Catalogue for the Poiret exhibition, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition Poiret at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (May–August 2005). It forms part of a series of monographs of twentieth-century designers published by Metropolitan Museum, that Andrew Bolton initiated in 2005.

While there are several books on the work of Paul Poiret (Palmer, 1973; Deslandres, 1987), this is the first and only book that focuses on Poiret’s modernism.

Dress history credits Poiret with freeing women from corsets and with originating such startling creations as cocoon coats, hobble skirts, harem pantaloons, and lampshade tunics. This book argues that these details have served to detract from Poiret’s more significant achievements. By providing a detailed, technical analysis of Poiret’s designs, the book reveals how Poiret, through the process of working with fabric directly on the body, pioneered a radical approach to dressmaking that relied on the skills of draping rather than those of tailoring and pattern making. It shows how Poiret looked to antique and regional dress types to advocate clothing cut along straight lines and constructed of rectangles. The book posits that it was this radical and reductive approach to construction that effectively established the paradigm of modern fashion, changing the direction of costume history irrevocably and steering it in the direction of modern design history.

More significantly, the book argues that Poiret’s modernity, expressed through the structural simplicity of his clothing, signifies a pivotal moment in the emergence of modernism. Moreover, it presents an alternative interpretation of modernism, one that does not exclude orientalism in the movement’s development.

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