Artists...

Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay was born on the 14^th November 1885 and died on the 5^th December 1979. She was a well-known and well respected Jewish-French artist. Her husband Robert Delaunay and others cofounded the Orphism art movement and was noted for its use of strong and bold colours and geometric shapes. Her work consists of paintings and textile designs along with stage set design. She was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre museum, France, in 1975.

Her work was based on modern design and included the concepts of geometric shapes and abstraction, the integration of furniture, wall coverings, fabrics and clothing.
 

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She was strongly influenced by the post-impressionist art of Van Gogh and Henri Rousseau and the fauves including Henri Matisse and Derain.

Orphism (1911 - 1913)

In 1911, she created a patchwork quilt for her son’s crib, which is now in her collection at the Musee National d’Art Moderne in Paris. It was created to experiment with the use of colour and geometric shapes from the artist’s work she had seen before and used as inspiration.

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She famously stated

"About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Russian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings."

Her work was associated with cubism at the time due to the geometric shapes and the use of colours and cubism was very popular at the time she was creating her work so it came across as though it had inspired her work, which you could say it did due to the shapes and colours. Other artists and designers used her version as inspiration to create their work as it did so well and was well recogniseable.

After her paintings she began to create and design print for fabrics and then took up the role of being a textile designers as well as being an artist. Her husband did more of the art work whereas she did the textile and fabric side of things as well as creating some garments to show the prints off and the paintings. Her garments sometimes seemed structured, which linked to her work well as it was very structured due to the geometric shapes and use of colour, which made them stand out.  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/delaunay_sonia.html 28/11/12

28/11/12 - information

www.telegraph.co.uk › Culture › Art › Art Features

www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/delaunay_sonia.html

Fashion Designers...

Paul Poiret

Paul Poiret was born on the 20^th April 1879 in Paris and died on the 30^th April 1944. He was a well-known and recognisable French fashion designer.
He has had many contributions to the 20^th century fashion and has been often noticed by Picasso and his contributions. He established his own fashion house in 1903 and he made his name with the controversial kimono coat. He was known for designing flamboyant window displays and threw many parties people remember, which drew much needed attention to his work for marketing and inspirations. His fashion house later expanded to design and sell furniture, décor and fragrances. He was also noticed for advertising and selling his fragrances as well as clothing in unusual environments with a lot of different and unusual props to make them stand out but also for people to recognise him and his work.

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His designs seemed poorly manufactured against new and up and coming designers such as Chanel as her designs were simple, sleek and relied on excellent craftsmanship and production, which got her more noticed, which made designers compete with each other.

He wanted his clothing to be groundbreaking and different but without thinking about the target audiences for the time period and the cost of production and how well they should be made with the materials chosen. 

In 1929, the house was closed and the leftover and wasted clothing were sold. Unfortunately when he died people forgot about him and his designs. When the fashion house closed he was forced out of work and a home with dept so he became a street painter and tried to sell his paintings to the customers of Paris’ cafes. He had some help from his dear friend Elsa Schiaparelli, who prevented his name from going into complete turmoil and people from forgetting who he was.
 

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He was best known for freeing women from corsets and inventing clothing such as the hobble skirt, harem trousers and lampshade tunics to make women feel more comfortable. He tackled draping and concentrated on more draped and tailored garments as a fresh approach to fashion and the fashion world. His clothing represented a pivotal moment in the emergence of modernism and changing the direction of fashion and fashion movement.

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25/11/12 - information

www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/466443/Paul-Poiret
designhistorypaulpoiret.blogspot.com/

Fashion Designers...

Coco Chanel

en.wikipedia.org 1920 23/11/12

 

Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel aka Coco Chanel was born on the 19^th August 1883 and died on the 10^th January 1971 and was a well known French fashion designer and the founder of the well known brand Chanel. She is famous for her corseted silhouette and popularising the sportive, casual chic as the feminine standard clothing and figure in the post-war era. As a fashion creator, her influences extended to her collections and her couture clothing.

 

Her designs influenced her jewellery, handbags and fragrances. Her business has been very successful for the social elements as well as the clothing and the brand itself. During the War people questioned her work and generated controversy around her reputation. Her work is known as craftsmanship work and she is often compared to a highly intelligent business women.

 

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I
n 1931 she began designing garments for film and they sold millions, which was very profitable to her and she became more known within the film industry. She travelled to Hollywood to gain inspirations for her garments and how they can be displayed. She gained a lot of private clients and people, which gave Chanel more profit and famous with popularity and social contexts.

Her private clients were Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich who were also known as dangerous women within their films and the clothing they wore helped with that, which Chanel designed specifically.
 

Elsa Schiaparelli was a huge rivalry for Chanel and her business in 1935 employed 4000 people to progress the business to beat Schiaparelli as her Haute couture came under threat. The boyish look and the short skirts of the 20s flapper dress and girl seemed to disappear. Her designs for Hollywood began to be hit with failure, which wasn’t good for her reputation. Schiaparelli’s designs had significant playful references to surrealism, which sparked enthusiasm in the fashion world.
 

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Chanel has a legacy as a designer she appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and they raved about them saying “The woman who hasn’t at least one Chanel is hopelessly out of fashion...This season the name Chanel is on the lips of every buyer.” Chanel’s famous corseted female silhouette still stands today and the designs are influenced by it. Her design aesthetic redefined the fashionable woman for the post WW I era.

The Chanel Suit was the innovative use of jersey fabric with a machine knit material manufactured for her by the firm Rodier and were used for the manufacture of the undergarments. Her wool jersey travelling suit consisted of a cardigan jacket, a pleated skirt and they were paired with a low-belted pullover top. They were worn with low-heeled shoes, which soon became the casual look in expensive women’s wear.

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The little black dress was one of Chanel’s earliest pieces and has been around and well noticed ever since. The concept of the little black dress was to show women off and make them look chic and rich due to the fabrics it was made out of and how they were portrayed. They were often made out of thin silk, crepe de chine and often had long sleeves. Vogue stated that they believed this particular garment could easily be seen as a uniform for all women of taste.

The Chanel bag is still very popular nowadays and are still very stylish and chic. The influences came from colour blends and the creation of bags and their purposes as well as how they should look. They are also said to be used as uniform bags to go with the little black dress and other clothing she has created. The original versions of the bags were constructed of jersey or leather and the outside-featured hand stitched quilted designs, which were influenced by the clothing. The bags still retained their original shapes with a clasp and chain strap differing its initial forms. The Chanel fashion house is now run by Karl Lagerfeld and is still extremely successful and has enhance the Chanel legacy and her designs.
 

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23/11/12 - information
 
Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life by Justine Picardie (7 Jul 2011)
www.chanel.com/en_GB/ 

Fashion Designers...

Elsa Schiaparelli...

 

en.wikipedia.org 1937 23/11/12

Elsa Schiaparelli was a very famous Italian fashion designer who was well known for her revelry with Coco Chanel due to the different designs and the fabrics used for the decade and the types of styles which were in at the time as they both wanted to be the designer that stood out as being different but also understanding women’s rights and the social context of their work.

 

She is one of the most prominent people in the fashion industry between World War I and World War II. She began starting with knitwear and her designs were commonly influenced by surrealists and surrealism like her collaborations with Alberto Giacometti. Her famous clients for her clothing and actually representing her designs and work included Daisy Fellows and the famous actress Mae West. She found it difficult to adapt to the changes in fashion and the styles following World War II, which made her close her business in 1954.

Her fashion career is well known and is a very famous designer. She created jumpers displaying the surrealist movement, which was very popular in the time period. Her designs first appeared in Vogue, her business then became to take off with a pattern that gave the impression of a scarf, which had been wrapped around the wearer’s neck. Her sport collection called ‘pour le sport’ was then released and expanded the year after with new designed clothing such as bathing suits, skiwear and linen dresses to allow movement and freedom.

The divided skirt, a forerunner of shorts, shocked the tennis world when it was worn by Lili de Alvarez at Wimbledon in 1931. She later added an eveningwear collection in 1931 and her business got stronger and stronger and became better known. Depending on the time periods she was always in season and on trend and made sure her designs were up to date. When she returned to her new designing roles she found that fashions had changed with Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ marking a rejection of the pre-war fashion.

Dada and surrealism art was known as modern art and it provided a significant source of inspirations for Elsa. She collaborated with a number of artists to develop and widen her knowledge for more imaginative design ideas to stand out and show the influences for the time period. She has quite often worked with Salvador Dali. Her work then started to become more recognisable and her most notable design was created.

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In addition she created things such as the shoe hat and the tear dress, which represented her influence of Salvador Dali, which can be identified in the designs such as the lamb-cutlet hat along with a 1936-day suit with pockets representing a chest of drawers. She has also been referred as ‘the Italian artist who makes clothes’ by Coco Chanel as she is well noticeable for designing garments with an artist inspired background or theme to her work often with collaborations.

The designs which she created when she collaborated with Salvador Dali are said to be her best-known work. She did not name her designs but the four main garments from the collaboration are popularly known as:

The 1937 Lobster Dress, which was a simple silk evening dress with a crimson coloured waistband, which featured a large painted by Dali onto the skirt. The design work for Elsa was interpreted into a fabric print by the leading silk designer sache. It has been famously worn by Wallis Simpson and a series of photographs by Cecil Beaton.
 

The tear dress was a slender pale blue evening gown painted with a Dali design of rips and tears, worn with a thigh-length veil with ‘real’ tears carefully cut out and lined in pink and magenta, which was part of the 1938 February Circus Collection. The paint was created to represent the illusion or torn animal flesh.

Salvador Dali also helped her design the Skeleton dress for the circus collection. It was a black crepe dress, which consisted of quilting to create the padded ribs, spine and leg bones.











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lisathatcher.wordpress.com 23/11/12

23/11/12 - information

Shocking life: the autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli by Elsa Schiaparelli (26 Nov 2012)
www.schiaparelli.com/
www.vogue.com/voguepedia/Elsa_Schiaparelli

Research for my theme...

Art Deco

Art deco is an influential visual arts design style, which first appeared in France during the 1920s and later grew dramatically during the 1930s and 1940s, which was the post-world war II era. Art deco is an eclectic style, which combines different shapes and sizes using traditional craft motifs using imagery and materials and often incorporated bright and rich colours and bold geometric shapes.

Art deco is an influential visual arts design style, which first appeared in France during the 1920s and later grew dramatically during the 1930s and 1940s, which was the post-world war II era. Art deco is an eclectic style, which combines different shapes and sizes using traditional craft motifs using imagery and materials and often incorporated bright and rich colours and bold geometric shapes. It is also known as streamline modern and influenced it heavily.

Art deco emerged from the interwar period when industrialisation was having a massive impact on the culture. One of the main attributes was the sudden involvement with technology and how it progresses and continues to be used for mass production, lowering costs and efficiency. Art deco is different to art nouveau as it includes geometric shapes whereas art nouveau is organic flowers, which is how they differentiate from each other. 

In the well-known and popular world of art, fashion was being highly influenced by the art movements such as surrealism. After World War I, art was seen as a slow transition and was influenced by art nouveau even though they are very different and have different influences. The decoration consisted of more then one geometric shape and tended to be smooth and sometimes slightly textured. Elsa Schiaparelli is one of the first and famous Italian designers of the 1920s who was heavily influenced by the art deco movement and combining it within her designs.

Art deco was a very popular type of art within the 1920s and influences many different artists and designers to create their work to show the different and known influences and how they can change the fashion and art world. The patterns and textures were used on clothing such as camisoles, skirts, trousers, bloomers, chemises etc. it also influenced architecture, interior design, industrial design, graphic arts and cinema.

Research for my theme...

1920s Fashion - the roaring twenties.

After World War 1, fashion became more prominent and it started to become more important to the society and how people lived. After the war the stock market was on a high increase and certain fabrics became more known and popular for certain garments.

The new fabrics consisted of natural fabrics such as cotton and wool and silk was also highly popular as it created a rich and luxurious feel and look to the clothing to make them stand out and differentiate the classes between richer and poorer. The silk was used not only to make garments look more expensive but it was used as comfort because during the war, women were entering the work force and wearing uncomfortable clothing so designers felt like women deserved more luxurious clothing and fabrics. Rayon was also used frequently as it was cheaper at the time for undergarments and was comfortable. Many garments consisted of fastenings such as buttons, lace, metal hook and eyes and zips.

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The clothing and fashions changed as women’s roles in society changed and people became more aware of the new ideas of fashion. The tubular dress evolved into similar silhouettes that introduced shorter skirts with pleats, gathers and slits to allow movement. The straight-line chemise (blouse) was added to a tighter fitting cloche hat, which was worn as a uniform. Women’s hairstyles became increasingly popular as they all began to have it very short ‘bobbed’ cut to fit under the hats they were wearing. Low-waisted dresses with a fullness at the hemline allowed women to move more freely and be more comfortable as well as looking fashionable.

The boyish figure became more prominent after the war as women were exposed to clothing that hid their figures for the working industry. They believed in flatter chested women to show no form of the figure, as they believe it should never be seen. Women’s rights were seriously strongly affected, as well as the fashions. The corset was discarded, as it was tight fitting and confining and was replaced by the chemise or a camisole and then bloomers to hide the figure but try to look more fashionable and stylish. During the mid – 1920s, all in-one lingerie became popular as it was easier to manage and cheaper as well as fashionable at the time.

For the first time in years, women’s legs were seen with hemlines risings to the knee and the dresses became more fitted to show the female figure and form. A more masculine look became quite popular, which linked to the boyish figure, which included flattened breasts and hips and a short bob hair cut. This was to hide the female form as politics made them have an active role within the society. The fashion was very forthcoming for this decade and continued to change.

Coco Chanel was the first woman to wear trousers and cut her hair short and completely discard the corset, which people found was very brave for this time period as corsets were seen as the main fashion item. Chanel was one of the most influential woman within the fashion industry and the design world of the 20^th century as she believed in women’s freedom and rights whether they had active roles in the society or not. She believed women should feel comfortable to chic in what clothing they wear and how they display themselves.

A new French fashion designer, Jean Patou came on the scene by making a two-piece jumper and a skirt in luxurious wool jersey and had an instant hit with his dresses and sports suits. Women in general became a fan of his work and believed that this was the way forward for the fashion industry.

By the end of the 1920s, the ever-popular Elsa Schiaparelli stepped into the limelight to represent a younger generation. For this she combined the new idea of classic design from the Greeks and Romans with a modern feel for freedom and movement. Schiaparelli said that the ancient Greek’s gave their goddesses the fabulous appearance of freedom. She produced evening gowns, which were very elegant with simplicity. She forgot about the chemise and her clothing became an awareness of the body underneath the elegant evening gown.

14/11/12 - information

www.fashionising.com/trends/b--1920s-fashion-954.html

www.1920-30.com/fashion/