American department stores.

By the age of 63, after the outbreak of the Second World War, Madeleine decided to close shop. She retired in 1942, living as relative reclusiveness. She did, however, continue work by teaching dressmaking and pattern cutting. She donated her entire archive, which included 120 dresses, copyright albums and drawings, to the Union Française des Arts du Costume (UFAC).

ALSO LOOK AT

Coco Chanel will be the obvious name that will pop up when thinking about other French fashion designers that made an impact. But there might be more interesting information to find out about Madeleine’s teachers: Kate Reilly and the successful four sisters who set up Callot Soeurs. A woman that fascinated me in this research was Madeleine’s real-life inspiration Maria Ruspoli, the Duchesse de Gramont. Though not much is available about her in English, there is a lovely portrait of her by Philip Alexius de László from 1922 that makes me want to know her story.
A contemporary of Madeleine’s was the American Ann Cole Lowe, the first African American to become a noted fashion designer.
The concept of having facilities available to workers is not unique to Madeleine’s company. The suffregist sister Sylvia Pankhurst ran a toy factory for some time, which also had a nursery on site.

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