1 Jeanne Lanvin: The Invisible Legacy Of An Influential Visual Artist “Beauty is the Promise of Happiness” (Stendhal) Figure 1Jeanne Lanvin in her Paris Studio 1930s Jeanne Lanvin (1867-1946) is a very peculiar and yet typically French cultural icon. Her peculiarity has sprung, to a certain extent, from her marked preference for the canonic blue colour of many her couture “objects” as well as her memorably elegant designs of which many 2 Figure 2 Lanvin's Noted Blue Arpège Perfume Bottle were on display in the important exhibition at Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris better known as Galleria. Typically French about the reception of her work, one might argue, is perhaps the infuriating oblivion of her admiring public to the invisible logic which underpinned her visually creative work. One would perhaps regard such a statement as self-contradictory only if one conflated two very different phenomena. Phenomena which neither the admiring contemporary consumers of Jeanne Lanvin’s creations nor the current proprietors of her immobilized and belatedly resurrected “masterpieces” seemed to have distinguished. That is to say, on one hand, the visually creative movement of her designer’s pen which constantly guided her pioneer work from, on the other hand, her seemingly completed and beautifully created designs-objects. 3 Designs-objects which gave the deceptive impression of possessing the characteristic self-sufficiency of distinct clothing items. Items of which one could dispose by displaying them in a variety of visible settings to oft desensitized contemporary spectators of a seemingly irrelevant cultural history in our age of manifestly restrictive “globalization”. That was purportedly neither the intention of Alber Elbaz, the artistic director of the Lanvin fashion house which is now owned by the Chinese businesswoman, Mrs. Wang Shaw, nor that of Olivier Saillard’s, the director of Galleria, who jointly organized this belated exhibition on the work of the founder of France’s oldest active fashion house. Moreover, Alber Elbaz had stated that he simply wished to protect the long neglected Lanvin robes and other creations on display from the damage which day light could have inflicted on them in the wake of their “resurrection” in this exhibition. That was understandable enough but one could ask at what price did Elbaz finally manage to “protect” his Lanvin “treasures”? More precisely, how did their exposure to what Elbaz called a stream of “soft nocturnal light ” affect their perception in the exhibition’s unpleasantly cluttered physical space? 4 Figure 3 The Rather Cluttered Lanvin Exhibition Galleria Indeed, nothing was more demoralizing, as far as I was concerned, than visiting an exhibition so unbearably packed with people and items that I had the impression of being in some dimly lit urban warehouse. Or, as one could say more evocatively in French, “un entrepôt”. To make things even worse, my request for a printed catalogue of the exhibition was turned down since the employees of this museum, operating under the aegis of Paris’ notoriously oversized municipal bureaucracy, could not even grasp the cultural relevance of the work of an international art reviewer (!) To the point that I wondered just how incomprehensible the association between Jeanne Lanvin and the world of art must have appeared to these undereducated functionaries of, to borrow the title of the controversial 1991 book of the noted French critic, Marc Fumaroli, France’s official “Etat Culturel ”. 5 That is to say, a state whose official machinery strives to promote public awareness of France’s rich cultural history and yet often facilitates its mummifying expropriation by its very own culturally ignorant and arrogant minions. Whilst it is true that, as Laurent Cotta rightly mentions in the exhibition’s catalogue, Jeanne Lanvin never considered herself an “artist” in the strict sense, her work as a designer clearly bore the imprint of her rapport to the world of art. A rapport which clearly exceeded her acquisition of a noted collection of significant works of art whose solid “classicism” never eclipsed their essence as art-works. Jeanne Lanvin, as Cotta underscores, might not have been particularly attracted to avant-garde art in an explicit manner but that does not at all mean that her creations cannot be considered artworks, albeit of a very peculiar sort. Artworks, that is, whose fundamentally artistic nature seems hopelessly eclipsed by their “popular” confiscation in an ahistorical and aesthetically ignorant consumer society. One which views such “treasures” as no more than antiquated fashionable merchandise of a bygone era of France’s eventful cultural history. 6 To put it in even more bluntly critical terms, one could say that Jeanne Lanvin’s creations are artworks which, despite their stultifying consumption by its past and present day consumers, nevertheless betoken the successful visual integration of a decisive variety of artistic and cultural influences. Influences of which even a perfunctory review could help underscore the importance of Lanvin’s work as a culturally decisive visual artist. An unrecognized visual artist whose rapport to the history of modern art clearly exceeded the biographical fact of her collaboration with the noted interior designer, Armand-Albert Rateau. Figure 4 Jeanne Lanvin's Iconic Marjolaine 7 For Lanvin’s designs-objects were, first and foremost, chromatically significant art experiments. Take, for example, the iconic La Marjolaine. One could ask, in the manner of the controversial German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, what is essentially “iconic” about this Lanvin creation? As simple as the answer to this question might indeed appear, it is oft infuriatingly neglected. To wit, that the creation of La Marjolaine or, for that matter, that of any other of Jeanne Lanvin’s “masterpieces” amounted to a visual transformation of all European sartorial reality. Hence, La Marjolaine cannot be, in strictly cultural terms, simply described as an elegant dress for the increasingly emancipated young and chic women of the 1920s since its “iconic” status is primarily derived from its transformative visual and cultural impact. Indeed, by merely looking at its monkey-silver lace “cocarde”, one can deduce that the creation of its “form” as such reflected the indisputable novelty of the visual direction which its designer-artist had chosen. To the point that its creation reflected a change in no less than the very notion of the “female garment”. 8 To borrow the language of the brilliant structuralist French theorist, Roland Barthes, one could say that La Marjolaine was a novel cultural “signifier”. One whose emergence was irreducible to its previously established signified-concept (“ female garment ”) to the point of modifying the latter. For whilst it looked visibly different from all previous designs for the non-conformist “coquettes” of the historical period in which it was created, its difference was not solely derived from its visible form since both the choice of its silver color and the inclusion of its “cocarde” implied that the function of all “female garment” had become, to quote a statement of a noted contemporary of Mallarme, Charles Blanc, that of discarding « everything that could impede a women’s walk ». Yet, this crucial transformation was itself no visible object-design since it was reflected in the specific visual reality of a peculiar artwork. An artwork which, to echo the late Jean François Lyotard, did not have an immutably pre-determined concept which could have simply regulated its creation or delimited its broader social utility. 9 The visual logic of the work of Jeanne Lanvin was neither an established canon (despite her markedly classicizing taste in art, notably her admiration for Fra Angelico) nor the unfettered roaming of the imagination towards which she remained understandably distrustful throughout her career. The combination of colors and decorative components which visibly constitutes La Marjolaine was and still remains an experiment in combining different material in a new visual ensemble. An ensemble whose emergence as such revolutionized the very notion of the “female garment ”. Despite its status as an object-design of a changing monetary value, La Marjolaine shall have always remained an experimental artwork. For it was, to borrow Barthes’ term, a specific “combinatory” of several visual-material components. The reader might wonder why I emphasize the pre-eminently artistic character of the 110 Jeannne Lanvin creations displayed in the exhibition. After all, was not her long relationship with the world of art both well-known and decisive ? So much so that one could, to paraphrase Laurence Cotta, even say that her work illustrates just how 10 formative the relation between the world of fashion design (Lanvin, Sonya Delaunay, Elsa Schiaparelli) and that of the visual arts had become in the 1920s. Yet, nothing seems more neglected than this salient historical fact in our age of arrogant and widespread ignorance of European cultural history. As long as Jeanne Lanvin’s creations are described as mere “dresses” (“robes”) by the likes of “Vogue” or “Elle” (be they richly bejeweled “dresses”) the majority of their admirers shall continue to view them as mere luxury items. Items which, as the Mayor of Paris, Ann Hidalgo, so revealing put it in her foreword to the catalogue of the exhibition, one could come to view as gems that must be safely placed in a “ jewel box” (“ecrin” ). Yet, such a view of the mythic Lanvin “treasures” proves, once again, that the function of the Lanvin myth as well as other cultural myths in our contemporary society is not to conceal but to distort the concept of its mystified “object”. For a myth such as this simply puts its “object” at one’s disposal by giving it, as Barthes notably put it, “an instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed richness, which it is possible to call and dismiss in a sort of rapid alternation”. 11 This is why I maintain that the infelicitous confinement of Jeanne Lanvin’s “masterpieces” to the gigantic box-warehouse of Galleria sadly distorted their true value as visual symbols of a long denied happiness in being. The sort of happiness whose visual expression breaks with all manner of officially sanctioned coffin in which one could only place dead mummies of a hopelessly forgotten past. Jeanne Lanvin’s creations, however, are not mummies since they are artworks. Artworks whose creation obliged their visually revolutionary maker to think outside the “box” of all previously consecrated sartorial canons. Be such a “box” a “jewel box” of the sort that could always be found in the urban warehouse of the old city of Paris. Paris-San Francisco April-July 2015 12