Armani Giorgio--

Giorgio Armani, one of the most authoritative names in Italian ready-to-wear design, was born in
Piacenza, Italy, in 1934. He became interested in fashion in 1957, when he left the school of
medicine at the University of Piacenza to become a buyer for the La Rinascete chain in Milan. In
1964 Armani met Nino Cerruti, owner of Hitman, the Italian men’s clothing producer. After a brief
period to see how Armani worked with materials, Cerruti asked him to restructure completely the
company’s approach to clothing. Armani worked with Cerruti for six years, developing a simplified
form of menswear that could be reproduced in series.

In the late 1960s Armani met Sergio Galeotti, which was the beginning of a relationship that lasted
for years. In 1973 Galeotti persuaded him to open a design office in Milan, at 37 corso Venezia. This
led to a period of extensive collaboration, during which Armani worked as a freelance designer for a
number of fashion houses, including Allegri, Bagutta, Hilton, Sicons, Gibò, Montedoro, and
Tendresse. The international press was quick to acknowledge Armani’s importance following the
runway shows at the Sala Bianca in the Pitti Palace in Florence.
The experience provided Armani with an opportunity to develop his own style in new ways. He was
now ready to devote his energy to his own label, and in 1975 he founded Giorgio Armani Spa in
Milan with his friend Galeotti. In October of that same year he presented his first collection of men’s
ready-to-wear for spring and summer 1976 under his own name. He also produced a women’s line
for the same season.

There is a common thread running through Armani’s stylistic development that is closely associated
with the change in contemporary society. It led to the creation of clothing and accessories that
aimed at a clean, simple style, beyond fashion, designed to enhance the personality of the person
who wore it. When, in 1976, the designer presented the first unstructured jackets for men, unlined
and un ironed, the product of years of experience in production design, they were intended to lower
labor costs and simplify tailoring. But in introducing them Armani opened a third way in men’s
clothing, an alternative to the traditional approach of English tailoring and the expectations
associated with Italian made-to-measure clothing, realizing an innovative synthesis between formal
wear and loose, flexible sportswear.
With the invention of the blazer worn as a pullover, Armani offered men a new identity that
rejected rigid professional divisions and allowed them to present themselves as young, attractive,
and vaguely feminine.
Referred to as the “first postmodern designer,” by several Italian newspapers, for his radically
unstructured garments, Armani had simply softened men’s wear and made women’s wear more
concise and modern, transforming changing social roles into an “Armani look,” making the casual
look authoritative.

Official recognition of his fame came in 1982 when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, only
the second fashion designer, after Christian Dior, to do so. Armani had freed women from their stiff
suits, providing them with soft jackets without collars and with comfortable pants.
Chanel coco
Gabrielle Chanel (1883–1971) was born out of wedlock in the French town of Saumur in the Loire
Valley on 19 August 1883 to Albert Chanel, an itinerant salesman, and Jeanne Devolle. Her mother
died of asthma at the age of 33, Chanel was just 12 old, she along with her two sisters were sent to
an orphanage at Aubazine. During the holidays the girls stayed with their grandparents in Moulins. In
1900 Chanel moved there permanently and attended the local convent school with her aunt
Adrienne, who was of a similar age. Having been taught to sew by the nuns, both girls found work as
dressmakers, assisting Monsieur Henri Desboutin of the House of Grampayre.
While on vacation in Deauville on the west coast of France in the summer of 1913, Boy Capel found a
shop for Chanel to open on the fashionable rue Gontaut-Biron, and it was here that she presented
her first fashion collections. With the outbreak of World War I in July 1914, many wealthy and
fashionable Parisians decamped to Deauville and shopped at Chanel’s boutique.

In 1916 Chanel purchased a stock of surplus jersey fabric from the manufacturer Rodier, which she
made into unstructured three-quarter-length coats belted at the waist and embellished with
luxurious fabrics or furs, worn with matching skirts. That fall Chanel presented her first complete
couture collection. The March 1917 issue of Les élégances parisiennes illustrates a group of jersey
suits by Chanel, some of which are delicately embroidered, while others are strictly plain and
accessorized with a saddlery-style double belt. All are worn with open-neck blouses with deep sailor
collars. A 1918 design consisted of a coat of tan jersey banded with brown rabbit fur, with a lining
and blouse of white-dotted rose foulard: this matching of the coat lining to the dress or blouse was
to become a Chanel trademark. Striking in their simplicity and modernity, Chanel’s jersey fashions
caused a sensation.
Fashions of the early 1920s. From 1920 to 1923 Chanel conducted a liaison with the grand duke
Dmitri Pavlovitch, grandson of Russia’s Tsar Alexander II, and her collections during these years were
imbued with Russian influences. Particularly noteworthy were loose shift dresses, waistcoats,
blouses, and evening coats made in dark and neutral colors with exquisite, brightly colored, folkloric
Russian embroideries stitched by exiled aristocrats. In 1922 Chanel showed long, lean, belted
blouses based on Russian peasant wear.
Perfumes. Chanel launched her first perfume, Chanel No. 5, in 1921. Reputedly named for the
designer’s lucky number, No. 5 was blended by Ernest Beaux, who used aldehydes (an organic
compound which yields acids when oxidized and alcohols when reduced) to enhance the fragrance
of such costly natural ingredients as jasmine, the perfume’s base note. Chanel designed the modern
pharmaceutical-style bottle and monochrome packaging herself. Chanel No. 5 was the first perfume
to bear a designer’s name. Building upon the success of No. 5, Chanel introduced Cuir de Russie
(1924), Bois des Îles (1926), and Gardénia (1927) before the end of the decade.
The little black dress. Chanel had designed black dresses as early as 1913, when she made a black
velvet dress with a white petal collar for Suzanne Orlandi. In April 1919 British Vogue reported that
“Chanel takes into account the lack of motors and the general difficulty of living in Paris just now by
her almost invariably black evening dresses” (p. 48). But it was not until American Vogue (1 October
1926) described a garçonne style black day dress as “The Chanel ’Ford’—the frock that all the world
will wear” (p. 69) that the little black dress took the fashion world by storm. And although the use of
black in fashion has a long history, Chanel has been credited as its originator ever since.
The war years. Chanel closed her fashion house during World War II but continued to sell her
perfumes. For the duration of the war she lived in Paris at the Hotel Ritz with her German lover, an
officer in the German army named Hans-Gunther von Dincklage. When Paris was liberated in 1944,
Chanel fled to Switzerland and did not return to the rue Cambon for almost a decade.
Chanel started working again at the age of seventy in 1953, partly to boost her flagging perfume
sales. Her fashion philosophy remained unchanged: she extolled function and comfort in dress and
declared her aim of making women look pretty and young. On 5 February 1954 she presented her
first postwar collection, a line of understated suits and dresses.
By modernizing the formulas that had brought her so much success earlier in her career, Chanel
succeeded in reestablishing herself as a fashion designer of international stature.
In 1954 Chanel introduced a man’s fragrance, Pour Monsieur. The same year Pierre and Paul
Wertheimer, who already owned Parfums Chanel, bought her entire business, and it remained
within the Wertheimer family as of the early 2000s.
Chanel died on 10 January 1971 in the midst of preparing her spring–summer 1971 collection. Her
personal clothing and jewelry was sold at auction in London in December 1978.
Following Chanel’s death, Gaston Berthelot was appointed to design classic garments in the Chanel
tradition between 1971 and 1973. The perfume No. 19, named after Chanel’s birthday, was launched
in 1970. From 1974 Jean Cazaubon and Yvonne Dudel designed the couture line; in 1978 a ready-to-
wear range was designed by Philippe Guibourgé; and in 1980 Ramon Esparza joined the couture
team. But it was not until 1983, when Karl Lagerfeld was appointed chief designer, that the House of
Chanel once again made fashion headlines: it remains the ultimate in desirability for a clientele of all
ages in the early 2000s.

Since his appointment, Lagerfeld has continued to reference the Chanel style, sometimes offering
classic interpretations and at other times making witty and ironic statements. Ultimately, he has
developed the label to make it relevant to the contemporary market.

Dior Christian
The French couturier Christian Dior (1905–1957) was born in Granville, France. Descendant of a
manufacturing family of the Norman bourgeoisie, Dior spent his early childhood in the comfortable
surroundings of the family villa, Les Rhumbs, located on the Channel coast in Granville, which now
houses a museum dedicated to his memory. At that time the little port was celebrated as a
fashionable seaside resort, and in summertime it was transformed into “an elegant Paris
neighborhood.” The family moved to Paris in 1911, to the new bourgeois neighborhood of Passy,
near the bois de Boulogne.

Following his father’s wishes, Dior registered at the École de Sciences Politiques in Paris after passing
his baccalaureate. He eagerly followed Parisian artistic developments and met various writers,
painters, and musicians, befriending, among others, Pierre Gaxotte, Maurice Sachs, Jean Ozenne and
his cousin Christian Bérard, Max Jacob, and Henri Sauguet. In 1927, after his military service and with
his father’s support, he opened an art gallery at 34, rue de la Boétie. Because his parents refused to
have their name on a commercial sign, the establishment was given the name of his associate,
Jacques Bonjean. The gallery exhibited the works of such contemporary artists as Giorgio de Chirico,
Maurice Utrillo, Salvador Dalí, Raoul Dufy, Marie Laurencin, Fernand Léger, Jean Lurçat, Pablo
Picasso, Ossip Zadkine, Georges Braque, and Aristide Maillol.
Christian Dior’s carefree youth soon came to an end: in 1931 his brother was institutionalized, his
mother died, and his father was completely ruined financially. “In the face of this accumulation of
tragedies,” Dior reacted by a “flight to the East.” He was “naïvely impelled by a desperate search for
a new solution to problems that this crisis of capitalism had made acute,” embarking on a study trip
to the Soviet Union with a group of architects, only to find on his return that his associate was also
ruined. His impoverished family abandoned Paris, retreating first to Normandy and later taking
refuge in the village of Callian, near Cannes. Dior stayed behind in Paris, closing his first gallery and
later joining the gallery of Pierre Colle on the rue Cambacérès. He thus went from “losses to forced
sales while continuing to organize surrealist or abstract exhibitions that drove away the last art
lovers.” In 1934 he had an attack of tuberculosis, and his friends took up a collection to send him for
treatment. The following year he found himself in Paris with no income and no place to live. He
survived on the sale of one of his last canvases, Le plan de Paris of Raoul Dufy, which the designer
Paul Poiret had sold to Dior when he was in similar destitute circumstances.
Couture and Costume

Jean Ozenne, who was designing for couture houses, introduced Dior to the fashion world and to his
clientele. At the age of thirty, Dior devoted himself to studying fashion drawing, referring only to
what he knew and appreciated of Edward Molyneux, Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Jeanne
Lanvin. He managed to sell his first sketches of hats and then of dresses. His clients were fashionable
hat makers and couture houses but he “also sold ideas to foreign buyers.” Publication of his
drawings in Le figaro produced his first public recognition. In 1937 the couturier Robert Piguet
selected four of his designs and asked him to produce them for his “half-collection” (midseason
collection). Christian Dior was just thirty-two, and these were, he said, the “first dresses that I really
created.”

In June 1938 Robert Piguet offered him a position as a designer in his couture studio located at the
Rond Point of the Champs Élysées. There he designed three collections in a row. The second
contained his “first wide dresses,” inspired by dresses worn by young heroines of the French second
empire children’s literature “les petites filles modèles” (well-behaved little girls). They were
characterized by a “raised bust, round width starting from the waist, petticoat of English
embroidery.” As the creator of a successful design called “English coffee,” he was introduced to
Carmel Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar. In 1939 his last prewar collection for Piguet launched the
line of what came to be called “amphora dresses” marking the “beginning of rounded hips.” In
parallel with his work as a designer, Dior designed theater costumes for individual clients. He
dressed, for example, the actress Odette Joyeux in Captain Smith by Jean Blanchon (at the théâtre
des Mathurins, December 1939) and in The School for Scandal by Richard Sheridan (at the same
theater, February 1940).

Dior was mobilized at the outbreak of war in 1939 and then joined his family in the unoccupied zone
of France after the 1940 armistice. Piguet, still in Paris, asked him to resume his prewar position, but
Dior was late in replying and found the position already taken by Antonio del Castillo in the fall of
1941. Dior then went to work for Lucien Lelong, together with another young designer, Pierre
Balmain. The two shared design responsibilities throughout the war: “Balmain and I never forgot
that Lelong taught us our profession in the midst of the worst restrictions,” said Dior. The personality
of Lucien Lelong, the clever president of the Chambre syndicate de la couture parisienne (association
of haute couture) throughout the German occupation of France, deeply influenced the future
couturier. After his study trip to the United States in 1935 and the launch of his Edition line, Dior had
developed an interest in foreign markets and high-end ready-to-wear. In contrast, he saw fashion
under the German occupation as “appalling” and exclaimed: “With what vengeful joy did I do the
opposite later.”

It was nonetheless a productive period for him: films (Le Lit à colonne by Roland Tual [1942], Lettre
d’amour [1942] and Sylvie et le fantôme [1945] by Claude Autant-Lara, Échec au roi by Jean-Paul
Paulin [1943], and Paméla; ou, L’énigme du temple by Pierre de Hérain [1945]) and Marcel
L’Herbier’s play Au petit bonheur (at the théâtre Gramont, December 1944) gave him the
opportunity to escape from the textile rationing that governed ordinary clothing and to conceive,
often for Odette Joyeux, historically inspired costumes full of long dresses and extravagant designs.

After the Liberation, Dior’s colleague Pierre Balmain opened his own couture house in 1945 on rue
François Ier and encouraged Dior to do the same. Marcel Boussac, a major French textile
manufacturer and president of the cotton-marketing syndicate, offered Dior the artistic direction of
the Gaston firm (formerly called Philippe et Gaston) on rue Saint-Florentin. Considering the business
outmoded, Dior suggested instead that he start a couture house “where everything would be new,
from the state of mind and the personnel to the furnishings and the premises,” in view of the fact
“that foreign markets, after the long stagnation of fashion due to the war, were bound to demand
really new fashions.” Marcel Boussac invested sixty million francs in the project.
The House of Dior

In 1946 Dior chose a private mansion located at 30, avenue Montaigne as the site of his own firm,
which was established on 8 October 1946. The enterprise had four models and eighty-five
employees, sixty of whom were seamstresses. The management team, in addition to the head
couturier, included a financial director (Jacques Rouet), a studio head (Raymonde Zehnacker, who
came from Lelong), a head of workshops (Marguerite Carré, who came from Patou), and an artistic
adviser and head of high-fashion design (Mitzah Bricard, a designer from Molyneux). The couture
house itself included two workshops for dresses and one for suits (whose head was Pierre Cardin,
then twenty years old). From the outset, it also had, on the ground floor, a shop selling articles and
accessories not requiring fitting. Salons and shops were decorated by Victor Grampierre in tones of
white and pearl gray and furnished in neo–Louis XVI style.

The opening was widely publicized: “When the summer 1946 collections came out, everyone was
talking about Christian Dior, because an extraordinary rumor was spreading that the financial
assistance of Marcel Boussac, the French king of cotton & would enable him to create his own
house.” Even before it was seen, Dior’s first collection thus made news, and he won the support of
the editors of Vogue, Le figaro, and Elle. The newcomer among couture houses, Christian Dior finally
unveiled, at the conclusion of the winter shows, his first collection for spring 1947. Considered the
opening shot for the New Look, it immediately gained notoriety for the couturier at the age of forty-
two. “The first season was brilliant, even beyond my hopes,” he said. The second, in which the
couturier carried “the famous New Look line to its extreme,” achieved “breathtaking” success and
was accompanied by the launch of his first perfume, Miss Dior.
With this impetus, Dior spent the last ten years of his life developing his couture house and
extending his influence on world fashion. (In 1955 the Dior firm had one thousand employees in
twenty-eight workshops and accounted for half the exports of the French couture industry.) For his
first collection, Dior received the Neiman Marcus Award in 1947. From his trip to the United States,
he learned, as he put it, that “if I wanted to reach the large number of elegant American women & I
had to open a luxury ready-to-wear shop in New York.” The following year, he set up the subsidiary
Christian Dior New York, Inc., at 745 Fifth Avenue. He repeated the process in Caracas in 1953
(Christian Dior Venezuela), in London in 1954 (Christian Dior, Ltd.), and later in Australia, Chile,
Mexico, and Cuba. These companies custom-made styles from Paris and sold accessories. But it was
not until 1967 that a real line of ready-to-wear was distributed, under the label Miss Dior.

In 1948 the Christian Dior perfume company was set up, and it launched the second fragrance,
Diorama, in 1949, followed by Eau Fraîche (1953) and Diorissimo (1956); the first lipsticks came out
in 1955. Dior opened a stocking and glove division in 1951 and established the Christian Dior Delman
company, which made shoes designed by Roger Vivier; finally, the Paris shop added a gifts and
tableware department in 1954. The range of products with the Dior label was enlarged thanks to a
very innovative policy for licenses, the first of which was granted in 1949. By this means, the label
was attached to all the accessories of female dress, from girdle to jewelry, but also, and very early
on, to totally distinct articles, such as Christian Dior Ties (1950).

The growth of the house was fostered by a simple and effective public relations policy: little direct
advertising but excellent relations with the press, which guaranteed great visibility for the fashions
as well as for their creator (who was featured on the cover of Time on 4 March 1957). The couturier
gave many interviews, designed disguises for memorable parties (among them, the Venetian ball of
Carlos de Beistegui given at the Palazzo Labia on 3 September 1951), and continued to dress stars,
such as Marlene Dietrich in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright in 1950 and Henry Koster’s No Highway in
the Sky in 1951 and Ava Gardner in Mark Robson’s The Little Hut in 1956. In Christian Dior et moi
(1956), Dior described his career, strewn with Parisian celebrities, pitfalls, coups de théâtre, and
palm readers’ predictions. In passing, he reassured the reader about the motives for his long-ago trip
to the Soviet Union and emphasized his admiration for the entrepreneurial spirit, thus helping to
forge the paradoxical myth of the creator of scandals with a reassuring face.

The attention given to the collections was intensified each year by the expectation—followed by the
announcement—of a new major change (affecting, notably, the length of skirts). The couturier
himself issued descriptive communiqués adopted by the press that frequently took a peremptory
tone, such as “No yellow" or “No hats with clean and tailored style,” giving force to the new fashion
tendency. The collections, each containing approximately two hundred items, unveiled in succession
contradictory lines that imposed on fashion a rate of change never seen before: Corolle and 8
(1947), also known as the “New Look collection"; Zig-Zag and Envol, followed by Ailée (1948);
Trompe-l’œil and Milieu de Siècle (1949); Verticale and Oblique (1951); Ovale ou Naturelle and
Longue (1951); Sinueuse and Profilée (1952); Tulipe and Vivante (1953); Muguet and H (1954), A and
Y (1955); Flèche and Aimant (1956); and Libre and Fuseau (1957).
La Belle Epoque Influences on the New Look
Differing in their lines, his creations were always related to one another through the constancy of
certain characteristics. Structurally, the dresses came out of the intention to sculpt the silhouette
along predefined lines. Whether it was the New Look, the Shock Look (the English name for the
Vivante line), or the Flat Look (the H line), the body was always strongly stylized. The waist was
displaced, cinched, or unbelted. The hips swelled or shrank thanks to the choice of materials able to
express in shapes the energetic and tense designs of the couturier: shantung, ottoman silk, thick
taffetas and satins, velvet, organza, woolen cloth, and cotton piqué generally replaced the customary
use of fluid woolen and silk crepes. Originator of a style that used a large quantity of material,
artifices, and ornaments, Christian Dior stimulated the growth of a number of parallel industries:
corset makers, feather makers, embroiderers, makers of costume jewelry, flower designers, and also
illustrators. Thus, the image of the creations of Christian Dior includes the shoes of Roger Vivier, the
prints of Brossin de Méré, the tulles of Brivet, the fabrics of Rébé (René Bégué) and Georges Barbier,
the jewels of Francis Winter, and the drawings of René Gruau. As for furs and hats, they were
manufactured in specialized workshops of the couture house.

Stylistically, Dior’s creations were frequently distinguished by ornaments that came directly from
pre-1914 fashion. Simulated knots; false pockets; decorative buttons; play with cuffs, collars,
basques, and tails; false belts; and bias cuts punctuated his collections with their trompe-l’oeil
effects and, from the outset, erased any modernist intentions.

Dior did not specify the origin of his stylistic borrowings. In particular, he expressed only elliptical
intentions to justify the inspiration for his New Look: “I have a reactionary temperament, a
characteristic that is too often confused with the retrograde; we had barely come out of a deprived,
parsimonious era, obsessed with tickets and textile rationing. My dream therefore naturally took on
the form of a reaction against poverty.” Hence, it is in the context of the presentation of his shows
that we should look for an explicit expression of his historical inspiration. Speaking of the renovation
of the mansion on the avenue Montaigne, the couturier asserted that he was striving “to prepare a
cradle in the style and the colors of the years of [his] Paris childhood” and described “this neo-Louis
XVI, white paneling, lacquered white furniture, gray hangings, glass doors with small beveled panes,
bronze wall lamps, and small lamp shades that ruled from 1900 to 1914 in the ’new’ houses of
Passy.” He displayed a “crystal chandelier and a proliferation of palms,” while the shop, on the
advice of Christian Bérard, was given a hanging of cloth of Jouy “in the tradition of notion shops of
the eighteenth century.”

In parallel with this nostalgic neo-neo-Louis XVI style, a veritable mirroring of pastiche, Christian Dior
seemed throughout his career to draw the material artifice of his pleated, draped, corseted, and
decorated effects from the clothing vocabulary of the Belle Époque. “I thank heaven that I lived in
Paris during the last years of the belle époque + whatever life has granted me since then, nothing
will ever be able to equal the sweet memory of those days,” he wrote. But by choosing as his
favorite period one in which taste was eclectic, the designer avoided the domination of a single style
in order to free himself to adopt all possible reinterpretations of the past.

Neither the structural artifices nor the proliferation of appliquéd ornaments interfered with the
readability of the line. Paradoxically, Dior’s creations attracted primarily through their sobriety. As
evidence of an eclectic sensibility, the ornamental resources derived from turn-of-the-century
fashion were effectively deployed with a concern for modernity hostile to the composite. The
conception of each model seemed to be guided only by emphasis on a single effect at a time. From
one model to the next, one’s attention was shifted, for example, from the emphasis of a cut to the
shimmering of a pattern or to the luxuriance of the embroidery. The directed gaze, channeled by the
erasure of the superfluous—by the notorious choice of uniform and subdued colors when the cut
was to be emphasized or, on the contrary, the choice of a simple cut to emphasize the fabric—
guaranteed the visual impact of each model and pointed up its strong identity. It thus was beyond
the individual model and only in the course of the show that the succession of appearances enabled
the presentation of an aesthetic of the whole, both composite and romantic.

The constancy of stylistic borrowings from the past revealed a veritable postmodernist stance on the
part of this man who was so admirably ensconced in his century. As Dior himself said:

It is strange that in 1956 people applied the names avant-garde and aesthetic of the future to the
works and the masters that we had admired between the ages of fifteen and twenty and who had
already been famous for ten years among the most aware of our elders, guided by Guillaume
Apollinaire.

But for Dior, “the new at all costs, even to create the absurd, is no longer the essential area of
exploration.” Far from the aspirations of prewar surrealism, he confided the origin of his first
collections: “After so many years of wandering, weary with consorting with only painters and poets,
couture wished to return to the fold and rediscover its original function which is to adorn women
and to beautify them.” As a result, his haute couture, while remaining a privilege of the wealthy,
appeared comprehensible to everyone. Christian Dior thereby gave his signature to the first
democratization of taste, if not of fashion.

By conforming the feminine silhouette to design, by dictating the choice of accessories and the
circumstances appropriate for every outfit, the couturier left little room for personal expression, risk,
and feminine fantasy. On the other hand, the steadiness of his “total look” guaranteed his
popularity. It enabled him to satisfy an enormous public, who saw in Christian Dior, whatever their
national or individual clothing cultures, the label of a guaranteed elegance. In the end, Dior’s
conception of a wearable fashion was also that of an exportable fashion.

Christian Dior was, in succession, an avant-garde amateur, an artisan of a kind of return to order,
and, finally, a manufacturer of elegance. The first superstar couturier, he died of a heart attack at the
age of fifty-two in Bagni di Montecatini, Italy. The financier Marcel Boussac thought at the time of
closing the house, but in the face of pressure from license holders, he appointed the young assistant
Yves Saint Laurent as artistic director, and in this way the label survived its founder. When Yves Saint
Laurent left in 1960, Marc Bohan took his place and held it until Gianfranco Ferré took over in 1989.
Their designs upheld the image of a couture distanced from the multiple challenges and manifestos
of contemporary fashion. The classicism of Christian Dior was not shaken until the arrival in 1997 of
John Galliano, who revived the active media exposure established by Dior himself.

Galliano john==
John Galliano (1960–) is widely considered one of the most innovative and influential fashion
designers of the early twenty-first century. Known for a relentless stream of historical and ethnic
appropriations, he mingled his references in often surprising juxtapositions to create extravagant yet
intricately engineered and meticulously tailored clothes. His continual interest in presenting fashion
shows as highly theatricalized spectacles, with models as characters in a drama and clothes at times
verging on costumes, won him applause as well as criticism. With his respective appointments at
Givenchy and Christian Dior, Galliano rose to international celebrity status as the first British
designer since Charles Frederick Worth to front a French couture house. He has been a member of
France’s Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture since 1993 and is the winner of many prestigious
awards, most notably British Designer of the Year in 1987, 1994, 1995, and 1997, and International
Designer of the Year in 1997.
Education and Early Career

Galliano, christened Juan Carlos Antonio, was born in Gibraltar in 1960. He moved to Streatham,
South London, with his Gibraltan father and Spanish mother at the age of six. Galliano had a brief
period of work experience with Tommy Nutter, the Savile Row tailor, during his studies at St. Martins
School of Art in London (since renamed Central St. Martin’s), as well as a part-time position as a
dresser at the National Theatre. He graduated from St. Martins with first class honors in fashion
design in 1984. His hugely successful final collection, Les Incroyables, was based on fashion motifs of
the French Revolution and was immediately bought by the London boutique Browns, where it was
featured in the entire window display. Galliano launched his label in the same year and has designed
in his own name ever since.

Despite Galliano’s rapid securing of a cult following and critical acclaim with such collections as
Afghanistan Repudiates Western Ideals, The Ludic Game, Fallen Angels, or Forgotten Innocents, the
business part of his early design career was most challenging. With inadequate and unstable
financial backing—the Danish businessmen Johan Brun and Peder Bertelsen were among his first
backers—Galliano had to produce several collections on a limited budget; some seasons he was not
able to show at all. Galliano’s shows of this period sometimes relied on last-minute improvisations
for the final effect—as in his Fallen Angels show when he splashed buckets of cold water over the
models just before the finale. Galliano began to work with the stylist Amanda Harlech, who worked
closely with him until 1997. Other long-term associates include the DJ Jeremy Healy, the milliner
Stephen Jones, and the shoemaker Manolo Blahnik.

In 1990 Galliano designed the costumes for Ashley Page’s ballet Currulao, performed by the Rambert
Dance Company. In 1991 he launched two less expensive, youth-oriented diffusion lines, Galliano’s
Girl and Galliano Genes. By the early 1990s, Galliano had become firmly rooted in London’s club
scene. This, combined with his first-hand knowledge of the theater, channeled his interests toward
experimentation and rarefied eccentricity, while it also fed the self-styled reinventions of his
personal image. Both remain Galliano trademarks.
From London to Paris

Galliano moved to Paris in 1990, hoping for better work prospects. His acclaimed 1994 spring–
summer collection, inspired by his personalized fairy-tale version of Princess Lucretia’s escape from
Russia, opened with models rushing down the catwalk, tripping over their giant crinolines supported
by collapsible telephone cables. Thanks to the support of (U.S.) Vogue’s creative director Anna
Wintour and the fashion editor Andre Leon Talley, Galliano’s breakthrough 1994–1995 autumn–
winter collection was staged in an hôtel particulier, the eighteenth-century mansion of the
Portuguese socialite São Schlumberger. The show recreated the intimate mood of a couture salon,
with models walking through different rooms in the house that held small groups of guests. The
interior of the house was transformed into a film set, evoking an aura of romantic decadence, with
unmade beds and rose petals scattered about. Despite being composed of a mere seventeen outfits,
the show used choreography and its exotic location to mark a momentous mid-1990s shift toward
fashion shows as spectacles. A comparable mode of presentation was developed by Martin Margiela
and Alexander McQueen around the same time.

In 1995 the president of the French luxury conglomerate LVMH, Bernard Arnault, appointed Galliano
as Hubert de Givenchy’s replacement as principal designer at Givenchy. Here Galliano had an
excellent opportunity to study the archives of a major Parisian couture house. He developed his skill
for merging—within one collection or a single outfit—traditional feminine glamour with a distinctly
contemporary element of playfulness. He was also able to do justice to the breadth of his vision as
one of fashion’s most spectacular showmen. During and after Galliano’s brief tenure at Givenchy,
the house acquired an air of “Cool Britannia,” and received unparalleled publicity. Alexander
McQueen took over at Givenchy in 1996, while Galliano was installed as chief designer at another
LVMH label, Christian Dior, as Gianfranco Ferré’s successor. Four years later, Galliano’s creative
control over Dior’s clothes was extended to the house’s accessories, shop design, and advertising.
Meanwhile, Galliano has continued to design under his own label. In 2003 he opened his first
flagship store on the corner of the rue Duphot and the rue du Faubourg-Saint Honoré in Paris. The
building’s interior was designed by the architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte. Galliano launched his first
signature men’s wear collection since 1986 for autumn–winter 2004.

Galliano creates eclectic clothes, which are based on sources from fashion, film, art, and popular
culture, and modernizes his borrowings to varying degrees. Inspired by extensive travel experiences
as well as thorough research in libraries, museum exhibitions, and archives, Galliano interprets not
only exotic and historical looks but also construction techniques—most significantly the body-
flattering elastic bias cut popularized by Madeleine Vionnet in the 1920s. His approach has been
described variously as magpie-like, history-book-plundering, romantic escapism, and postmodern
pastiche. Galliano’s first haute couture Dior collection for spring–summer 1997, which coincided
with Dior’s fiftieth anniversary, juxtaposed quasi-Masai jewelery and quasi-Dinka beaded corsets
with hourglass silhouettes reminiscent of the Edwardian era and Dior’s own New Look. In the same
collection, innocent white leather doily-like dresses and hats were shown alongside 1920s Chinese-
inspired dresses styled with a menacing edge.

Unlike the androgynous creatures who paraded avant-garde shapes in Galliano’s London shows of
the 1980s, the heroines of his 1990s Paris period were luxurious icy divas by day and exotic opium-
fueled seductresses by night—as represented in his Haute Bohemia collection for spring–summer
1998. For most of the decade he found inspiration in mysterious and sexually ambiguous women,
ranging from real historical aristocrats, showgirls, and actresses to imagined characters and female
stereotypes: Indian princess Pocahontas, Lolita (stemming from Vladimir Nabokov’s fictional
character), Edwardian demimondaines, the actress Theda Bara as Cleopatra, the artist and model
Kiki de Montparnasse, the Russian princess Anastasia Nicholaevna, the Duchess of Windsor, the film
character Suzie Wong, other prostitutes, and trapeze artists. Galliano’s real clients in this period
included Béatrice de Rothschild, Madonna, Nicole Kidman, and Cate Blanchett.

Since around 2000, in addition to Galliano’s multicultural cross-referencing, he has placed new
emphasis on shaking up the high and low of fashion. He has returned to the excesses of his earlier
work and “dirtied” traditional elegance with over-the-top chaotic mixes of street culture and spoofs
of “rock n’ roll chic.” While the designer maximized the concepts of couture and ready-to-wear alike
as a masquerade and “laboratory of ideas,” with clothes as “showpieces,” he has reinforced the
identity of the House of Dior as a leading luxury brand with a tongue-in-cheek twist. The creative
identity of his own label, which makes up for two of the six collections he produces yearly, has been
closely linked to that of Dior.
Givenchy Hubert*

Hilfiger Tommy--
Born in 1951, a young Tommy Hilfiger first explored his entrepreneurial potential and interest in
fashion in his hometown of Elmira, New York. Before graduating from high school, he opened a
hippie boutique called the People’s Place in 1969. The store saw rapid success before experiencing a
sharp decline. Hilfiger filed for bankruptcy in 1977 and moved to New York City shortly thereafter.
He served a brief stint designing jeans at Jordache and was offered a position at Calvin Klein in the
early 1980s, but was soon approached by investor and entrepreneur Mohan Murjani to design a
menswear line under his own name.

In 1985, the Tommy Hilfiger brand was founded with backing from the Murjani Group. Hilfiger’s first
menswear collection made its way into the spotlight with an audacious marketing campaign
designed by George Lois. Under the headline “The 4 Great American Designers for Men,” a billboard
listed Tommy Hilfiger’s initials and graphic red, white, and blue logo alongside the initials of the
established names Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis, and Calvin Klein.

Equal parts preppy, sporty, and suffused with Americana, Tommy Hilfiger’s accessible sportswear
and denim attracted a collegiate crowd as well as the hip-hop community. In the 1990s, Snoop Dogg,
Grand Puma, and other artists sported baggy jeans and oversized T-shirts emblazoned with the
Hilfiger logo. Unlike other preppy American clothiers, Tommy Hilfiger responded by courting his
newfound market, featuring hip-hop celebrities in his advertising campaigns and infusing his designs
with streetwear influences.

After this phase came to a close and the brand’s popularity waned in the 2000s, the founder and
principal designer strategically steered his company back into profitability and market relevance. The
company had gone public in 1992 but was sold to Apax Partners and privatized in 2006 and reached
an exclusive agreement with Macy’s. Tommy Hilfiger was acquired by Phillips-Van Heusen in 2010
for $3 billion and in 2016, the company reported global retail sales of $6.6 billion. Hilfiger himself
was named the 1995 Menswear Designer of the Year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America
and earned the CFDA’s Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.
Hilfiger’s lifestyle brand includes several collections for men, women, and children such as Tommy
Hilfiger Tailored, Hilfiger Collection, and Hilfiger Denim. The label retains a quintessentially American
style and a global reach, operating over 1,800 retail stores worldwide with licensing agreements for
fragrances, footwear, eyewear, accessories, watches, undergarments, and bedding. Hilfiger created
an adaptive clothing line for children with disabilities in 2016, which was received favorably and
followed by a line for adults in 2017. The brand’s extensive philanthropic activities were
consolidated under the name TommyCares in 2012, and the designer’s memoir, American Dreamer,
was published in 2016
Hip-hop is both the voice of alienated, frustrated youth and a multibillion-dollar cultural industry
packaged and marketed on a global scale. Hip-hop is also a multifaceted subculture that transcends
many of the popular characterizations used to describe other music-led youth cultures.
A characteristic of hip-hop fashion is the multiple themes that are filtered through the aspirations of
wearers and designers alike. The American mainstream designer Tommy Hilfiger has successfully
captured an understanding of hip-hop culture and has produced very specific fashion items, which fit
the market place without being apologetic.

During the mid-1990s, new cuts of Hilfiger’s jeans were given titles such as “Uptown,” which refer to
the geographical placements of Harlem and the Bronx, two New York districts with large African
American populations. The Uptown cut of the jeans are ostensibly the same as extra-baggy, low-
slung jeans manufactured by any other hip-hop designer or popular mainstream manufacturer
addressing the hip-hop marketplace; however, the degree of hip-hop enthusiasm for Hilfiger made
the brand very popular.

Jacobs Marc
Marc Jacobs, an influential American designer, was born to affluent parents in New York City in April
1963. As a teenager he lived with his fashion-conscious grandmother and attended the High School
of Art and Design. In 1984 he graduated from the Parsons School of Design with several awards,
including Design Student of the Year. Jacobs met Robert Duffy, his long-term business partner, at the
graduation supper and in 1986 the duo launched the Marc Jacobs brand. In 1989 Jacobs was named
the head of Perry Ellis, where he created his infamous grunge collection for spring 1993. Fashion
insiders loved his take on the slacker garage-band look, but his employer did not. He was fired
immediately.

In his own words, Jacobs’s designs are “a little preppy, a little grungy, a little couture.” He is
consistently inspired by the “cool girl”—whether she is a club kid or a famous ingénue like Sophia
Coppola. His designs are subtle, witty, and celebratory, underpinned with elegance, and are
wearable across lifestyles.

Jacobs signed with LVMH in 1997 to become the artistic director for Louis Vuitton. In 2001 he
launched a diffusion line called Marc by Marc Jacobs. In 2013 Jacobs left Louis Vuitton to focus on his
own brand.
After the death of American designer Perry Ellis, his eponymous line of polished sportswear had
coasted on its reputation for stylish wearability. Then, its spring/summer 1993 show, designed by
Marc Jacobs, shook up the entire Seventh Avenue fashion establishment with its ode to the “grunge”
look of the American Pacific Northwest.

In 1992, Marc Jacobs was a young designer with a modest profile at the American sportswear
company Perry Ellis, whose namesake founder had died in 1986. The line was known for easy,
pragmatic, and insouciant style for men and women. Jacobs had been there since 1988, but had only
recently been gaining creative and critical momentum. That November, in the Perry Ellis showroom
on Seventh Avenue, he took a sharp turn toward youthful relevance and away from established
ideas of good taste and proper design, and showed his collection for spring/summer 1993, which
was inspired by the movement that had come to be called “grunge.”

At that time, the most visible designers in New York were still producing sleek sportswear in the
mold of Ellis and his contemporaries, or uptown looks for the ladies-who-lunch set, while Europe
was still seen to be in the throes of 1980s-style excess à la Gianni Versace and Christian Lacroix.
Jacobs’s “grunge” collection rejected both in favor of mixed-up, ironic, and anti-glamorous clothes
that appeared more like thrift store finds than designer goods. There were plaid flannel shirts, sheer
floral slips, and mismatched prints, accessorized with chokers, combat boots, and slouchy knit
beanies. Though many of the era’s famous supermodels walked the show, their glamour was
somewhat toned down by minimal makeup and hairstyling. The look is well described by fashion
journalist Sarah Mower of Vogue as “an amalgamation of Seattle’s music culture, the rise of ‘waif’
models, and young British realist photography.”

As the quote above makes clear but many seem to forget, Marc Jacobs did not invent grunge. The
style had been percolating in the Pacific Northwest of the United States since the late 1980s,
developing alongside the musical genre of the same name, and by 1992 it had also spread to
disaffected young people around the country who, in response to economic recession and an
uncertain future, rejected the excesses of high fashion. That Marc Jacobs was aware of the scruffy,
thrown together, grandma’s attic style is not surprising, as he was a young downtown New Yorker.
What shocked the fashion establishment was to see these decidedly anti-consumerist clothes on the
runway of New York Fashion Week, an environment traditionally more friendly to corporate
dependability and the obviously sellable. This collection, with its mix of discarded old styles, had no
clear commercial viability.
Impact on Fashion

Reviews were immediately mixed, with a small chorus of supporters who could see a directional
purpose and the value in bringing this subcultural style into the profit-generating sphere. Indeed,
American Vogue canonized the moment with a December 1992 editorial that has been reproduced
countless times since, titled “Grunge & Glory,” featuring slip dresses and heavy sweaters designed
by Jacobs as well as a few peers, but styled explicitly in the manner of his show. Still, most reviewers
expressed horror and scorn. “The slaves to fashion who are sucker enough to fall for this grunge
garbage deserve the slobby sartorial look they pay for,” wrote one. “Rarely has slovenliness looked
so self-conscious, or commanded so high a price,” wrote another. Meanwhile, the authenticity of the
look was critiqued by those for whom the grunge lifestyle was a reality, often an economically
necessitated one. The split reaction to the controversial show is best summed up by Jacobs’s receipt
of the 1992 Women’s Wear Designer of the Year award from the Council of Fashion Designers of
America, and the fact that he was promptly fired by Perry Ellis.

The uproar caused by the collection only served to enhance and cement its legend. For those
previously unfamiliar with the grunge subculture, Jacobs was believed to have “created” the grunge
look (as reported in Forbes magazine), a misunderstanding reinforced by the flattening of media
narratives over time. Instead, he “held up a mirror to the way young women like [Sofia] Coppola,
Kate Moss, Helena Christensen, and Courtney Love were already dressing, and bounced the
reflection back into the wider world,” as Mower explained in 2005.

Grunge so shocked the fashion establishment that it couldn’t help but fixate upon it: three years
later, in 1995, Anna Wintour’s editor’s letter in Vogue derided the style as passé, assuring readers
that the “grunge moment” was “long gone” and that it was once again “OK to look rich.” Yet, the
magazine reprinted images from the “Grunge & Glory” editorial at least a dozen times in the
subsequent decade, assuring its place as a 1990s touchstone. As Mower writes, “What else does
anyone remember about fashion in 1992?”

Marc Jacobs went on to open his own namesake line in 1994 and to design for French luxury house
Louis Vuitton from 1997–2014. He now stands in the upper echelon of global fashion designers, yet
as critic Cathy Horyn says, he “will always be remembered for one moment: the night he did
grunge.” Perhaps this is why, in spite of more than two decades of success since then, in 2018 he
rereleased twenty-three looks from the grunge collection in a capsule collection that he called
“Redux Grunge.” The redux comprises head-to-toe reproductions of the original collection, proving
that his original combination of reverent co-optation, canny timing, and unwillingness to
compromise for commerciality created a new model for bottom-up incorporation of subcultural style
into high-fashion visibility.

Karen Donna--
Donna Karan was born Donna Ivy Faske in 1948 in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, New
York. Her parents worked in the apparel industry and encouraged her dreams of becoming a
designer. In 1966, she entered the Parsons School of Design. A year later, her talent won her an
internship at Anne Klein, a major women’s sportswear designer. A job offer as Anne Klein’s assistant
quickly followed and Karan left school.

At only nineteen years of age, Karan was not prepared for the pressures of full-time employment.
Within nine months, she was fired. She bounced back with a position at another sportswear firm
where she honed her skills as a professional, then returned to Anne Klein in 1968—experienced,
wiser, and more determined. In 1971, she became associate designer. When Klein unexpectedly
passed away in 1974, she was appointed head designer. Though devastated by the loss of her
mentor, she accepted the position and hired her Parsons classmate, Louis Dell’Olio, as assistant
designer.
Her first presentation of urban-chic career separates received a standing ovation. The growing
population of working women inspired Karan to create Anne Klein II, a highly successful diffusion
line. Under Karan’s decade-long leadership, Anne Klein became the leading sportswear brand in the
United States.

Within ten years, Karan desired a new challenge: She wanted to design modern clothes for modern
people. With the backing of the firm that owned Anne Klein, and in partnership with her second
husband Stephen Weiss, she launched Donna Karan New York. Her label’s name paid homage to her
muse as well as her collection’s attitude—urban, energetic, edgy, vibrant, and sophisticated. In the
fall of 1985, she presented her first (now-famous) collection, “Seven Easy Pieces.” It was a system of
interchangeable separates for career women with busy lives. Emphasizing black and based on a
bodysuit with poppers at the crotch, each piece could be mixed with a selection of skirts, pants,
unstructured blazers, and blouses to create an effortless, chic, comfortable, professional, and subtly
sensual wardrobe. It offered working women an alternative to the period’s boxy suits and floppy
ties. The collection achieved critical acclaim and retail success. The components, remixed and re-
accessorized, shifted easily from day, to evening, to weekend. A highly profitable diffusion line,
DKNY, soon followed. Karan balanced career, family, and education when she returned to Parsons to
study for a degree in 1987.

Over the next twenty years, Karan’s business skyrocketed. In 1996, her company became one of the
first firms on the New York Stock Exchange to be headed by a woman. She expanded into
accessories, timepieces, swimwear, denim, lingerie, hosiery, eyewear, active wear, shoes,
menswear, children’s wear, home accessories, skincare, and fragrances—a complete lifestyle
system. Her corporate mission reflects her design aesthetic: “Luxury, sensuality, comfort and
creative expression, always utilizing the finest-quality fabrics, workmanship, and technological
innovation.” By 2004, Donna Karan International had over one hundred stores worldwide.

Donna Karan’s career is studded with numerous prestigious design awards. Known for her warmth
and spirituality, Karan has also been recognized numerous times for her charitable and humanitarian
work.

Kawabuko Rei
Rei Kawakubo[1] has become one of the most influential designers of the past three decades, with
almost every major fashion designer citing her as an inspiration (Figure 3.1). According to fashion
journalist Claudia Croft (2008: n. pag.), Marc Jacobs of Louis Vuitton argues that ‘everyone is
influenced by Comme des Garçons’. Croft asserts that Kawakubo ‘stands very much apart. She is
truly a designer’s designer’, and cites a comment by Cathy Horyn of The New York Times that she
‘works more in the spirit of an artist than any other designer working today’ (ibid.). Designers
including Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Helmut Lang, Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester,
Jil Sander, Miucca Prada and Donna Karan have all acknowledged her influence.

Rei Kawakubo established her label in 1969 and formally established her Comme des Garçons
company in Minami-Aoyama, Tokyo in 1973. She entered the world of international Parisian fashion
in 1980 when she opened her boutique in Paris and showed her first collection, alongside Yohji
Yamamoto, in 1981. Both designers were products of post-war Japan and grew up in a country that
was responding to the economic woes of the 1930s and 40s, a time when Japan suffered the effects
of economic depression. During their early childhood, Japan was one of the poorest countries in Asia
and these decades were commonly referred to as kuraitani— the Valley of Darkness. The Japanese
were tenuously picking up their social and cultural pieces, as well as attempting to reconstruct their
homes and cities after the catastrophes of war.
Kawakubo, the daughter of a professor, studied literature and philosophy at Keio University, Tokyo,
in the 1960s and would have been familiar with intellectual debates relating to women’s status and
positioning within society. It could be argued that this is a factor that has been instrumental in her
mission to question stereotypical images and perceptions of women through fashion. The meaning
communicated through Kawakubo’s work has often reflected an underlying feminist ideology. In an
attempt to break away from social constraints and conventions, her clothing comments on the
stereotypical Western image of the body, and the idealistic concept of sartorial beauty and glamour,
versus the way that female role-playing can instead embrace the notion of dignity and perseverance
through dress. Both Kawakubo and Yamamoto reacted against the unashamed American popular
culture that was culturally endemic to the younger Japanese generation in the post-1945 era and,
through their work, tried to re-instil a respect for traditional cultural traits.

Kawakubo and Yamamoto’s first joint Paris collection, in 1981, startled the fashion world with its
blatant disregard of accepted Western practices based on sexual difference, sexual commodification
and sexual exploitation.[2] While there are distinct similarities in their work, especially in the early
years, with time critics began to appreciate that the work is mutually discrete. As a Japanese woman
who was not following the accepted family role, Kawakubo’s own career choice would have been
viewed with suspicion. According to Nanako Kurihara in the 1993 documentary Ripples of Change,
Japanese women who choose a career are considered to be selfish and shirking their matriarchal
role within the family unit.
Kawakubo showed trousers with sweater cuffs around the ankles, tunics that transformed into
shawls, oversized overcoats and shapeless boiled knitwear constructed with holes’ (Quinn 2002:
145). The Japanese ‘black’ fashions were characterized by torn, ripped and ragged fabric and uneven
and unstitched hemlines—but this sense of random disorder was very carefully calculated to give
the impression of spontaneity. Large, loose-fitting garments such as jackets or coats of oversized
proportions were constructed in an atypical manner with a minimum of buttons or details. Street
dresses had long sleeves and straight, simple lines and sometimes were tied together with knots of
fabric. Significantly, due to their unprecedented influence, a new form of anti-fashion emerged as
the dominant aesthetic in the early 1980s:

In March 1983, Kawakubo presents a collection which included coat dresses, cut big and square with
no recognizable line, form or silhouette. Many had misplaced lapels, buttons and sleeves, and
mismatched fabrics. More calculated disarray was created by knotting, tearing and slashing fabrics,
which were crinkled, creased and woven in unusual textures. Footwear consisted of paddy slippers
or square-toed rubber shoes.
Derridean deconstruction had become a highly circulated, debated and politicized branch of
philosophy that had seeped deep into areas such as feminism and postcolonial studies.
Kawakubo presented her “Wrapped” collection in 1983: These were garments that, as the name
suggests, were infinitely variable, and therefore not defined to a predetermined template or
schema. Instead of echoing the contours of the body, Kawakubo used swathes of fabric to enclose
and alter the body’s shape, producing layered and asymmetrical forms. They centralized the very act
of wearing in an almost performative way. Wrapping was dictated by gesture and the body itself.
Other collections such as Kawakubo’s Autumn/Winter 1983 featured distressed wool knits with large
holes to invoke the composition of lace. The “lace sweaters” are an agglomeration of masses, sitting
asymmetrically so that they resemble neither an animal carapace nor armor, but more an
amorphous blob, elemental or biological—much as an abscess or tumor can be seen to be beautiful
once shorn of associations of pain, fear or disfigurement. In this regard, Kawakubo’s understanding
of the body is Spinozist, for Spinoza explained that vermin or diseases are not essentially ugly or evil,
rather they are substances with retroactive effects on our own proper substance. That they cause us
ill does not make them evil. Similarly, there are forms of beauty that are allowed to come to light
freed of negative connotations.[9]
Just as she affords a new angle on what can be considered beautiful, Kawakubo and her
contemporaries conceived of fashion according to a different sense of space from that of Western
designers, their work far more architectonic and structural. Overall they considered clothing more as
a whole, working down to the parts (the limbs, the head) as opposed to the manner in which
Western designers would aggregate the parts to lead to the whole. Movement and the body were
not contingent but central concerns. Paradoxically, although the work of Japanese designers had a
sculptural quality—many of them could stand on their own as independent aesthetic objects—they
were largely designed with the living, acting body in mind, much in the way that architecture must
account for function, that is, the bodes that inhabit it. Kawakubo’s Spring/Summer 1997 collection
“Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body,” referred to as “Lumps and Bumps” because of her use of
padding to alter the shape of the body, consisted of tight tops and skirts in stretch gingham that
exaggerated the buttocks, torso and shoulders, and made the body appear “distended, extended
and relocated” (Plate 4).[10] Much like an architect designing a building with its multiple spaces,
Kawakubo’s collection was concerned with designing the body rather than the garment. “I wanted to
design the body itself, and I wanted to use stretch fabrics,” said Kawakubo, “I was keenly aware of
the difficulty of expressing something using garments alone. And that is how I arrived at the concept
of designing the body.”[11] Seventeen years later Kawakubo was still using the concept of “lumps
and bumps” to explore bodily limits. In her Autumn/Fall 2010 “Inside Decoration” collection, large
pillow-like shapes were affixed to the shoulders, torso, hips and backs, adding bulk and heft to parts
of the body that fashion has always sought to flatter.

Klein Calvin
Calvin Klein was born in the Bronx, New York, on 19 November 1942. He attended the High School of
Industrial Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, where he studied fashion design.

Klein’s first major position in the fashion industry was with Dan Millstein, a Seventh Avenue coat and
suit manufacturer. He worked there from 1962 to 1964, starting as a pattern cutter and advancing to
a full-fledged designer. Klein’s second position was with Halldon, Ltd., where he began to be
recognized in the press for his designs.
Klein soon became frustrated by the design restrictions of moderate-priced fashion manufacturers.
Encouraged by his parents and financed by his boyhood friend Barry Schwartz, Klein developed a
collection of coats and suits under his own label.

Klein’s first line was discovered by a buyer from Bonwit Teller, who was so impressed by the
collection of finely tailored coats in fresh colors that he sent Klein to meet with Mildred Custin, then
president of Bonwit Teller. Custin placed a large order with Klein, giving a jumpstart to the newly
formed Calvin Klein Limited.

Early on, the savvy Klein developed relationships with fashion insiders, including the designer
Chester Weinberg and Vogue fashion editor Nicolas de Gunzburg. The publicity agent Eleanor
Lambert took Klein on as a client and was instrumental in guiding his early career. Klein’s first Vogue
cover was in September 1969, with his classically cut outerwear featured prominently in the New
York fall preview editorial inside. Throughout the 1970s, Klein’s designs were noted for their
sportswear influence, muted pastel color palettes, and simplicity of design. Looks that are
considered classic Klein were introduced at this time: the pea coat, the trench coat, the shirtdress,
and the wrap blouse. Klein was also an early advocate of all-occasion or “day into night" dressing,
with evening pajamas being his preferred form of formal wear.

As the decade wore on, Klein eased up his tailoring for a relaxed, sexy look. Klein also began to
incorporate looks from active sportswear into his collection—swimwear and tennis outfits that could
be used off the beaches and tennis courts by pairing them with wrap skirts or pants. Corduroy cargo
pants, flannel shirts, and elegant fur-trimmed parkas were shown on Klein’s 1970s fall runways. For
all his innovations, Calvin Klein won his first Coty American Fashion Critic’s Winnie Award—as the
youngest recipient ever—in 1973. He won again in 1974, and in 1975 he was inducted into the Coty
Hall of Fame. In 1978 Klein began designing a menswear collection that was licensed to Maurice
Biderman.

The most groundbreaking piece of sportswear Klein showed on the runway first appeared in spring
1976: a slim-cut pair of jeans with his name embroidered on the back pocket. Although the idea of
logo-emblazoned jeans was not brand-new, this was the first time that jeans had shown up on a
designer runway. By 1978, with Puritan Fashions as manufacturer, Klein was selling 2 million pairs of
jeans per month. The phenomenal success that Klein had with his jeans line was due in no small way
to a brilliant and controversial advertising campaign starring a young Brooke Shields.
The 1980s

Klein’s designs, even in the excessive 1980s, continued to evoke a minimalist aesthetic, with a
relatively restrained use of embellishment and color. The core of the collection was, as always, made
up of timeless pieces in good fabrics. The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CDFA) recognized
Klein when he won designer of the year awards in 1982 and 1983 for his women’s collection. Klein
won a CFDA award in 1986 for both his men’s and women’s collections, the first time a designer had
won both awards in the same year.
In 1982 Calvin Klein launched a men’s underwear line. The collection revolved around a standard
men’s brief, with Klein’s name stamped on the waistband. Bold black-and-white photography on the
packaging and an advertising campaign featuring celebrity models Antonio Sabato Jr. and Marky
Mark in suggestive poses helped make the product appealing to both straight and gay men. The
underwear line became a phenomenon when Klein took the same briefs and modified and marketed
them for women. Warnaco purchased the underwear division in 1994.

By 1983 Calvin Klein, whose eponymous fragrance had produced a lukewarm reception four years
earlier, was ready to give perfume another try. The result was Obsession and, again, with brilliant
advertising—television ads directed by Richard Avedon and print ads shot by Bruce Weber—
Obsession was a success. In 1986 Klein married Kelly Rector, one of his design assistants. The
marriage, as well as the mid-1980s “return to family values" mood, inspired the designer’s next
fragrance, Eternity. A shared-gender fragrance, cK One, was launched in 1994.
The 1990s

In the 1990s Calvin Klein’s worldwide expansion into Asia, Europe, and the Middle East markets
brought his name international consumer recognition. The decade also saw Klein revamp the
jeans/sport division of the company, creating the cK collection, made to appeal to a younger, hipper
customer. Klein had been farsighted enough to realize the importance of archiving his work, so a
constant recall of his roots was readily available. The cK line, largely inspired by these vintage
collection pieces, was recognized by the CFDA with an award in 1993.

“I didn’t think I was doing anything different from what Voguedid when it used Brooke as a model&.
Vogue put $3,000 dresses on her, but it wasn’t expecting to sell those dresses to 15-year-olds. It was
using her as a model and I was using her as an actress” (Quoted in Plaskin, p. 4).

With the Brooke Shields ads, Calvin Klein forever changed television commercials. Klein spent an
unprecedented $5 million on marketing that year. Feminists were enraged by the jeans ads and felt
that, rather than sales, the commercials—with slogans such as “You know what comes between me
and my Calvin’s? Nothing"—would provoke violence against women (Plaskin, p. 62).

Klein surrounds himself with people who share his aesthetic, and he is known in the fashion world
for his intensely collaborative relationships with those who work with him. Most noteworthy is Zack
Carr, who was Klein’s creative doppelgänger for almost thirty years. Jeffrey Banks, Isaac Mizrahi, and
Narciso Rodriguez are also notable Calvin Klein alums.

The twenty-first century began with litigation between Klein and Warnaco over underwear and jeans
distribution. The case was eventually settled out of court. Klein and his partner Barry Schwartz sold
Calvin Klein, Inc., to Phillips–Van Heusen in December 2002. Since that time Klein has stepped down
as creative head of the company that bears his name and has assumed a consultant role. In 2004,
Francisco Costa took over as Creative Director.
The name Calvin Klein represents so many different things—controversial advertising campaigns, the
leading name in the designer-jeans phenomenon, stylish boyish underwear for women, and brilliant
and ruthless business practices. So much of what Klein designed has become fundamentally what
Americans wear that his clothing can rightly be called an American uniform.

Lagerfeld Karl--
Karl Lagerfeld was born on 10 September 1938 to a wealthy family in Hamburg, Germany. He moved
to Paris in 1952 and first came to the attention of the fashion world two years later when he won a
competition prize for his design of a woolen coat. In 1954 he was hired as a design assistant by
Pierre Balmain, one of the premier couture houses of the early postwar period. In 1958 he parted
ways with Balmain and became art director at the House of Patou, where he remained until 1962.
For most of the next fifteen years he designed for a number of companies and under a variety of
contractual and freelance agreements.

He was associated especially with Chloë (1963–1983), where he created styles that simultaneously
were elegant and focused on the young. Many of his most striking designs for Chloë had an art deco
flavor, being very streamlined and body conscious. He also utilized prints to excellent effect. At the
same time, he worked as a freelance designer for Krizia, Valentino, Ballantyne, and other companies.
Beginning in 1965 he designed furs for Fendi. His ability to design simultaneously for several
different houses has been a defining characteristic of his career; Lagerfeld became known as a man
who was never content to do just one thing at a time.

In 1975 Lagerfeld formed his own company and in 1983 became artistic director of the House of
Chanel. While continuing his responsibilities at Chanel and at Fendi, he formed Karl Lagerfeld S.A.
and KL to market his own ready-to-wear lines. Karl Lagerfeld S.A. was acquired by Dunhill (the parent
company of Chloë) in 1992, and Lagerfeld returned to Chloë at that time and held the post of chief
designer until 1997, when he was replaced by Stella McCartney. When he left Chloë, he regained
control of the company bearing his own name; in the early 2000s Lagerfeld was designing for Karl
Lagerfeld/KL, Chanel, and Fendi. He has also designed costumes for many films and theatrical
productions.

Lagerfeld probably is most admired for his work at Chanel, where in 1982–1983 he took over
responsibility for a company that had become somnolent, if not moribund, and very quickly made it
exciting again. Taking the basic vocabulary established by Coco Chanel, he modernized it,
introducing new materials, including denim, and exaggerating such details as the “double C" logo.
Remarkably, his work for Chanel has remained as vital in the twenty-first century as it was in the
mid-1980s.

Karl Lagerfeld has had a wide-ranging career in the arts, achieving considerable success as a writer
and photographer. Over the years he has produced many fashion photography spreads for his
collections at Chanel and for his own labels and has published several books of his photographs. He
also is well known as an aesthete and connoisseur of art and antiques. In 2000 he sold part of his
antique furniture and art collection at auction for more than $20 million. With his signature silver-
white hair and newly slim figure, he is a familiar and iconic presence on the European fashion scene.

Lauren Ralph

An argument can be made that Ralph Lauren is the most successful and influential designer of his
time, though he is known less for the creativity of his designs than for being an astute marketer and
image maker. His fascination with style began in early childhood. He was born Ralph Lifshitz in the
Bronx, New York, in 1939, the fourth and last child of Frank and Frieda Lifshitz, both Jewish refugees
from Eastern Europe. He was educated in both public schools and strict yeshivas and raised with
high expectations.
Early Interest in Fashion

Even as a boy Lauren loved to dress well and was always a sartorial step ahead of his peers. He liked
to try on his dapper father’s jaunty hats, and he wore his older brothers’ hand-me-downs with a
notable sense of style. Even if his clothes were not expensive, he distinguished them with an unusual
drape or combination. He knew how to tie a Shetland sweater around his shoulders just so and
rolled the cuffs of his jeans in a particular and unique way. When he fantasized about being a
teacher, he imagined himself wearing a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches. Ralph and his
brother Jerry often went shopping together where they discovered thrift-shop clothing. The
memories of those hunting expeditions still inform Lauren’s collections: it was in thrift shops that he
discovered the joys of rugged military clothes, the integrity of British tweed suits, the thrilling
transformation that could take place when a socially backward Jewish kid donned a cowboy shirt
and a pair of jeans and imagined himself at home on the range.
Early Career

Once out of school he became a furnishings buyer for Allied Stores, and then (having changed his
surname to Lauren) a tie salesman at Brooks Brothers. After a brief stint as a supply clerk in the U.S.
Army, Lauren spent the 1960s pounding the New York pavement selling gloves, men’s fragrance, and
ties. More importantly, however, he was refining his personal style, designing his own custom-made
suits, haunting great men’s stores like Paul Stuart, and gaining inspiration from custom-made suit
makers like Roland Meledandri.

Lauren grew frustrated with his conservative bosses in the tie business, since they seemed unaware
of the oncoming peacock revolution in men’s fashion. Secretly, he designed a line of wide ties,
inspired by ones made in England by the brand Mr. Fish. He sought out a backer to finance the line
and others to produce it. In 1967 he launched Polo as a division of the tie-maker Beau Brummel.
Soon Bloomingdale’s, then America’s most cutting-edge department store, discovered Ralph Lauren.
Thus began an intense and mutually advantageous relationship that still thrived in the early 2000s.
Polo Brand

In 1968 Lauren left Beau Brummel, taking the name Polo with him, and went into business with the
suit maker Norman Hilton. Lauren began expanding, first into a full range of clothing and furnishings
for men, and then, in 1971, into women’s fashions. Even in those early days, he displayed
characteristics that defined his career: an innate understanding of branding (he embroidered his
polo player logo on the cuffs of his first women’s shirts, creating one of the most singular brand
identities in the history of marketing); a fearless refusal to be reined in by finances or expectations;
and a recklessness (doing too much too soon with insufficient capital and staff) that soon led to the
first of several financial crises. Later crises were caused by Lauren’s fierce—but never entirely
realized—desire to be as successful in women’s fashions as he was, almost immediately, in men’s
wear. Still, he produced iconic clothing for both sexes after those first wide ties: his famous polo and
oxford shirts, khakis, perfect Shetlands, prairie skirts, Navajo blanket coats, and men’s wear–inspired
women’s suits. Over the years, despite nagging fit and delivery problems caused by his insistence on
dressing only a certain body type and an almost paralyzing uncertainty over what to include in his
lines, those styles won him a grudging respect. Clothing from his collections, which appeared in two
acclaimed films from the 1970s—The Great Gatsby and Annie Hall—helped promote his name.
Print Advertising

In the late 1970s, when Lauren formed a fragrance company with Warner Communications, money
began pouring in, earning him serious commercial power and financing his next and perhaps
greatest innovation. In partnership with the photographer Bruce Weber, who also worked for Calvin
Klein, Polo began producing extraordinary print advertisements that served as mini-movies,
advertising the myriad, linked product categories Lauren produced. More significantly, they
hammered home Polo’s most potent product, the idea that clothes not only make the man and
woman, but make them whatever they want to be, whether that is a New England patrician or a
Colorado cowgirl.
Retailing Legacy

In the late 1980s Lauren and his creative services department unveiled the extensive renovation and
preservation project that is the Rhinelander Mansion, long one of New York’s architectural
treasures, and now the backdrop to Lauren’s ultimate Polo retail store. It has forever redefined
fashion retailing. He had become, as a biographer called him, the personification of “the
commodification of status, of the democratization of symbols of the haute monde, of the perfection
of luxury merchandising and the rise of ’lifestyle’ marketing, and of the globalization of branding and
the simultaneous Americanization of international fashion” (Gross, 2003).

Though Lauren still did not always receive the approbation of fashion editors and his peers in the
fashion design world, he went on to win every award that could be bestowed on designers, as well
as worldwide fame and enormous wealth. Polo grew so large that in June 1997 it became a public
corporation, listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

At age sixty-five Lauren, one of the greatest businessmen-designers in fashion history, remained
driven and unsatisfied, still struggling to prove himself. His attempt to reposition Polo as a premium
luxury brand was a troubled one. In 2004 Polo’s stock price still languished below the highs it hit the
day it was first offered to the public, and investors and financiers remained skeptical not just of
Polo’s position in the market, but also of its future. As head of a company heavily dependent upon
his design and marketing skills, his style intuition, and his personality, Ralph Lauren showed no signs,
however, of climbing off his polo pony.
McQueen Alexander==
Born Lee McQueen in the East End of London in 1969, Alexander McQueen was the youngest of six
children to a taxi driver and a social history teacher. He left school at the age of sixteen and started
an apprenticeship with the Savile Row tailors Anderson and Sheppard. From there McQueen moved
to the tailors Gieves and Hawkes, the theatrical costumers Bermans and Nathans, the designer Koji
Tatsuno in London, and (at age twenty) to Romeo Gigli in Milan. Returning to London in 1990, he
sought employment teaching pattern-cutting at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design;
instead, despite his lack of formal fashion training, he was offered a place in the fashion design
course as a graduate student. He was awarded the master of arts degree in 1992. After leaving
college, McQueen claimed unemployed social security benefits and feared criminal prosecution if
caught working for money. He then began designing under the name of Alexander McQueen,
continuing to claim benefits as Lee McQueen. His graduate collection was bought in its entirety by
the influential stylist Isabella Blow, at that time a Vogue fashion editor, who went on to promote and
encourage his work over several years.

“He takes ideas from the past and sabotages them with his cut to make them thoroughly new and
in the context of today.& He is like a Peeping Tom in the way he slits and stabs at fabric to explore all
the erogenous zones of the body.”

Isabella Blow, quoted in Sarajane Hoare, “God Save McQueen.” Harper’s Bazaar 30 (June 1996): 148.

As Alexander McQueen he immediately started his own label, first showing in autumn-winter 1993.
His early collections, such as Nihilism (spring-summer 1994) and Highland Rape (autumn-winter
1995) relied on shock tactics rather than wearability, a strategy that helped him establish a strong
identity. With their harsh styling, the designs in these collections explored variations on the themes
of abuse and victimization. They frequently featured slashed, stabbed, and torn cloth, as well as
McQueen’s brutally sharp style of tailoring. He introduced extraordinary narrative and aesthetic
content to his runway shows. Styling, showmanship, and dramatic presentation became as
important as the design of the clothes; models walked on water, were drenched in “golden showers”
on an ink-flooded catwalk, or were surrounded by rings of flame. The shows were put together on
minimal budgets, assisted by models, makeup artists, stylists, and producers prepared to work for
nothing. His creative director, Katy England, played an important role in both the development of his
aesthetic and the design and styling of his shows. At this stage McQueen began collaborations with
designers such as Dai Rees and the jewelers Shaun Leane and Naomi Filmer, whose accessories and
jewelry he used in his shows. Besides these activities, he also worked with innovative film, video, and
pop producers.

McQueen played up to his bad-boy reputation, opening himself to accusations of misogyny in his
Highland Rape collection, which featured apparently bruised and battered models staggering along
an apocalyptic, heather-strewn runway, and baring his backside to the buyers at the New York
version of his Dante show (autumn-winter 1996). His commercial sense, however, was as sharp as
his tailoring, and his antics and anecdotes were always to a purpose, be it to attract press, buyers, or
backers. The Dante show in New York, for example, elicited an order from Bergdorf Goodman. From
the start McQueen understood the commercial value of shock tactics in the British fashion industry,
which had almost no infrastructure despite its reputation for innovation. After he had acquired his
first backer, he toned down, while not entirely losing, the outrageous content of the shows. Other
important developments for McQueen occurred in 1996. Late in that year he changed his backer to
the Japanese corporate giant Onward Kashiyama, one of the world’s biggest clothing production
houses; it also backed Helmut Lang and Paul Smith. Its subsidiary, Gibo, produced the McQueen line.
In October he was appointed designer in chief at Givenchy in Paris, replacing John Galliano, who
went to Christian Dior. Also in 1996 McQueen was named the British Designer of the Year—a success
he repeated in 1997 and 2001.

McQueen and Galliano thus spearheaded an assault on Paris-based fashion by young British
designers in the 1990s, and their iconoclastic imagery and show techniques did much to boost a
flagging French business. The appointment to Givenchy brought with it the backing of the
conglomerate LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), which allowed McQueen to continue his
uncompromising design style for his own label. While he toned down the rougher edges of his style
for Givenchy, in both the Givenchy and McQueen collections he continued to develop themes that
had been with him since graduation. Darkly romantic, with a harsh vision of history and politics,
McQueen’s approach differed from the more straightforwardly romantic output of Galliano or
Vivienne Westwood. His inspirations were as likely to be cult films by Stanley Kubrick, Pier Paolo
Pasolini, or Alfred Hitchcock; seventeenth-century anatomical plates; or the photographs of Joel-
Peter Witkin, as his predecessors in the pantheon of fashion design. His early designs included the
low-slung and cleavage-revealing “bumster" trousers; he maintained a fascination with highly
structured corsets and tailoring, as well as with historical cut and detailing. However, in the late
1990s the victimized look of his early models gave way to an Amazonian version of female glamour
as a form of terror. Growing up with an older sister who was a victim of domestic violence, McQueen
has said that as a designer he aimed to create a vision of a woman so powerful that no one would
dare to lay a hand on her.

In tandem with his commercial work, McQueen continued to collaborate with photographers such as
Nick Knight and Norbert Schoerner in publishing projects, and to work with those outside the fashion
world, such as the artist Sam Taylor-Wood and the musician Björk. Whereas his sharp tailoring was
sold in shops, his dramatic, unique showpieces that never went into production were in demand
from art galleries and exhibitions across the world.

McQueen sold a controlling share in his business to Gucci in December 2000 and left Givenchy early
in 2001, continuing to show under his own name in Paris rather than London. His role as creative
director of the company permitted him to retain creative freedom as a designer, while the backing of
Gucci—owner of Yves Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney, and Balenciaga—facilitated the transition of
his business from a small-scale London label to a global luxury brand. In March 2001 he launched his
custom-made menswear line in collaboration with the Savile Row tailors Huntsman. That year
McQueen also opened a flagship store in New York and, in 2003, two more in London and Milan. He
launched his perfume, Kingdom, in 2003 as well, the same year that the Council of Fashion Designers
of America named him International Designer of the Year and that Britain awarded him a CBE
(Commander of the British Empire) for his services to the fashion industry. Recently, McQueen
explored new ways of making runway shows available on the Internet. His very theatrical Webcast
show with a hologram of Kate Moss attracted tremendous attention, as did his live streaming of his
runway shows. On February 11, 2010, McQueen, at the age of forty and reportedly in despair at the
recent death of his mother, took his own life, sending waves of shock and sorrow through the
international world of fashion.

Missoni--

The husband-and-wife partnership of Ottavio Missoni and Rosita Missoni has revolutionized the
development of fashionable knitwear. Born in Rugosa (now Dubrovnik) in 1921, Ottavio grew up as
an Italian track champion. In 1947, he and his friend Giorgio Oberweger produced the “Venjulia”
wool athletic suit, which became the official uniform of the Italian athletics team at the 1948 London
Olympic Games. He met Rosita Jelmini that year in London, while he was on the Olympic team and
she was a student. Rosita was born in 1932 in the village of Golasecca. As a young girl, she selected
fabrics and designs at the textile mill established by her maternal grandparents, the Torrani family.
In 1953, Ottavio and Rosita were married and began their joint knitwear venture, called Maglifico
Jolly, in Gallarate where they could benefit from the Torranis’ knowledge and machinery.

In 1955, Milan’s Biki boutique and La Rinascente commissioned garments. Rinascente’s collection of
spring 1958, named “Milano-Sympathy,” was the first to include the Missoni label. In the early
1960s, the Missonis began experimenting with the colorful zigzag and striped patterns that would
become their signature. They used machines built for shawls and bedspreads to produce sweaters
and dresses in energizing jacquard patterns. Ottavio plotted the patterns, which took their
inspiration from such influences as Guatemalan textiles or abstract art. Meanwhile Rosita developed
the shape of the garments. Research into color and materials has always guided their creative
process more than the fashionable silhouette.

In 1966 Ottavio and Rosita’s first fashion show of these unusually colored knit separates, held at the
Teatro Gerolamo in Milan, received praise in the press and the encouragement of Anna Piaggi. In
1967 Rosita sent braless models down the runway at the Pitti Palace in Florence; the resulting
controversy saw the following year’s collection presented elsewhere at Milan’s Solari swimming
pool. The collection caught the attention of American Vogue editor in chief Diana Vreeland. In 1969,
Ottavio and Rosita built a new factory in Sumirago.

The Missonis introduced their famous patchwork inserts in their après-ski collection in 1971. The
decade also witnessed the winning of the Neiman Marcus Fashion Award in 1973, the opening of the
first Milan boutique in 1976, and a retrospective exhibited at the Rotonda della Besana in Milan in
1978 that traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1979. Missoni diversified
with the introduction of menswear in 1971 and the launch of Missoni Home in 1983.

The couple’s achievements in fashion and art have earned them great honors, including the Premio
Pitti Immagine prize in 1994. In 1998, their daughter Angela assumed complete creative control of
the brand, including the men’s and women’s collections and their eleven licenses. In 1999, she
launched the diffusion line, M Missoni, and added a woven collection. Missoni continues to expand
as a lifestyle brand with furniture, fragrances, and hotels. Ottavio Missoni passed away in May 2013.
The Italian brand made its debut in the United States by famously winning over Diana Vreeland
during a trip to New York City. Upon seeing the couple’s colorful clothes Ms. Vreeland remarked,
“Who says a rainbow has seven colors? It has many shades.” Enamored by the Missonis’ talent, she
filled the Missoni’s Plaza suite with fashion editors and department store buyers. With the nod of
Vogue, the brand erupted in the United States and Europe, becoming the epitome of cool-girl 70’s
fashion

Miyake Issey
n tHe eArly 1970s, tHe world of fashion changed dramatically with the Parisian debut of Issey Miyake
(b. 1938). He was among the “first wave” of Japanese designers to capitalize on the great social
changes of the late 1960s and the growing influence of ready-to-wear clothing. These cultural
changes, and Japan’s rise as an economic superpower, were factors in Miyake developing an
optimistic and future-oriented approach to design. He also had a healthy respect for tradition and
pioneered the use of what were then less fashionable, ethnographic materials, initiating the trend
toward abandoning the predictable, manufactured, and stylized forms of “exoticism.” Miyake was
one of the first globally influential designers to find creative uses for the latest technologically
advanced synthetics being produced in Japan. The use of fabrics such as permanently pleated
polyester, combined with his innovative construction techniques, allowed Miyake to make some of
the most extraordinary garments ever seen. His fantastic pleated creations that morph from flat
pieces of cloth into three-dimensional geometric forms were revelations when they first appeared in
the late 1980s. In 1993, Miyake launched the Pleats Please line. The garments were linear in cut, and
the surface designs were daringly innovative. From 1996 to 1998, Miyake invited fine artists such as
Yasumasa Morimura, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tim Hawkinson, and Cai Guo-Qiang to design unique Pleats
Please works.In 1994 and 1999, Miyake stopped designing his collections, choosing instead to focus
on research and other projects such as his specialty line A-POC (an acronym for “a piece of cloth”).
The earliest incarnations of A-POC involved a single process in which “frames” containing fully
formed garments were created in long tubes of jersey knit. Each garment needed but for the wearer
to separate it from its frame using scissors and then customize it to her liking. Today, the A-POC
concept has evolved into a more modern interpretation, and this system of producing garments will
be applied to all Issey Miyake lines and will be known as A-POC inside. —P.M.

Issey Miyake does not want to be called an artist (Figure 1.1). Nor does he want to be labelled a
‘Japanese’ fashion designer. However, from a Western point of view, he is both. He argues that
stereotypical boundaries limit the possible concepts of design and yet his history has revealed that
nothing has prevented Miyake from melding the past, the present and the future in his life’s work.
By challenging convention as an aesthetic stance, he states, ‘I believe in questioning.’ For over forty
years, Miyake has reinvented form, redefined the boundaries of clothing in both functional and
aesthetic contexts, and rejuvenated new modern methods of clothing production. He has promoted
an integral liaison between the fine arts, photography, the applied arts and fashion and shown the
world the true meaning of collaborative effort. He has fostered new talent and he has ‘given back’ or
‘passed forward’ that which he has learned from his predecessors, his colleagues, his years of
experimentation and his time-honoured experience in the fashion industry. Undoubtedly, he is
considered one of the most creative forces in the world today.

Miyake has been dubbed ‘The Picasso of Fashion’, presumably in relation to the diversity of his work,
his propensity for discovering new artistic methodologies and his challenging of traditional concepts
of design. One might argue that what constitutes the greatest challenge of his work is his ability to
force the viewer to confront their own assumptions about what comprises clothing or ‘dress’.
Miyake draws on both artisan production and new technologies and explores all expected and
unexpected possibilities in the process. In both his Pleats, Please and A-POC collections, he has
embraced the new postmodern woman of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He has
shown her that, through the beauty of simplicity, clothing can be unaffected by the shifting tides of
taste. His work suggests that meaning, either symbolic or inferred, can allow the imagination to
expand well beyond the literal needs of clothing. Yet Miyake also sees clothing as something to use,
and more recently something to renew or reuse. He has devised new ways of minimizing waste in
clothing fabrication and sees the customer as his greatest collaborator.
Miyake’s collection ranges until 1996 consisted of neutral-coloured trousers, skirts and tops. After
this he introduced high fashion colours and they often incorporated printed designs by different
guest artists: Yasuma Morimura the contemporary Japanese fine artist, the photographer Nobuyoshi
Araki, and artist Tim Hawkinson. Known as the Guest Artist series (1997), Miyake invited artists to
use his modular pleated garments as a medium for their own work. He chose collaborators who used
the body as an erotic or conceptual entity. Morimura is an artist who uses his body as a tool of
expression. When Miyake invited him to incorporate a number of his printed images into the Pleats,
Please series, Morimura chose the top half of the French neo-classicist nineteenth-century painter
Ingres’ famous Le Source painting of 1856, where an image of a young woman about to pour water
from a jug was used. An inverted photograph of the artist himself covered with scarlet netting was
featured on the bottom half (Figure 1.3). In another garment, the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki
used optical illusions as images on the pleated fabric which move with the body. Araki, one of
Japan’s most controversial photographers, also uses his craft as an autobiographical tool. His optical
images either ‘appear’, if they are printed on the clothing before it is pleated, or ‘disappear’, if they
are printed after the fabric has been pleated. Thus the photo images come in and out of focus, so to
speak, as the clothing follows the wearer’s movements. Hawkinson uses a variety of experimental
techniques to fragment the image of the body into sections or ‘visual patches’.

he concept quoted above (in Simon 1999) was to become the foundation of all of Miyake’s later
work—particularly his second major series, the A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) range.[3] Like the kimono,
the main principle was not to cut into the woven cloth, but to respect the integrity of the material
and to use its shape to house the body. This series evolved from a conceptual basis that challenged
existing conventions—it became another form of renewed clothing production. Lee, in her
Fashioning the Future: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe, argues that ‘APOC proposes a radical rethink of
fashion manufacture for the twenty-first century’ (2005: 30).

A-POC started in 1998 as revolutionary garments cut either by heat-punch or, better, by extreme
cold-punch methods, from tubes of Raschel-knit material (a warp-knitted fabric that resembles
hand-crocheted and lace fabrics and nettings) and has now evolved to include jeans and furniture
coverings. At the 2006 Milan Furniture Fair, a collaborative A-POC project between Miyake and
designer Ron Arad displayed upholstery that can switch from covering Arad’s Ripple Chair to clothing
a human. Called Gemini, it is used to cover a body-cushioning seat pillow, blurring the edges
between designer chairs and designer clothing. This new concept becomes part of the ‘performance’
that is also an inherent part of the A-POC process. It would seem that the interactive part that the
consumer plays, not only in the process of making, but also in the wearing of individual garments, is
paramount to its appeal. The garments can become customized for individual purchasers and
Miyake contends that ‘People are waiting for something that is fun which they feel that we can
create together’ (Menkes 2000b). A-POC was initially revealed to the fashion world at the Ecole des
Beaux Arts in Paris in the autumn of 1999 and shortly afterwards in Tokyo. In his Omotesando shop,
Rolls of fabric in bright red, green, black, navy and white are stacked upon a display case … If [the
customers] want to try on something, there is a selection of items ready-cut. These can be bought
individually but the idea is that one size fits all, and there is no right or wrong way of wearing it.
Miyake says ‘You can wear it as you like—they’re your clothes’. This idea of making clothes from a
single piece of cloth—like the Indian Sari or the Roman toga—has always been central to his work.
‘The basis for clothing design lies in a piece of cloth, which no fashion or trend can alter’, he argues.

(Blanchard 1999)

The tube of stretch jersey fabric, which starts with a single thread, so each garment is woven
complete with welts and seams, metamorphoses into a variety of different forms when cut. The tube
of fabric is initially pressed flat so that the shapes of the garments can be woven into them. A ribbed
outline demarcates the shapes, which can then be cut out with a pair of scissors. Menkes (2000b)
refers to this process as a ‘Miyake Slice-Your-Own’, suggesting that it is a type of ‘deli self-serve’
construct. In the high-tech twenty-first century, consumers have been programmed to cope with DIY
fashions, self-serve department stores, ATM machines and petrol stations. Theoretically, one might
suppose that the A-POC concept is not much different.

While seen by some as a marketing gimmick and by others as a utopian vision to fetishize
technological progress, this new approach to fashion was successful in Tokyo, but when his Paris
store opened, in September 2000, it was slower to catch on. He argues that it usually takes eight
years for a revolutionary trend to take hold, but it seems it is taking longer for the concept of A-POC
to find its footing. But is this really what the postmodernist consumer wants? Miyake argues that

We are looking to people, not the fashion (community) and we are fascinated by technology. People
have become consumers; they forgot the ways they can participate in their clothing. A-POC does
that. It is important people participate in making their own clothing.

(Graham 2007)

Conceived as a unique, futuristic interactive fashion system, A-POC tube designs, made from high-
tech fibres and woven by a computer-instructed machine with the clothing pattern etched on, allow
the buyers to become their own pattern-cutters and designers. According to Miyake, this process
provides a framework for ‘design and fit’ and subsequently could be seen as clothing that becomes
universal (Plate 2). The fact that the A-POC garments could be produced without machine-sewn
seams is revolutionary in itself and stimulates interesting possibilities that could totally revolutionize
the ready-to-wear fashion industry. Significantly, while the concept is primarily about uniformity and
the streamlined body, it also minimizes waste in clothing fabrication. This has become a major issue
in terms of ecological sustainability over the past decade. Miyake suggests that ‘we make a single
pattern and we send it to many places—Africa, the Middle East—and people can make it their own
… To me, it’s the future of clothing, the 21st century way of making clothes to use frameworks and
technology to use cloth efficiently and beautifully’ (Graham 2007). Arguably, in both his Pleats,
Please and A-POC ranges, Miyake has attempted to redefine the role of design in daily life.

Miyake’s vision, setting the standards for a universal fashion production system, may not be fully
realized for decades, but it has offered the world a new insight into ‘what might be’. Conceptually, it
might be too difficult for today’s Western fashion buyers to grasp. Anna Wintour, long-standing
editor-in-chief of American Vogue complained that the Japanese designers’ clothes were ‘too
difficult to wear’ to be a commercial success (Warady 2001). Miyake admits that 80 per cent of his
clothes are sold in Japan, while he has retail outlets in New York, Paris and London, among other
cities. Today, Miyake insists that A-POC intrigues the Chinese, whom he says are his best customers
as they are learning quickly to wear lighter, unusual clothes and they understand the advances
technology promises. ‘The great thing about Japanese designers’, argues Miyake, ‘is that we have
our own companies. We don’t do licensing. We are not controlled by someone else. We are our
own’ (Simon 1999). Franka Sozzani, editor-in-chief of Italian Vogue, applauds the Japanese
designers’ independence and suggests frequently that they are considered icons in the fashion
world.
++++

Poiret paul
Before Paul Poiret (1879–1944), there was the couture: clothing whose raison d’être was beauty as
well as the display of wealth and taste. Paul Poiret brought a new element of fashion to the couture;
thanks to him fashion can be a mirror of the times, an art form, and a grand entertainment. Poiret, in
the opinion of many, was fashion’s first genius.

Born into a solidly bourgeois Parisian family (his father, Auguste Poiret, was a respectable cloth
merchant), Poiret attended a Catholic lycée, finishing as was typical in his early teens. Following
school came an apprenticeship to an umbrella maker, a mêtier that did not suit him. At the time, it
was possible to begin a couture career by shopping around one’s drawings of original fashion
designs. Couture houses purchased these to use as inspiration. Poiret’s first encouragement came
when Mme. Chéruit, a good but minor couturière, bought a dozen of his designs. He was still a
teenager when, in 1896, he began working for Jacques Doucet, one of Paris’s most prominent
couturiers.

Auspiciously, Doucet sold four hundred copies of one of Poiret’s first designs, a simple red cape with
gray lining and revers. And in four years there, the novice designer rose up in the ranks to become
head of the tailoring department. His greatest coup was making an evening coat to be worn by the
great actress Réjane in a play called Zaza. The biggest splash fashion could make in those days was
on the stage, and Poiret made sure to design something attention-worthy: a mantle of black tulle
over black taffeta painted with large-scale iris by a well-known fan painter. Next came the custom of
more actresses, and then, while working on the play L’Aiglon starring Sarah Bernhardt, Poiret snuck
into a dress rehearsal where his scathing critique of the sets and costumes were overheard by the
playwright, costing him his job. (The remarks could not have alienated Madame Bernhardt, as he
would dress her for several 1912 films.) He fulfilled his military service during the next year and then
joined Worth, the top couture house as an assistant designer in 1901. There he was given a sous
chef job of creating what Jean Worth (grandson of the founder) called the “fried potatoes,” meaning
the side dish to Worth’s main course of lavish evening and reception gowns. Poiret was responsible
for the kind of serviceable, simple clothes needed by women who took the bus as opposed to
languishing in a carriage, and while he felt himself to be looked down on by his fellow workers, his
designs were commercial successes.

In September 1903 he opened his own couture house on the avenue Auber (corner of the rue
Scribe). There he quickly attracted the custom of such former clients as the actress Réjane. In 1905
he married Denise Boulet, the daughter of a textile manufacturer, whose waiflike figure and
nonconventional looks would change the way he designed. In 1906 Poiret moved into 37, rue
Pasquier, and by 1909 he was able to relocate to quite grand quarters: a large eighteenth-century
hôtel particulier at 9 avenue d’Antin (perpendicular to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and since World
War II known as Avenue Franklin-Roosevelt). The architect Louis Suë oversaw the renovations; the
spectacular open grounds included a parterre garden. Poiret also purchased two adjoining buildings
on the Faubourg St. Honore, which he later established as Martine and Rosine.
Les Robes of Paul Poiret

Until the October 1908 publication of Les Robes de Paul Poiret, Poiret was merely an up-and-coming
couturier, likely to assume a place in the hierarchy as secure as that of Doucet or Worth. However,
the limited edition deluxe album of Poiret designs as envisioned and exquisitely rendered by new
artist Paul Iribe would have far-reaching impact, placing Poiret in a new uncharted position, that of
daringly inventive designer and arbiter of taste. Fashion presentation up to then had been quite
straightforward: magazines showed clothes in a variety of media, based on what was possible
technically: black-and-white sketches, hand-colored woodblock prints, or colored lithographs, and, in
the case of the French magazine Les Modes, black- and-white photographs or pastel-tinted black-
and-white photographs. The poses were typical photographer’s studio ones, carefully posed models
against a muted ground, vaguely landscape or interior in feeling.

Using the pochoir method of printing, resulting in brilliantly saturated areas of color, Paul Iribe
juxtaposed Poiret’s graphically striking clothes against stylishly arranged backgrounds including
pieces of antique furniture, decorative works of art, and old master paintings. The dresses, depicted
in color, popped out from the black-and-white backgrounds. This inventive approach was
tremendously influential, not only affecting future fashion illustration and photography, but
cementing the relationship between art and fashion and probably inspiring the launch of such
exquisitely conceived publications as the Gazette du Bon Ton.

The Poiret Rose

While there are some designers associated with specific flowers (Chanel and the camellia, Dior and
the lily-of-the-valley) no one can claim the achievement of having reinvented a flower in such a way
as to have it always identified with them. The Poiret rose (reduced to its simplest elements of
overlapping curving lines) may have appeared for the first time in the form of a three-dimensional
silk chiffon flower sewn to the empire bodice of Josephine, one of the 1907 dresses featured in the
1908 album Les Robes de Paul Poiret.Flat versions of the Poiret rose, embroidered in beads,
appeared on the minaret tunic of the well-known dress Sorbet, 1913. Poiret’s characteristically large
and showy label also featured a rose.

The dresses were no less newsworthy and influential. When Poiret introduced his lean, high-waisted
silhouette of 1908, it was the first time (but hardly the last) that a radically new fashion would be
based fairly literally on the past. The dresses, primarily for evening, feature narrow lines, high waists,
covered arms, low décolletés. Their inspiration is both Directoire and medieval. In abandoning the
bifurcated figure of the turn of the twentieth century, Poiret looked back to a time when
revolutionary dress itself was referencing ancient times. Suddenly the hourglass silhouette was
passé.
Poiret, Bakst, and Orientalism

Poiret had an affinity with all things Eastern, claiming to have been a Persian prince in a previous life.
Significantly, the first Asian-inspired piece he ever designed, while still at Worth, was controversial. A
simple Chinese-style cloak called Confucius, it offended the occidental sensibilities of an important
client, a Russian princess. To her grand eyes it seemed shockingly simple, the kind of thing a peasant
might wear; when Poiret opened his own establishment such mandarin-robe-style cloaks would be
best-sellers.

The year 1910 was a watershed for orientalism in fashion and the arts. In June, the Ballet Russe
performed Scheherazade at the Paris Opera, with sets and costumes by Leon Bakst. Its effect on the
world of design was immediate. Those who saw the production or Bakst’s watercolor sketches
reproduced in such luxurious journals as Art et Decoration (in 1911) were dazzled by the daring color
combinations and swirling profusion of patterns. Since the belle époque could be said to have been
defined by the delicate, subtle tints of the impressionists, such a use of color would be seen as
groundbreaking.

Although color and pattern were what people talked about, they serve to obscure the most daring
aspect of the Ballet Russe costumes: the sheerness (not to mention scantiness) of the materials.
Even in the drawings published in 1911, nipples can be seen through sheer silk bodices, and not just
legs, but thighs in harem trousers. Midriffs, male and female, were bare altogether. Whether
inspired or reinforced by Bakst, certain near-Eastern effects: the softly ballooning legs, turbans, and
the surplice neckline and tunic effect became Poiret signatures.

The cover of Les Modes for April 1912 featured a Georges Barbier illustration of two Poiret
enchantresses in a moonlit garden, one dressed in the sort of boldly patterned cocoon wraps for
which Poiret would be known throughout his career, the other in a soft evening dress with high
waist, below-the-knee-length overskirt, narrow trailing underskirt, the bodice sheer enough to
reveal the nipples.

While Poiret’s claim to have single-handedly banished the Edwardian palette of swooning mauves
can be viewed as egotistical, given Bakst’s tremendous influence, his assertions about doing away
with the corset have more validity. In each of the numerous photographs of Denise Poiret she is
dressed in a fluid slide of fabric; there is no evidence of the lumps ands bumps of corsets and other
underpinnings. Corsetry and sheerness are hardly compatible and boning would interrupt Poiret’s
narrow lines.
The Jupe-Culotte

In the course of producing his (hugely successful) second album of designs Les Choses de Paul Poiret
(1911), Poiret asked his latest discovery, the artist Georges Lepape, to come up with an idea for a
new look. It was Mme. Lepape who sketched her idea of a modern costume and put it in her
husband’s pocket. When Poiret asked where the new idea was, Lepape had to be reminded to fish it
out. The next time they met, Poiret surprised the couple with a mannequin wearing his version of
their design: a long tunic with boat neck and high waist worn over dark pants gathered into cuffs at
the ankle. And so, at the end of the album under the heading: Tomorrow’s Fashions, there appeared
several dress/trouser hybrids, which would become known as jupe-culottes.

The jupe-culotte caused an international sensation. The Victorian age had left the sexes cemented in
rigid roles easily visible in their dress—men in the drab yet freeing uniform of business, and women
in an almost literal gilded cage of whalebone and steel, brocade and lace. While Poiret’s impulse
seems to have been primarily aesthetic, the fact that it coincided with the crusade of suffragists
taking up where Amelia Bloomer had left off, served to bring about a real change in how women
dressed. For months anything relating to the jupe-culotte was major news. In its most common
incarnation, a kind of high-waisted evening dress with tunic lines revealing soft chiffon harem pants,
the jupe-culotte was wildly unmodern, requiring the help of a maid to get in and out of and utterly
impractical for anything other than looking au courant. Poiret did design numerous more tailored
versions, however, often featuring military details and his favorite checked or striped materials;
these do look ahead (about fifty years) to the high-fashion trouser suit.
Martine

In the space of five years, Poiret had become a world-renown success. Now came another influential
act. Martine, named after one of Poiret’s daughters, opened 1 April 1911 as a school of decorative
art. Poiret admitted to being inspired by his 1910 visit to the Wiener Werkstätte, but his idea for
Martine entailed a place where imagination could flourish as opposed to being disciplined in a
certain style. Young girls, who, in their early teens had finished their traditional schooling, became
the pupils. Their assignment was to visit zoos, gardens, the aquarium, and markets and make rough
sketches. Their sketches were then developed into decorative motifs. Once a wall full of studies had
been completed, Poiret would invite artist colleagues and wallpaper, textile, or embroidery
specialists for a kind of critique. The students were rewarded for selected designs, but also got to
see their work turned into such Martine wares as rugs, china, pottery, wallpaper, textiles for
interiors, and fashions. The Salon d’Automne of 1912 displayed many such items made after designs
of the École Martine and Poiret opened a Martine store at 107, Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

Within a few years, a typical Martine style of interior had been developed, juxtaposing spare, simple
shapes with large-scale native designs inspired in the main from nature. A 1914 bathroom featured
micro-mosaic tiles turning the floor, sink case, and tub into a continuous smooth expanse
punctuated by murals or tile panels patterned with stylized grapes on the vine. There were Martine
departments in shops all over Europe; although more decorative than what would become known as
art deco and art moderne, Martine deserves an early place in the chronology of modern furniture
and interior design.

Also in 1911 Poiret inaugurated a perfume concern, naming it after another daughter, Rosine, and
locating it at the same address as Martine. Poiret’s visionary aesthetic was perfectly suited to the
world of scents and he was involved in every aspect of the bottle design, packaging, and advertising,
including the Rosine advertising fans. He was also interested in new developments of synthetic
scents and in expanding the idea of what is a fragrance by adding lotions, cosmetics, and soaps.
Fellow couturiers like Babani, the Callot Soeurs, Chanel, and Patou were among the first to follow
suit; thanks to Poiret, perfumes continue to be an integral part of the image (and business) of a
fashion house.
Poiret the Showman

At a time when the runway had yet to be invented and clothes were shown on models in intimate
settings in couture houses, Poiret’s 1911 and 1914 promotional tours of Europe with models wearing
his latest designs made a tremendous splash.

On 24 June 1911 the renowned 1,002-night ball was held in the avenue d’Antin garden featuring
Paul Poiret as sultan and Denise Poiret as the sultan’s favorite in a combination of two of Poiret’s
greatest hits, a jupe-culotte with a minaret tunic. The invitations specified how the guests should
dress: Dunoyer de Segonzac was told to come as Champagne, His Majesty’s Valet and Raoul Dufy as
The King’s Fool. If one of the 300 guests showed up in Chinese (or, worse, conventional evening)
dress, he or she was sent to a wardrobe room to be decked out in Persian taste. Although fancy
dress balls had been all the rage for several decades, this one seems to have struck a chord; perhaps
it was the first hugely luxurious (champagne, oysters, and other delicacies flowed freely) event
staged by a creative person (in trade no less) rather than an aristocrat. Future fêtes, each with a
carefully thought-out theme, failed to achieve the same level of excitement. After the war, Poiret’s
thoughts had turned toward increasingly zany moneymaking ventures. The nightclub was the latest
diversion after World War I and Poiret turned his garden first into a nightspot, and then in 1921 it
became an open-air theater, Oasis, with a retractable roof devised for him by the automobile
manufacturer Voisin. This venture lasted six months.

His last truly notable bit of showmanship was his display at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts
Décoratifs et Industriels. Rather than set up a display in an approved location in an official building,
Poiret installed three barges on the Seine. Decorated in patriotic French colors, Delices was a
restaurant decorated with red anemones; Amours was decorated with blue Martine carnations; and
Orgues was white featuring fourteen canvases by Dufy depicting regattas at Le Havre, Ile de France,
Deauville; and races at Longchamps, showing some of Poiret’s last dress designs under his own label.
It was clear that his zest for ideas was being directed elsewhere other than fashion. Typically over
the top, he also commissioned a merry-go-round on which one could ride figures of Parisian life,
including him and his midinettes, or shop-girls.
The Poiret Milieu
Poiret’s interest in the fine, contemporary arts of the day began while he was still quite young. His
artist friends included Francis Picabia and André Derain, who painted his portrait when they were
both serving in the French army in 1914. His sisters were Nicole Groult, married to Andre Groult, the
modern furniture designer; and Mme. Boivin, the jeweler; another was a poet. Besides discovering
Paul Iribe and Georges Barbier, he reinvigorated the career of Raoul Dufy by commissioning
woodcut-based fabric designs from him and starting him off on a long career in textile design and
giving new life to his paintings as well. Bernard Boutet de Monvel worked on numerous early
projects for Poiret, including, curiously, writing catalog copy for his perfume brochures. While quite
young, Erté saw (and sketched) Poiret’s mannequins in Russia in 1911; after emigrating to Paris he
worked as an assistant designer to Poiret from the beginning of 1913 to the outbreak of war in 1914.
His illustrations accompanied articles about Poiret fashion in Harper’s Bazaar and reveal a signature
Erté style that might not have developed without the inspiration of Poiret. He also launched the
careers of Madeleine Panizon, a Martine student who became a milliner, and discovered shoemaker
Andre Perugia, whom he helped establish in business after World War I.
Poiret’s Clientele

Not surprisingly, Poiret’s clients were more than professional beauties, clotheshorses, or socialites.
Besides the very top actresses of his time, Réjane and Sarah Bern-hardt, the entertainer Josephine
Baker, and the celebrated Liane de Pougy, one of the last of the grandes horizontales, there were:
the Countess Grefulhe, muse of Marcel Proust, and Margot Asquith, wife of the English prime
minister, who invited him to show his styles in London, creating a political furor for her (and her
husband’s) disloyalty to British designers. Nancy Cunard, ivory bracelet–clad icon of early twentieth-
century style, recalled that she had been wearing a gold-panniered Poiret dress in 1922 at a ball
where she was bored dancing with the Prince of Wales but thrilled to meet and chat with T. S. Eliot.

The international cosmetics entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein met Poiret while he was a young design
assistant at Worth and followed him as he struck out on his own. She was photographed in one of
his daring jupeculottes in 1913 and wore a Poiret Egyptian style dress in her advertisements in 1924.
The quintessentially French author Colette was a client. Boldini painted the Marchesa Casati in a chic
swirl of Poiret and greyhounds. The American art patrons Peggy Guggenheim and Gertrude Whitney
dressed in high bohemian Poiret and Natasha Hudnut Rambova, herself a designer and the exotic
wife of the matinee idol Rudolf Valentino, went to Poiret for her trousseau.
Postwar Poiret

Poiret was involved for the duration of the war as a military tailor, and although he occasionally
made news with a design or article, when he was demobilized in 1919 he had to relaunch his
fashion, decorating, and perfume businesses. His first collection after the war, shown in the summer
of 1919, was enthusiastically received and fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar continued to
regularly feature his luxurious creations, typically made in vivid colors, lush-patterned fabrics, and
trimmed lavishly with fur. Poiret’s work perfectly suited the first part of the 1920s. The dominant
silhouette was tubular, and fairly long, and most coats were cut on the full side with kimono or
dolman sleeves. Such silhouettes were perfect for displaying the marvelous Poiret decorations,
either Martine-inspired or borrowed from native clothing around the world. He continued to
occasionally show such previous greatest hits as jupe-culottes and dresses with minaret tunics. In
1924 he left his grand quarters in the avenue d’Antin, moving to the Rond Point in 1925. He would
leave that business in 1929.
Obscurity

By 1925 Poiret had begun to sound like a curmudgeon, holding forth against chemise dresses, short
skirts, flesh-colored hose, and thick ankles with the same kind of ranting tone once used by M.
Worth to criticize Poiret’s trouser skirt. Financially, he did poorly too, and he sold his business in
1929.

In 1931, Women’s Wear Daily announced that Paul Poiret was reentering the couture, using as a
business name his telephone number “Passy Ten Seventeen.” Prevented from using his own name
by a legal arrangement, he told the paper that he planned to print his photograph on his stationery,
since presumably he still owned the rights to his face. This venture closed in 1932. After designing
some for department stores such as Liberty in London in 1933, he turned his attention to an
assortment of endeavors including writing (an autobiography called King of Fashion) and painting.
He succumbed to Parkinson’s disease on 28 April 1944.

While Gabrielle Chanel is credited with being the first woman to live the modern life of the
twentieth century (designing accordingly), it is Poiret who created the contemporary idea of a
couturier as wide-reaching arbiter. His specific fashion contributions aside, Poiret was the first to
make fashion front-page news; to collaborate with fine artists; develop lines of fragrances; expand
into interior decoration; and to be known for his lavish lifestyle. Poignantly he was also the first to
lose the rights to his own name.

Poiret’s earliest styles were radically simple; these would give way to increasingly lavish “artistic”
designs and showman-like behavior. By 1913 Harper’s Bazaar was already looking back at his notable
achievements: originating the narrow silhouette, starting the fashion for the uncorseted figure,
doing away with the petticoat, being the first to show the jupe-culotte and the minaret tunic. That
the fashion world was already nostalgic about his achievements proved oddly prescient: his ability to
transform how women dressed would pass with World War I.

Valentino
Valentino Garavani (1932– ) was born in Voghera, a city in Lombardy, on 11 May. Even as a young
man he was fascinated by fashion and decided to study design in Milan. When he was seventeen he
discovered the extraordinary shade of red that would remain a design element throughout his
career at a premiere of the Barcelona Opera.
Early Career

In 1950 Valentino went to Paris, where he studied design at the schools of the Chambre Syndicale de
la Couture Parisienne. He obtained his first position as a designer with Jean Dessès. In 1957
Valentino went to work in Guy Laroche’s new atelier, where he remained for two years. His training
in France provided him with both technical skill and a sense of taste. In 1959 he decided to return to
Italy and opened his own fashion house on the via Condotti in Rome with financial assistance from
his family. In November he made his debut with his first couture collection, displaying 120 luxurious
outfits notable for their stoles and draped panels that emphasized the shoulders. The Sunday Times
of London was quick to take note of the new designer, singling him out for the refined lines of his
tailoring and the sophistication of his garments.

In 1960 Valentino met Giancarlo Giammetti, who became his business administrator. At this time he
moved his fashion house to via Gregoriana, 54. Valentino quickly became the favorite designer of
the movie stars who were often found at Cinecittà, known as the new Hollywood during the years of
Italy’s economic boom. One of the first stars who wore Valentino’s clothes was Elizabeth Taylor, who
was in Rome for the filming of Cleopatra. In 1960 Valentino signed an agreement with a British firm,
Debenham and Freebody, to reproduce some of his couture designs. That same year he designed
costumes for Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film La Notte. In 1963 Valentino’s summer line
was photographed on the set of Federico Fellini’s film 8 1/2.

Valentino’s collection for fall–winter 1961–1962 featured twelve white outfits inspired by Jacqueline
Kennedy. But what secured Valentino’s fame was the success of his first fashion show on the runway
of the Sala Bianca in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence in July 1962. For the first time French Vogue
dedicated its cover to an Italian designer.
International Success

Valentino’s fall–winter collection for 1963–1964 was inspired by wild animals. American Vogue
published a photograph of the contessa Consuelo Crespi wearing one of his zebra-patterned models,
which anticipated his op art and pop art-inspired collection of spring–summer 1966. The 1966
collection has become famous for its prints and geometric designs, its stylized animals, and its large
dots. That same year Valentino started a lingerie line and stunned his audience with a winter show
that included pink and violet furs. Ethel Kennedy chose a Valentino dress for her meeting with Pope
Paul VI in June 1966.

In 1967 Valentino received the Neiman Marcus Award in Dallas, which spurred him to further
develop his creative ideas. The award was the direct impetus for his first men’s collection, Valentino
Uomo. The designer’s accessories, especially his handbags with a gold “V,” became essential items
for the elegant women of the jet set. In 1968 Valentino introduced his famous Collezione Bianca, a
spring–summer line of white and off-white garments that included suits, wraps, coats, and legwear
in white lace. The show took place at a critical moment in international fashion and helped alleviate
the crisis in haute couture—a crises due to changes in international society in 1968 when people
started looking at less exclusive models. In March of that year Valentino opened a store in Paris,
followed by one in Milan in 1969. In October 1968 he designed Jacqueline Kennedy’s dress for her
wedding to Aristotle Onassis. He was the most acclaimed designer of the moment and expanded his
circle of clients to include Paola di Liegi, Princess Margaret of England, Farah Diba, the Begum Aga
Khan, Marella Agnelli, Princess Grace of Monaco, Sophia Loren, and many other well-known women.

Valentino lengthened hemlines and introduced folk and gypsy motifs in the early 1970s. He started
his first boutique line in 1969. It was originally produced by Mendes, although ready-to-wear
production was turned over to Gruppo Finanziario Tessile (GFT) in 1979. Valentino also opened a
prêt-à-porter shop in the center of Rome in 1972. Throughout the 1970s his designs alternated
between slender suits and harem pants coupled with maxi coats. These designs often evoked a
Liberty and art deco atmosphere, as in his 1973 collection inspired by the art of Gustav Klimt and the
Ballets Russes. In 1974 he opened new stores in London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo (in the early
2000s there are twenty-five stores throughout the world). In 1976 he decided to show his boutique
line in Paris, while keeping his couture line in Rome. Valentino launched his first perfume, named
Valentino, in 1978. The following year he introduced a line of blue jeans at a famous discothèque,
Studio 54 in New York City, which was publicized through an advertising campaign photographed by
Bruce Weber.

The collections of the 1980s were characterized by sarong skirts gathered on the hip, draped
garments, ruched fabrics, breathtaking necklines, and dramatic slits in a range of colors that
emphasized the famous Valentino red, together with black and white. In 1982 the designer
presented his fall–winter collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1986 he introduced
Oliver, a more youthful line named after his faithful dog, which he used as a logo. Three years later,
Valentino decided to show his couture line in Paris, a series of garments inspired by ancient and
modern art.

Valentino’s collections of the 1990s integrated the themes of revival and self-reference—flounces,
embroidery, and dots—partly as a way of emphasizing his thirty years in fashion, which were
celebrated in several short films, exhibitions, and books. In January 1998, after a difficult period,
Valentino sold his brand to the Holding di Partecipazioni Industriali SpA (HdP) group run by Maurizio
Romiti, although Valentino remained the creative director. In 2002 HdP sold the fashion house to
Gruppo Marzotto.
Elements of Style

Valentino has paid his own personal tribute to contemporary fashion, inventing a recognizable look,
modern yet sophisticated, which balances tradition and innovation through the image of an iconic
femininity that is both classic and chic. Valentino’s designs have as a common denominator the
technical precision of fine tailoring, which he applies not so much for the sake of innovation but
rather to provide a sense of stylistic continuity. Bows, ruching, and draping are distinctive features of
many of his designs, together with the famous Valentino red. All these features are used
strategically, serving to give the brand its mythic quality. Valentino’s fabrics are printed with flowers,
dots, and his own initial, which has doubled as a logo since the 1960s, highlighting the interplay
between ornamental texture and effective communication.

A forceful interpreter of the lines and ambiance of the nineteenth century, with references ranging
from the neoclassical with its fine drapery through the Second Empire with its crinolines, Valentino
plays with the idea that his garments serve as a kind of aesthetic memory, a modern reference to a
different time. Because of the designer’s ability to work with tradition, he has found a unique,
although elitist, stylistic solution that has satisfied sophisticated women throughout the world.

Versace Gianni
Gianni Versace (1946–1997) was a defining figure in the world of design in the 1980s and 1990s. He
dressed the independent spirits, celebrities, and the rich, young, and fearless. His exclusive clique
personified his ideals of men’s and women’s ready-to-wear and couture clothing. He also created
accessories, linens, and a collection for the home inspired by his preference for the baroque style.
Versace’s knowledge was encyclopedic and his sense of history prophetic; his genius was the
successful linkage of fashion and culture.

Following Versace’s tragic death in July 1997, his sister Donatella was catapulted into the
international limelight. Only three months later, no longer her brother’s muse and collaborator, she
assumed creative direction over the development of a dozen highly demanding collections. An
earlier agreement between brother and sister had established that she would be the one to carry on
his work if it were ever necessary. As a result the signature Versace Atelier collection was presented
as usual in Paris in 1998.

Donatella Versace was born in Reggio Calabria, in southern Italy in 1955. She was one of four
children born to a businessman and an accomplished seamstress. During Donatella’s childhood,
Gianni designed clothing for his younger sister, who became the embodiment of his standards. After
she completed her studies in Italian literature at the Università di Firenze to supplement her sense of
culture, she followed Gianni to Milan, where he had established his career. Initially he sketched his
first ready-to-wear collections for the manufacturing firms of Genny, Complice, and Callaghan.

Donatella arrived with the intention of shaping her brother’s public image through deft management
of his public relations. When he established his signature company in 1978, she became his spirited
muse-in-residence. Santo Versace, an older sibling, assisted in the organization of the business,
which he continues to direct.

As the house’s driving creative force since 1997, Donatella has forged on to energize her
international team of fashion designers. Her entrance-making gowns, as well as practical, elegant
ready-to-wear clothes and men’s wear maintained a high profile in her design studios and corporate
offices in the center of Milan. The Versace family estates are located in nearby Como, within an
hour’s drive from the Milan corporate headquarters.
Business Innovations

Donatella’s larger-than-life approach to creating fashion mirrored her brother’s maxim that fashion
must fuse with the media, the performing arts, celebrity, vitality, and sexuality. Donatella staged the
audacious, high-powered Versace runway shows after Gianni’s death, enlisting the friendship and
devotion of many of the supermodels. Her brother had initiated successful advertising campaigns
with photographers and artists beginning in the late 1970s: Richard Avedon and Andy Warhol,
among others, shared his flamboyant taste for self-promotion. Donatella continued in this vein,
preferring to work with such photographers as Steven Meisel and Bruce Weber. The company
continued to unleash dynamic, sexually charged media campaigns in the early 2000s as it expanded
its share of the luxury trades.

Gianni Versace’s penchant for extreme styling and unconventional choices of sumptuous and radiant
fabrics combined themes from his studies in art history with new technology. The Versace label was
more focused on the modern career woman in the early twenty-first century, a change reflected in
the variety of garments it produced. Donatella’s hallmarks included flashy materials fluidly draped.
She presented herself on the international stage as the model of an invincible woman. Donatella also
launched the fragrance Versace Woman in 2001.
Personal Image

During their adolescence and early adult years, brother and sister remained loyal to each other.
Gianni created vibrant garments for Donatella that embodied his personal rationale of expression.
The freedom to dare, to make personal choices, was one of the Versace duo’s resonant manifestos.
During their nineteen years of collaboration, Versace consulted his younger sibling in all important
decisions. Her bravura and dedication made her an integral part of the company as it developed. In
early 2000 she epitomized the liberation he sought as a designer. Gianni paid tribute to Donatella
when he named his 1995 perfume Blonde to honor her trademark long, platinum locks. Surrounded
by revelers, her frequent tours of nightspots provided her with access to the younger generation. In
due course, Donatella became chief designer for Versace’s Versus collection, where she further
empowered her success with their dual vision of bold patterns and high glamour infused with sex
appeal, designed for a younger clientele. While Donatella was independent in her thinking, she was
also committed to her brother’s enduring legacy. She continued to style flashy and extreme ready-
to-wear clothing as well as a couture line, as she did during her apprenticeship with Gianni and in
her position as an accessory designer and creator of a line of children’s clothing in 1993.

Donatella’s camaraderie with celebrities, including Elton John, Elizabeth Hurley, and Courtney Love,
reflected her belief in the significance of uncompromising friendships. Madonna, Jon Bon Jovi, Sting,
and Trudy Skyler were among her closest confidantes. Like her older brother, she combined music
with the media and the spectacle of contemporary urban life. Donatella’s designs affirmed
sensuality, employing short skirts and plunging necklines as devices of freedom. “Fashion can be
freedom or it can be a way to live with no freedom,” she avowed in Interview.

Donatella married the former model Paul Beck, with whom she had two children—Allegra, her
uncle’s beneficiary, born in 1986, and Daniel, born in 1991.

Donatella Versace reveled in the attention she received in fashion and popular lifestyle magazines.
She pursued visibility at all levels of society and was always ready to convey the glamorous
extravagance that identified her company. Her fashion edicts remained consistent: “If I want to be
blonde, I am not going to be a medium blonde. I am going to be totally blonde. If I am going to wear
heels, they are not going to be two inches high. They are going to be much higher than that. It’s the
freedom of extremes that I love” (Interview). Her confident design ethic mirrored that of her late
brother, who became a creative genius in high-end apparel and of bold gestures in the media.

There have been several important museum exhibitions devoted to Versace - at the Museum at FIT,
at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and most recently in 2002-3 at the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the last of which also included Donatella’s work
Westwood Vivienne
Dame Vivienne Isabel Westwood DBE RDI (née Swire; born 8 April 1941) is a British fashion designer
and businesswoman, largely responsible for bringing modern punk and new wave fashions into the
mainstream.[1]

Westwood came to public notice when she made clothes for Malcolm McLaren's boutique in the
King's Road, which became known as SEX. Their ability to synthesise clothing and music shaped the
1970s UK punk scene which was dominated by McLaren's band, the Sex Pistols. She viewed punk as
a way of "seeing if one could put a spoke in the system".[2]

Westwood opened four shops in London and eventually expanded throughout the United Kingdom
and the world, selling an increasingly varied range of merchandise, some of which promoted her
many political causes such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, climate change and civil rights
groups.
Early years

Westwood was born in the village of Tintwistle, Cheshire,[N 1] on 8 April 1941,[3] the daughter of
Gordon Swire and Dora Swire (née Ball), who had married two years previously, two weeks after the
outbreak of World War II.[4] At the time of Vivienne's birth, her father was employed as a
storekeeper in an aircraft factory; he had previously worked as a greengrocer.[4]

In 1958, her family moved to Harrow, Middlesex, and Westwood took a jewellery and silversmith
course at the University of Westminster, then known as the Harrow Art School,[5] but left after one
term, saying: "I didn't know how a working-class girl like me could possibly make a living in the art
world".[6] After taking up a job in a factory and studying at a teacher-training college, she became a
primary school teacher. During this period, she created her own jewellery, which she sold at a stall
on Portobello Road.[3]

In 1962, she met Derek Westwood, a Hoover factory apprentice, in Harrow.[7] They married on 21
July 1962; Westwood made her own wedding dress.[7] In 1963, she gave birth to a son, Benjamin
(Ben) Westwood.[7]
Malcolm McLaren

Westwood's marriage to Derek ended after she met Malcolm McLaren. Westwood and McLaren
moved into a council flat in Clapham, where their son Joseph Corré was born in 1967.[8] Westwood
continued to teach until 1971 and also created clothes which McLaren designed. McLaren became
manager of the punk band the Sex Pistols and subsequently the two garnered attention as the band
wore Westwood's and McLaren's designs.
Punk era
Westwood was one of the architects of the punk fashion phenomenon of the 1970s, saying "I was
messianic about punk, seeing if one could put a spoke in the system in some way".[7] The store that
she co-managed with McLaren, SEX, was a meeting place for early members of the London punk
scene. Westwood also inspired the style of punk icons, such as Viv Albertine, who wrote in her
memoir, "Vivienne and Malcolm use clothes to shock, irritate and provoke a reaction but also to
inspire change. Mohair jumpers, knitted on big needles, so loosely that you can see all the way
through them, T-shirts slashed and written on by hand, seams and labels on the outside, showing the
construction of the piece; these attitudes are reflected in the music we make. It's OK to not be
perfect, to show the workings of your life and your mind in your songs and your clothes."[9]
Fashion collections
The 'Mini-Crini,' 1985-87

Westwood's designs were independent and represented a statement of her own values. She
collaborated on occasions with Gary Ness, who assisted Westwood with inspirations and titles for
her collections.[10]

McLaren and Westwood's first fashion collection to be shown to the media and potential
international buyers was Pirate. Subsequently, their partnership, which was underlined by the fact
that both their names appeared on all labelling, produced collections in Paris and London with the
thematic titles Savages (shown late 1981), Buffalo/Nostalgia Of Mud (shown spring 1982), Punkature
(shown late 1982), Witches (shown early 1983) and Worlds End 1984 (later renamed Hypnos, shown
late 1983).[11] After the partnership with McLaren was dissolved, Westwood showed one more
collection under the Worlds End label: "Clint Eastwood" (late 1984-early 1985).[12]

She dubbed the period 1981-85 "New Romantic" and 1988–91 as "The Pagan Years" during which
"Vivienne's heroes changed from punks and ragamuffins to 'Tatler' girls wearing clothes that
parodied the upper class". From 1985 to 1987, Westwood took inspiration from the ballet Petrushka
to design the mini-crini, an abbreviated version of the Victorian crinoline.[13] Its mini-length,
bouffant silhouette inspired the puffball skirts widely presented by more established designers such
as Christian Lacroix.[14] The mini-crini was described in 1989 as a combination of two conflicting
ideals - the crinoline, representing a "mythology of restriction and encumbrance in woman's dress",
and the miniskirt, representing an "equally dubious mythology of liberation".[15]

In 2007, Westwood was approached by the Chair of King's College London, Patricia Rawlings, to
design an academic gown for the college after it had successfully petitioned the Privy Council for the
right to award degrees.[16] In 2008, the Westwood-designed academic dresses for King's College
were unveiled. On the gowns, Westwood commented: "Through my reworking of the traditional
robe I tried to link the past, the present and the future. We are what we know."[16]
Academic dress of King's College London in different colours, designed and presented by Vivienne
Westwood in 2008.

In July 2011, Westwood's collections were presented at The Brandery fashion show in Barcelona.[17]
Westwood worked closely with Richard Branson to design uniforms for Virgin Atlantic crew. The
uniform for the female crew consisted of a red suit, which accentuated the women's curves and
hips, and had strategically placed darts around the bust area. The men's uniform consisted of a grey
and burgundy three-piece suit with details on the lapels and pockets. Westwood and Branson were
both passionate about using sustainable materials throughout their designs to reduce the impact on
the environment and so used recycled polyester. Before fully launching the designs, the two
released some for a trial period with pilots and cabin crew and made changes using the feedback
they received.[18]

Worth Charles Fredrick

Charles Frederick Worth, the designer who dominated Parisian fashion in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, was born in Bourne, Lincolnshire, England, on October 13, 1825. As a young
man, Worth worked as an apprentice and clerk for two London textile merchants. In addition to
gaining a thorough knowledge of fabrics and the business of supplying dressmakers during this time,
he also visited the National Gallery and other collections to study historic portraits. Elements of the
sitters’ dresses in these paintings would later provide inspiration for Worth’s own designs, for both
fashionable ensembles and masquerade costumes.

Worth relocated to Paris in 1845. Despite early struggles, he found work with Gagelin, a prominent
firm that sold textile goods, shawls, and some ready-made garments. Worth became Gagelin’s
leading salesman and eventually opened a small dressmaking department for the company, his first
position as a professional dressmaker. He contributed to the reputation of the firm with prize-
winning designs displayed in the Great Exhibition in London (1851) and the Exposition Universelle in
Paris (1855). The designer opened his own firm with a business partner in 1858.

Success in Paris
Worth’s rise as a designer coincided with the establishment of the Second Empire in France. The
restoration of a royal house in 1852, with Napoleon III (1808–1873) as the new emperor, once again
made Paris an imperial capital and the setting for numerous state occasions. Napoleon III
implemented a grand vision for both Paris and France, initiating changes and modernization that
revitalized the French economy and made Paris into a showpiece of Europe. The demand for luxury
goods, including textiles and fashionable dress, reached levels that had not been seen since before
the French Revolution (1789–99). When Napoleon III married Empress Eugénie (1826–1920), her
tastes set the style at court (1978.403; 01.21). The empress’ patronage ensured Worth’s success as a
popular dressmaker from the 1860s onward.

Worth’s designs are notable for his use of lavish fabrics and trimmings, his incorporation of elements
of historic dress, and his attention to fit. While the designer still created one-of-a-kind pieces for his
most important clients, he is especially known for preparing a variety of designs that were shown on
live models at the House of Worth. Clients made their selections and had garments tailor-made in
Worth’s workshop.
Although Worth was not the first or only designer to organize his business in this way, his aggressive
self-promotion earned him the titles “father of haute couture” and “the first couturier.” By the
1870s, Worth’s name frequently appeared in ordinary fashion magazines, spreading his fame to
women beyond courtly circles.

The House of Worth

The large number of surviving Worth garments in the permanent collection of The Costume
Institute, as well as in other institutions in the United States, is testament to Worth’s immense
popularity among wealthy American patrons, as well as European royalty and aristocrats. Many
clients traveled to Paris to purchase entire wardrobes from the House of Worth. For the wealthy
woman, a complete wardrobe would consist of morning, afternoon, and evening dresses
(C.I.53.63a,b; 49.3.25a, b), and lavish “undress” items such as tea gowns and nightgowns, which
were worn only in the privacy of one’s home. Women also looked to Worth to supply gowns for
special occasions, including weddings (C.I.41.14.1) and ornate masquerade balls (1994.462a,b), a
favorite entertainment in both the United States and Europe. Worth’s clients also included stars of
the theater and concert stage. He supplied performance costumes and personal wardrobes for
leading actresses and singers such as Sarah Bernhardt, Lillie Langtry, Nellie Melba, and Jenny Lind.

The House of Worth Continues

With his talent for design and promotion, Charles Frederick Worth built his design house into a huge
business during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. His sons, Gaston-Lucien (1853–1924) and
Jean-Philippe (1856–1926), took over their father’s business following his death in 1895 and
succeeded in maintaining his high standards. Jean-Philippe’s designs in particular follow his father’s
aesthetic, with his use of dramatic fabrics and lavish trimmings (1976.258.1a,b; C.I.46.4.20a-c). The
house flourished during the sons’ tenure and into the 1920s. The great fashion dynasty finally came
to an end in 1952 when Charles Frederick Worth’s great-grandson, Jean-Charles (1881–1962), retired
from the family business.

Yamamoto Yohji

Sabyasachi Mukherjee
Sabyasachi Mukherjee (born 23 February 1974) is an Indian fashion designer, jewellery
designer,retailer and couturier from Kolkata,India. Since 1999, he has sold designer merchandise
using the label Sabyasachi. Mukherjee is one of the Associate Designer Members of Fashion Design
Council of India and the youngest board member of the National Museum of Indian Cinema.[1] He
has designed costumes for Bollywood films such as Guzaarish, Baabul, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag,
Raavan, and English Vinglish.
Early life

Sabsyasachi's mother comes from a super rich family as cited by him on Band Bajaa Bride. He
bragged about it on the BBB episode, that his father was extremely good looking & was from a
middle class family. However, there is no evidence to prove that.
Career
Models walk for SabyaSachi Couture.

During the summer of 1999, Sabyasachi Mukerjee graduated from the National Institute of Fashion
Technology India. Four months later, he started his eponymous label which began with a workforce
of three people. In 2001, he won the Femina British Council’s most outstanding young Designer of
India award,[4] which took him to London for an internship with Georgina von Etzdorf, an eclectic
designer based in Salisbury. Returning home with ideas, Sabyasachi started retailing at all major
stores in India.

In 2002, Sabyasachi Mukerjee participated at the India Fashion Week which got positive feedbacks
from the press. During the spring of 2003, he made his first international runway, with the "Grand
Winner Award" at the Mercedes Benz New Asia Fashion week in Singapore, which paved his way to a
workshop in Paris by Jean Paul Gaultier and Azzedine Alaia. In his collection "Kora" at the Lakme
Fashion Week 2003, he used unbleached and hand woven fabrics with Kantha and other hand
embroideries.

In 2004, Sabyasachi took a step ahead with Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week and The Miami Fashion
Week[5] with a bohemian take on Indian textiles and his collection was called "The Frog Princess".
His significant achievements included his coveted showing in Browns earning him a retail place at
the tiny London store voted by Vogue as the best shopping destination in the world, thereby
establishing himself as one of the most promising young designers for years to come.

In 2005, his spring-summer collection, "The Nair Sisters" was inspired by hand block printing,
embroideries, bagru prints and the extensive use of cotton and other hand woven fabrics. The
collection was sold at Browns & Selfridges in London. He was requested to showcase his collections
at the prestigious Oxford University annual black tie charity dinner fashion show.

2006, Sabyasachi’s debut Spring Summer collection’07 at New York Fashion Week earned him critical
acclaim and his label started selling world-wide. The essence of this collection was based on folklore,
glamour, simplicity, modern architecture and intricate detailing. There was a marked influence of
paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth century like Brueghel, Claude Monet and others. He
used dark jeweled colors with muted shades accentuated with subtle texturing and indigenous
embroidery. He is the only Indian designer to be a part of all three leading fashion weeks: New York,
Milan and London. Sabyasachi believes that the unique positioning of Indian designers is due to the
exclusivity of his homeland with its rich history and culture. He believes that Indian designers bring a
flavor to the west that is no longer perceived as only exotic but also a rich blend of individuality and
sensitivity.

2007, Sabyasachi participated at the New York and at the London Fashion Weeks plus Bridal Asia
2007, Lakme India Fashion Week and the Vogue Launch event in India. His "Sanctuary" collection
showcased at Lakme Fashion Week Fall Winter 08 received positive reviews from the fashion editor
of the New York Times, Suzy Menkes.[6]
Sabyasachi closed the third edition of PCJ Delhi Couture Week (8–12 August 2012) with his New
Moon collection inspired by the flavours of five cities of the world- straitjacket discipline of New
York, the nostalgia of the British Raj in Kolkata, the subversive decadence of Berlin, the romanticism
of Paris and bohemian flair of Barcelona. Bollywood star Sridevi was the showstopper & walked the
ramp for the designer in a sari.[7][8] The designer is showcasing this collection in UAE as well.[9]
Sabyasachi launched in 2008 a line of jewelry exclusively designed by himself, in association with the
GAJA brand. The collection was showcased at the Vogue Wedding Show 2016.[10] He launched his
exclusive menswear collection featuring Sherwanis, Kurtas and headgear at the Lakme Fashion Week
Spring Summer 09 Grand Finale show. He also started a kids wear line under the label Chota Sabhya.

In 2012, the designer styled a calendar for which Bollywood actress Neha Dhupia dressed up as
famous painter Frida Kahlo,[11] who has been the designer's inspiration for the Grand Finale at
WIFW Autumn-Winter 2011 where the models walked the ramp wearing Frida Kahlo-esque rose
headbands and wire-rimmed glasses.[12]

Sabyasachi Mukherjee's Autumn Winter 2015 collection at Amazon India Couture Week (AICW) was
a collaboration with French luxury footwear and fashion designer Christian Louboutin.[13][14] 80
pairs of shoes, both for men and women, all embroidered with the quintessential Sabyasachi
embroidery and embellished with hand-placed sequins, were created for the show. Louboutin also
modified his signature Victoria heel for the collection, to be embroidered with the signature
Sabyasachi embroidery using acid dyed burnt zardozi and vintage Parsi gara.[15].The designer has
exclusively collaborated with Bergdorf Goodman New York for handcrafted pieces of fine and
bohemian jewellery during January to March 2020.[16]
Design philosophy
Noyonika Chatterji walks in SabyaSachi Couture.

Sabyasachi's design philosophy is "personalized imperfection of the human hand". Deserts, gypsies,
prostitutes, antique textiles and cultural traditions of his home town, Kolkata, have been a lifelong
inspiration for this designer who believes that "clothes should just be an extension of one's
intellect". He uses unusual fabrics, texturing and detailing, fusion of styles, patch-work with
embellishments in a vibrant colors. His creations evoke images of ancient and medieval ages. He
describes his own collections as "an International styling with an Indian soul".

He designs crafted bridal wear and rigorously structured pieces.[17] On occasion, to the delight of
his global audiences, the designer is known to draw inspirations from the wider world, such as
exotic, indigenous ethnic European art such as the colourscapes of French impressionists like Monet
and Henry Matisse in his clothes.[18]

He pioneered the use of high-end luxury Indian textiles in a modern context. His unique contribution
was the use of classical methods like bandhani, gotawork, block printing, hand dyeing etc. in
construction of modern silhouettes. Sabyasachi is especially famous for Indian Bridal Wear.[19]
Manish Arora
Manish Arora is an Indian fashion designer based in New Delhi. In early 2011, he was appointed creative
director of the womenswear collection of the French fashion house Paco Rabanne,[1] although he left the
company in May 2012.[2]

Born and brought up in Mumbai, Manish was studying, when he decided to change his career path and applied
for the National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi. He graduated in 1994 after winning the Best
Student Award.

Career

Model in a Manish Arora design (Spring 2007 collection) at London Fashion Week

In 1997 Manish launched his own label "Manish Arora" and started retailing in India.[3] Three years later, he
participated in the first-ever India Fashion Week held in New Delhi and represented India at the Hong Kong
Fashion Week.[citation needed]

Arora launched his second label, "Fish Fry", in 2001.[4] This sportswear-styled line was created in association
with the athletic apparel manufacturer Reebok.[5] In 2002, Manish opened his first flagship store, Manish
Arora Fish Fry, in New Delhi and in the following year opened a second store in Mumbai. Another successful
showing at India Fashion Week (2003) led to a stocking deal with the fashion house Maria Luisa (Paris) and the
beginning of a successful export business.

During 2004 he was awarded the Best Women's Prêt Designer at the first ever Indian Fashion Awards' 2004
held in Bombay and MC2 Diffusion Paris started representing the label for the export business. The following
year Manish participated in the Miami Fashion Week in May 2005 where he was presented with the designer's
choice for Best Collection Award.

He had a successful debut at the London Fashion Week in September 2005 and received an overwhelming
response from the press as well as the buyers. He opened a new store at Lodhi Colony Market in New Delhi in
December 2005. Arora exhibited some of his work at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London for an exhibition
called "Global Local" in association with the British Council, India.

A fashion jury in a leading Indian publication Outlook designated him "Best Indian Fashion Designer" and
featured him on the cover of its March 2006 issue. Manish opened his first Manish Arora franchise store in
Villa Moda, Kuwait and another Manish Arora Fish Fry store at Crescent at The Qutub, New Delhi in 2006.

In 2007 the first Fish Fry for Reebok concept store opened at the Garden of Five Senses, New Delhi, and Arora
teamed up with make-up and cosmetics company MAC for designing a signature collection. He has also
collaborated with Swatch for a limited edition of watches. In 2008, once again, Reebok launched the 'RBK Fish
Fry Collection 2008', a lifestyle range designed by Manish Arora.

"Indian by Manish Arora", a brand designed for the growing Indian market for women's wear, is licensed to
another fashion company. Manish was invited to show his collection at the “Fashion in Motion” exhibition held
at Victoria and Albert Museum, London in September 2007.[3] By 2009 Manish owned four stores in India and
sold his collections to more than 80 retailers worldwide.[4][6] The designer has also entered into a joint
venture with BIBA Apparels Pvt. Ltd. to further expand the label.[7]

In 2012, Arora previewed his jewellery line in association with label Amrapali comprising a range of hand
jewellery, neckpieces and pendants.[8]

Some of his work was displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in the Fabric of India 2014-15 Exhibition.
[citation needed]

Style

Manish Arora is regarded by many as "the John Galliano of India".[9] He is known for his psychedelic colour
palette and kitsch motifs in garments that combine traditional Indian crafts like embroidery, appliqué and
beading with Western silhouettes.[5]

Yves Saint Laurent*

yves sAint lAurent (1936–2008) is one of the greatest names in fashion history. Along with Christian
Dior and Coco Chanel, he was part of a trio of couturiers who epitomized the best of twentieth-
century fashion and style. A prodigious sketcher, he was never an “inventor” of styles, nor was he a
master craftsman. Instead, like Chanel before him, Saint Laurent was a modernist who re-
contextualized many items of functional clothing, such as safari jackets and men’s tuxedos, into chic
and feminine wardrobe staples. Saint Laurent also produced sweepingly exotic and romantic clothes
inspired by such diverse sources as Russian peasantry or the demimonde of the Belle Epoque. Few
couturiers could match Saint Laurent’s blend of perfectly proportioned cuts and brilliant color
combinations.Although known to the world at large by only three initials — YSL — the designer was
born Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent in Oran, Algeria. A precocious talent, he moved to
Paris to pursue a fashion career. When he was just seventeen, Saint Laurent was hired as Christian
Dior’s assistant; a mere four years later, following Dior’s sudden death, he was named head of Dior’s
house. While his first collection was a triumph, subsequent seasons were viewed as too avant garde.
After a traumatic stint in the army and his firing from Dior, Saint Laurent opened his own fashion
house in 1961 with Pierre Bergé, his longtime partner.His ready-to-wear line, Rive Gauche, which
debuted in 1966, set the template for other French couturiers, and for four decades, until his
retirement in 2002, Saint Laurent changed the course of fashion. He created a number of landmark
styles: his odes to art, from Piet Mondrian shift dresses in 1965 to his 1980 Picasso collection; his “Le
Smoking” women’s tailored tuxedo suit in 1966; his spring 1971 collection, inspired by 1940s
fashion; and his Ballets russes (1976–1977) and Chinese (1977–1978) collections. Saint Laurent was
also noted for his use of ethnic models at his runway shows and for the bevy of inspiring women —
from Betty Catroux to CatherineDeneuve to Loulou de la Falaise — who were enmeshed in both his
designing and personal lives.So celebrated was Saint Laurent during his lifetime that, in 1983, he was
the first living fashion designer to have a solo exhibition of his work organized by the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. While they are more common today, such exhibitions were controversial at the
time. Saint Laurent died in 2008. His death was a widely reported event, particularly in France, and
his funeral was attended by leading political figures and celebrities alike. —P.M.
“The most consistently celebrated and influential designer of the past twenty-five years, Yves Saint
Laurent can be credited with both spurring the couture’s rise from its sixties ashes and with finally
rendering ready-to-wear reputable.” „Als beständigstem und einflussreichstem Modeschöpfer der
letzten 25 Jahre kann Yves Saint Laurent das Verdienst zugesprochen werden, die Auferstehung der
Couture aus der Asche der Sixties beflügelt und Prêt-à-porter-Mode endgültig salonfähig gemacht zu
haben.“« Couturier le plus adulé et le plus influent de ces vingt-cinq dernières années, Yves Saint
Laurent a fait renaître de ses cendres l’esprit haute couture des années 60, et a fini par redorer la
réputation du prêt-à-porter. » — Caroline rennolds Milbank, author

Louis Vuitton*

Born in 1821 in Anchay, France, Louis Vuitton worked as an apprentice for the packing-case maker
M. Maréchal, where he created personal luggage for Empress Eugénie before setting up his own
business in 1854. Vuitton’s career as a craftsman trunk maker quickly brought him an ever-
expanding roster of clients, requiring him to move to workshops at Asnières, on the outskirts of
Paris, in 1859. The workshops remain at the original site, and this is where all the luggage and
accessories are still made. Annexed to the workshops is the family home, which is now a museum.

Vuitton’s first innovation was to pioneer a gray, waterproof canvas (Trianon), which was stretched
across the poplar wood structure of the trunk, eliminating the need for a dome-shaped lid, which
had been essential for repelling rain from the trunk during transit atop a horse-drawn carriage. This
innovation enabled porters to stack trunks one on top of the other, allowing travelers to take more
luggage with them on trips.

Vuitton’s success in the luxury luggage market was due to his willingness to modify and custom-build
luggage that was adaptable to new forms of transportation. For example, cabin trunks for ocean
liners were designed to fit under daybeds so as to maximize use of space. Yet what the luggage
contained was never a secondary concern, but of equal value in the definition of first-class travel. To
meet the needs of these elite travelers, Vuitton devised the wardrobe trunk with interior drawers
and hanging space with the advice of the couturier Charles Frederick Worth.

As the company prospered, its products were widely imitated, forcing Vuitton to change the canvas
design from a striped to a checkerboard (or Daumier) design. His son Georges created the famous
monogram canvas in 1896. The design was intended primarily to combat commercial piracy,
although its orientalist, decorative design also reflected the fashion for all things Japanese at the end
of the nineteenth century. Beyond the initials that feature as a tribute to his father, Georges’s design
bears three abstracted flowers, based upon a Japanese mon or family crest that, not unlike a coat of
arms, was traditionally used to identify items made for and owned by a particular family.
International stature was assured for the company by the opening of a London store in 1885, a
French store opposite the Grand Hotel in 1871, and distribution in America through Wanamaker’s
department store in 1898. Design awards at the Exposition International d’Industrie et des Arts
Decoratives of 1925 secured the company’s reputation for grand luxe in the art deco style.

Later in the twentieth century, handbags, wallets, and other small leather goods became
increasingly important parts of the company’s product line, as luxe travel with numerous trunks and
suitcases became largely a thing of the past. In 1997, the company hired the American fashion
designer Marc Jacobs to design accessories and clothing. A commercial and critical success, the
ready-to-wear collections have been central to the continued success of Louis Vuitton. Limited
edition pieces produced in collaboration with other creative artists have resulted in some of the
wittiest and shrewdest reworkings of brand identity. Fashion designer Stephen Sprouse (2001),
British fashion illustrator Julie Verhoeven (2002), and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami (2003) have
created some of the most popular designs.

The Stephen Sprouse collaboration was inspired by a visit Marc Jacobs made to Charlotte
Gainsbourg’s apartment, where he noticed a Louis Vuitton trunk that had once belonged to her
father, the French singer Serge Gainsbourg. Gainsbourg had so disliked the status implied by the
canvas design that he had tried to erase the symbols with black paint. Yet as the design is produced
as a woven jacquard, he only made the design appear subtler, and in turn, more sophisticated.
Sprouse was inspired to add graffiti over the monogram canvas in fluorescent colors as an ironic act
of defilement. Yet the graffiti design only served to reinforce the status of the brand and its
association with street credibility. Even more successful was Murakami’s 2003 redesign of the
famous Louis Vuitton monogram logo, using a radiant palette of colors. This was followed by two
additional collections, featuring cherries and animé-like symbols that brought J-Pop into high
fashion.

The consumption of luxury brands by American hiphop performers, termed bling-bling, created a
new and younger market for Louis Vuitton. This new market was memorably represented by the
performing artist Lil’ Kim, who posed on the cover of the November 1999 issue of Interview
magazine naked, her body painted with the Louis Vuitton monogram. In recent years, head designer
Marc Jacobs has also transformed himself into a hard-bodied sex symbol, given to posing semi-
naked, adorned with tattoos.

Because they are such desirable status symbols, Louis Vuitton products are subject to intense
counterfeiting, which the company vigorously combats. Vuitton remains the most prestigious and
easily recognized brand of luggage.

Sabyasachi Mukherjee (born 23 February 1974) is an Indian fashion designer, jewellery

designer,retailer and couturier from Kolkata, India. Since 1999, he has sold designer merchandise
using the label Sabyasachi. Mukherjee is one of the Associate Designer Members of Fashion Design
Council of India and the youngest board member of the National Museum of Indian Cinema.[1] He
has designed costumes for Bollywood films such as Guzaarish, Baabul, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag,
Raavan, and English Vinglish.

During the summer of 1999, Sabyasachi Mukerjee graduated from the National Institute of Fashion
Technology India. Four months later, he started his eponymous label which began with a workforce
of three people. In 2001, he won the Femina British Council’s most outstanding young Designer of
India award,[4] which took him to London for an internship with Georgina von Etzdorf, an eclectic
designer based in Salisbury. Returning home with ideas, Sabyasachi started retailing at all major
stores in India.

In 2002, Sabyasachi Mukerjee participated at the India Fashion Week which got positive feedbacks
from the press. During the spring of 2003, he made his first international runway, with the "Grand
Winner Award" at the Mercedes Benz New Asia Fashion week in Singapore, which paved his way to a
workshop in Paris by Jean Paul Gaultier and Azzedine Alaia. In his collection "Kora" at the Lakme
Fashion Week 2003, he used unbleached and hand woven fabrics with Kantha and other hand
embroideries.

Sabyasachi's design philosophy is "personalized imperfection of the human hand". Deserts, gypsies,
prostitutes, antique textiles and cultural traditions of his home town, Kolkata, have been a lifelong
inspiration for this designer who believes that "clothes should just be an extension of one's
intellect". He uses unusual fabrics, texturing and detailing, fusion of styles, patch-work with
embellishments in a vibrant colors. His creations evoke images of ancient and medieval ages. He
describes his own collections as "an International styling with an Indian soul".

He designs crafted bridal wear and rigorously structured pieces. On occasion, to the delight of his
global audiences, the designer is known to draw inspirations from the wider world, such as exotic,
indigenous ethnic European art such as the colourscapes of French impressionists like Monet and
Henry Matisse in his clothes.

He pioneered the use of high-end luxury Indian textiles in a modern context. His unique contribution
was the use of classical methods like bandhani, gotawork, block printing, hand dyeing etc. in
construction of modern silhouettes. Sabyasachi is especially famous for Indian Bridal Wear.

Calvin Klien
Calvin Richard Klein (born November 19, 1942) is an American fashion designer who launched the
company that would later become Calvin Klein Inc., in 1968. In addition to clothing, he also has given
his name to a range of perfumes, watches, and jewellery.
Klein was born on November 19, 1942 to a Jewish family in the Bronx, the son of Flore (née Stern)
(1909–2006) and Leo Klein.[1][2] Leo had immigrated to New York from Hungary, while Flore was
born in the United States to immigrants from Galicia (Eastern Europe) and Buchenland, Austrian
Empire (modern day-Ukraine).[3][4]
Klein went to Isobel Rooney Middle School 80 (M.S.80) as a child. He attended the High School of Art
and Design in Manhattan and matriculated at, but never graduated from, New York's Fashion
Institute of Technology, receiving an honorary doctorate in 2003. He did his apprenticeship in 1962
at an old line cloak-and-suit manufacturer, Dan Millstein,[5] and spent five years designing at other
New York City shops. In 1968, he launched his first company with a childhood friend,[6] Barry K.
Schwartz.[6][7]
Klein was one of several design leaders raised in the Jewish immigrant community in the Bronx,
along with Robert Denning and Ralph Lauren. He became a protégé of Baron de Gunzburg,[7]
through whose introductions he became the toast of the New York elite fashion scene even before
he had his first mainstream success with the launch of his first jeans line. He was immediately
recognized for his talent after his first major showing at New York Fashion Week. He was hailed as
the new Yves Saint Laurent, and was noted for his clean lines.
Calvin Klein's unwavering vision of minimal designs and wearable urban styles are part of what make
him an icon: his widely recognized marketing genius is also part of the package.
Calvin Klein started out as a coat company and then moved to sportswear. Back in the late '70s, Klein
launched a designer jeans line, which not only broke down price barriers by offering a lower-priced
line but spawned sexy, controversial ads featuring teenage model Brooke Shields (and, later, actor
Mark Wahlberg).
Klein has also left his mark with some industry firsts, including making utilitarian men's underwear
sexy and the first unisex fragrance, CK One. An influence to many of the minimal-chic designers of
the late 20th century, including Miuccia Prada and Donna Karan, Calvin Klein remains one of the
most recognizable designer names in the world.
I've always had a clear design philosophy and point of view about being modern, sophisticated, sexy,
clean and minimal. They all apply to my design aesthetic. -- Calvin Klein in Women's Wear Daily.
Having initially focused on women’s coats and coordinates, Klein eventually branched out into
additional lady’s apparel that could be mixed and matched, cultivating a minimalist, streamlined look
that relied on sublime tailoring and fabric choices. Later in the decade he branched into menswear
and jeans, eventually becoming a major player in a denim market dominated then by the likes of
Gloria Vanderbilt, Jordache and Sasson. He hired fashion luminaries to help shape his vision, with
some crediting former Vogue editor Francis Stein as being the force behind articulating the
sensuality that Klein would become known for. By the 1980s, Klein’s brand was also known for
underwear and luxurious perfumes and colognes with corresponding ad campaigns. In the following
decade, the label branched out further into home apparel.

Ralph Lauren
Ralph Lauren was born in The Bronx, New York City,[4][5] to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants,[6][7][8]
[9] Frieda (Cutler) and Frank Lifshitz , an artist and house painter,[10][11] from Pinsk, Belarus.[12]
[13] He is the youngest of four siblings[14][15]—two brothers and one sister.
Lauren attended day school followed by the Manhattan Talmudical Academy, before eventually
graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1957.[16] He went to Baruch College, at the City
University of New York (CUNY) where he studied business, although he dropped out after two years.
Drawing on his interests in sports, Lauren named his first full line of menswear 'Polo' in 1968. He
worked out of a single "drawer" from a showroom in the Empire State Building and made deliveries
to stores himself.[19] By 1969, the Manhattan department store Bloomingdale's sold Lauren's men
line exclusively. It was the first time that Bloomingdale's had given a designer their own in-store
boutique.
In 1971, Ralph Lauren Corporation launched a line of tailored shirts for women, which introduced
the Polo player emblem to the world for the first time, appearing on the shirt's cuff. The first full
women's collection was launched the following year. In 1971 Lauren also opened a store on Rodeo
Drive in Beverly Hills, California; this was the first freestanding store for an American designer.[
Ralph Lauren opened his first flagship in the Rhinelander mansion, on Madison Avenue and 72nd
Street in New York City in 1986. Lauren re-created the building's original opulence with a young
design consultant named Naomi Leff, with whom he had previously worked on Ralph Lauren Home.
[23] The Polo Sport line was introduced in 1992 followed by over ten additional lines and acquired
brands, including Ralph Lauren Purple Label in 1995 and Lauren Ralph Lauren in 1996.
In 1970, Lauren was awarded the Coty Award for his men's designs. Following this recognition, he
released a line of women's suits tailored in a classic men's style. Then in 1972, Lauren released a
short-sleeve cotton shirt in 24 colors. This design, emblazoned with the company's famed logo—that
of a polo player, created by tennis pro René Lacoste—became the brand’s signature look.
Lauren is known for capitalizing on an aspirational style and key insignia which evokes the British
gentry while also referencing the aesthetics of the American upper class. His fashion ideas have been
criticized by some for not being particularly innovative while also embraced by scores of consumers
who prefer more approachable looks. Lauren subsequently broadened his brand to include a luxury
clothing line known as Ralph Lauren Purple, a rough and rustic line of apparel dubbed RRL, a home-
furnishing collection called Ralph Lauren Home and a set of fragrances. Polo currently produces
clothing for men, women and children and has hundreds of internationally placed stores, including
factory stores that produce the majority of his sales domestically.
Having initially focused on women’s coats and coordinates, Klein eventually branched out into
additional lady’s apparel that could be mixed and matched, cultivating a minimalist, streamlined look
that relied on sublime tailoring and fabric choices. Later in the decade he branched into menswear
and jeans, eventually becoming a major player in a denim market dominated then by the likes of
Gloria Vanderbilt, Jordache and Sasson. He hired fashion luminaries to help shape his vision, with
some crediting former Vogue editor Francis Stein as being the force behind articulating the
sensuality that Klein would become known for. By the 1980s, Klein’s brand was also known for
underwear and luxurious perfumes and colognes with corresponding ad campaigns. In the following
decade, the label branched out further into home apparel.

Alexander McQueen
Alexander McQueen was a London-based, English fashion designer who was head designer of the
Louis Vuitton Givenchy fashion line, before starting his own line.
Lee Alexander McQueen was born on March 17, 1969, into a working-class family living in public
housing in London's Lewisham district. His father, Ronald, was a cab driver, and his mother, Joyce,
taught social science. On their small incomes, they supported McQueen and his five siblings.
At age 16, McQueen dropped out of school. He found work on Savile Row, a street in London's
Mayfair district famous for offering made-to-order men's suits. He worked first with the tailor shop
Anderson and Shephard, and then moved to nearby Gieves and Hawkes.
Deciding to further his clothes-making career, McQueen moved on from Savile Row and began
working with theatrical costume designers Angels and Bermans. The dramatic style of the clothing
he made there would become a signature of his later independent design work. McQueen then left
London for a short stint in Milan, where he worked as a design assistant to Italian fashion designer
Romeo Gigli.
Upon his return to London, McQueen enrolled at Central Saint Martin's College of Art & Design, and
received his M.A. in fashion design in 1992. The collection he produced as the culminating project of
his degree was inspired by Jack the Ripper, and was famously bought in its entirety by the well-
known London stylist and eccentric Isabella Blow. She became a long-time friend of McQueen's, as
well as an advocate for his work.
Soon after obtaining his degree, McQueen started his own business designing clothes for women. He
met enormous success with the introduction of his "bumster" pants, so named because of their
extremely low-cut waistline. Only four years out of design school, McQueen was named Chief
Designer of Louis Vuitton-owned Givenchy, a French haute couture fashion house.
In 2000, Gucci bought a 51 percent stake in Alexander McQueen's private company, and provided
the capital for McQueen to expand his business. McQueen left Givenchy shortly thereafter. In 2003,
McQueen was declared International Designer of the Year by the Council of Fashion Designers of
America and a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by the Queen of
England, and won yet another British Designer of the Year honor. Meanwhile, McQueen opened
stores in New York, Milan, London, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
With the help of Gucci's investment, McQueen became more successful than ever. Already known
for the flair and passion of his shows, he produced even more interesting spectacles after leaving
Givenchy. For example, a hologram of model Kate Moss floated ethereally at the showing of his 2006
Fall/Winter line.
In 2007, the specter of death would come to haunt McQueen, first with the suicide of Isabella Blow.
The designer dedicated his 2008 Spring/Summer line to Blow, and said that her death "was the most
valuable thing I learnt in fashion." Just two years later, on February 2, 2010, McQueen's mother died.
One day before her funeral, on February 11, 2010, McQueen was found dead in his Mayfair, London
apartment. The cause of death was determined to be suicide.
McQueen's rise from lower-class high school dropout to internationally famous designer is a
remarkable story. His bold styles and fascinating shows inspired and wowed the world of fashion,
and his legacy lives on. Longtime co-designer Sarah Burton took over the still-operating Alexander
McQueen brand, and McQueen's contribution to fashion was honored by a 2011 exhibition of his
creations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Vivienne Westwood

Fashion designer Vivienne Westwood helped set the style for modern punk and New Wave music.
Considered one of the most unconventional and outspoken fashion designers in the world, Vivienne
Westwood rose to fame in the late 1970s when her early designs helped shape the look of the punk
rock movement.
Born Vivienne Isabel Swire on April 8, 1941, in the English town of Glossop in Derbyshire, Westwood
came from humble beginnings. Her father was a cobbler, while her mother helped the family keep
ends meet by working at a local cotton mill.
Her first marriage dissolved and she met Malcolm Mclaren, an art student and future manager of the
Sex Pistols. With Mclaren, Westwood had a second son, Joseph. Through her new partner,
Westwood, who'd begun making jewelry on the side, was introduced to a new world of creative
freedom and the power art had on the political landscape. "I latched onto Malcolm as somebody
who opened doors for me," Westwood said. "I mean, he seemed to know everything I needed at the
time."
In 1971, Mclaren opened a boutique shop at 430 Kings Road in London and started filling it with
Westwood's designs. While the name of the shop seemed to be in constant flux — it was changed
five times — it proved to be an important fashion center for the punk movement. When Mclaren
became the manager of the Sex Pistols, it was Westwood's designs that dressed the band and help it
carve out its identity.

But as the punk movement faded, Westwood was hardly content to rest on her laurels. She's
constantly been ahead of the curve, not just influencing fashion, but often times dictating it. After
her run with the Sex Pistols, Westwood went an entirely new direction with her Pirate collection of
frilly shirts and other attire. Her styles have also included the mini-crini of the 1980s and the frayed
tulle and tweed suit of the 1990s. She's even proved it's perfectly possible to make a subversive
statement with underwear. "Vivienne's effect on other designers has been rather like a laxative,"
English designer Jasper Conran once explained. "Vivienne does, and others follow."
Coupled with Westwood's unconventional style sense, is an outspokenness and daring that
demonstrates a certain level of fearlessness about her and her work. In one famous incident, she
impersonated Margaret Thatcher on the cover of a British magazine. To do so, she wore a suit
Thatcher had ordered but not yet received, an act that made Thatcher irate.
Still, Westwood's influence is hard to deny. Twice she has been named British designer of the year
and was awarded the O.B.E. (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 1992.
For more than 30 years, even after she had long made her fortune and fame, Westwood lived in the
same small South London apartment, paying just $400 a month for the home and riding her bike to
her studio in Battersea.

Valentino
Valentino Garavani is an Italian fashion designer best known as the founder of the Valentino SpA
company.
Fashion designer Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani was born on May 11, 1932, in Voghera,
Lombardy, Italy. He began working in the fashion industry at a young age, apprenticing under local
designers including his aunt Rosa. His formal training took place in Paris, at the École des Beaux-Arts
and the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. Valentino got his professional start as an
apprentice working in the salons of Jean Dessès and Guy Laroche.
Valentino left Paris in 1959 to open a fashion house in Rome. He modeled his business on the grand
houses he had seen in Paris. In his early shows, Valentino quickly gained recognition for his red
dresses, in a shade that became widely known as "Valentino red."

In 1960, Valentino met Giancarlo Giammetti in Rome. Giammetti, an architecture student, quickly
became Valentino's partner, both professionally and romantically. Together, the pair developed
Valentino SpA into an internationally recognized brand. Valentino's international debut took place in
1962, at the Pitti Palace in Florence. The show cemented the designer's reputation and attracted the
attention of socialites and aristocratic women from around the world. Within a few years,
Valentino's designs were considered the pinnacle of Italian couture. In 1967, he received the
prestigious Neiman Marcus Fashion Award. His client list included the Begum Aga Khan, Queen Paola
of Belgium and movie stars Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn.

Among Valentino's most prominent clients was Jacqueline Kennedy. Kennedy developed an interest
in the designer's work after admiring friends in several Valentino ensembles. In 1964, Kennedy
ordered six dresses in black and white, which she wore during the year following the assassination of
her husband, President John F. Kennedy. She would remain a friend and a client from that point on,
linking the Valentino name to her own iconic status in the fashion world. Valentino also designed the
dress that Kennedy wore when she wed Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in 1968.
In 1998, Valentino and Giammetti sold their company for approximately $300 million to the Italian
conglomerate HdP. In 2002, HdP sold the Valentino brand to Marzotto Apparel. Valentino remained
actively involved with the company throughout these changes in ownership.

In 2007, Valentino announced that he would hold his final haute couture show in January of the
following year. This final show, presented at the Musée Rodin in Paris, featured legendary models
including Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer and Eva Herzigova, who had worked with Valentino
throughout their runway careers

Yohi Yamamoto

Yohji Yamamoto is a Japanese fashion designer based in Tokyo and Paris. Considered a master tailor
alongside those such as Madeleine Vionnet, he is known for his avant-garde tailoring featuring
Japanese design aesthetics.
Yamamoto has won notable awards for his contributions to fashion, including the
Chevalier/Officier/Commandeur of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Medal of Honor with Purple
Ribbon, the Ordre national du Mérite, the Royal Designer for Industry and the Master of Design
award by Fashion Group International.
Born in Tokyo, Yamamoto graduated from Keio University with a degree in law in 1966. He gave up a
prospective legal career to assist his mother in her dressmaking business, from where he learned his
tailoring skills. He further studied fashion design at Bunka Fashion College, getting a degree in 1969.
Yohji Yamamoto is widely regarded as ranking among the greatest fashion designers of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He is one of the few in his profession who have
successfully broken the boundaries between commodity and art, by creating clothing that ranges
from basics like athletic shoes and denim jeans to couture-inspired gowns that are nothing short of
malleable mobile sculptures. Lauded as a blend of master craftsman and philosophical dreamer,
Yamamoto has balanced the seemingly incompatible extremes of fashion's competing scales.
Inspiration from the intangible, mainly images of historical dress from sources such as photographs,
has been a mainstay in Yamamoto's work. The crumpled collar in an August Sander portrait, the
gauzy dresses captured by Jacques-Henri Lartigue while vacationing on the Riviera, and the gritty
realism of Françoise Huguier's travels among the Inuit of the Arctic Circle are but a few examples. It
is not surprising that the riveting catalogs created for each of Yamamoto's high-end ready-to-wear
women's collections have included the work of such notable photographers as Nick Knight, Paolo
Roversi, Inez van Lamsweerde, and Vinoodh Matadin. Whether Yamamoto is evoking historicism via
the ancien régime or the belle epoque, or ethnic garments made of richly woven silks and woolens,
he has come to epitomize the vast range of creative possibilities in the art of dress
From the moment Kawakubo and Yamamoto presented their first fashion collections to an
international audience in the 1980s, they were defined as Japanese designers. Virtually every article
about them as well as the critical reviews of their collections began by describing them as
inseparable from and encapsulated in their Asian heritage. Many journalists inaccurately assumed
that they produced clothing worn by all Japanese people. The reality was that the loose, dark-
colored, and seemingly tattered garments were as startling to the average Japanese as they were to
the Western audiences that first viewed them. Although Yamamoto's work changed and evolved
over the next two decades, it retained several key elements- the ambiguities of gender, the
importance of black, and the aesthetics of deconstruction.
Yamamoto's professed love of and respect for women has not been evident to many because his
clothes were often devoid of Western-style gender markers. He expressed an aversion to overtly
sexualized females, and often dressed women in designs inspired by men's wear. Such cross-gender
role-playing has long been a part of Japanese culture, and a persistent theme among performers and
artists for centuries. The fact that Yamamoto on more than one occasion chose women as models
for his menswear fashion shows was another small piece of his sexual identity puzzle.
No color in the fashion palette has been as important in the work of Yohji Yamamoto as black. This
early unrelenting black-on-black aesthetic earned his devotees the nickname karasuzoku, or
members of the crow tribe.
The connection between deconstruction, originally a French philosophical movement, and
contemporary fashion design has yet to be fully explored by fashion historians. There is no direct
evidence that such ideas were the motivating force in the early designs of Yohji Yamamoto. It is
more likely that he combined a mélange of influences: the devastation and rapid rebuilding of Japan
in the postwar era; the revolt against bourgeois tastes; an affiliation with European street styles; and
a desire, like that of the early proponents of abstraction in fine art, to find a universal expression of
design by erasing elements that assign people to specific socioeconomic and gender roles.
The initial impact of Yamamoto's designs began to diminish as the 1980s came to a close; the
designer fell into a self-professed decline for the next few years. By the mid-1990s, however,
Yamamoto experienced a resurgence of creativity rare in contemporary fashion. His output was
vastly different from his work of a decade earlier, in that it fully embraced the most lyrical and
fleeting elements of historical modes. His designs became a blend of street-style realism and
Victorian romanticism, reshaped and reconfigured for a contemporary audience. At both extremes,
Yamamoto retained his very personal vision-creating clothes for an ideal woman who, according to
the couturier, does not exist.
Perhaps the most potent quality that Yamamoto displayed was his brilliant ability to recontextualize
the familiar into wearable creations that came as close to works of art as any clothing designed in
the early 2000s.
Yamamoto continued to evolve in the early 2000s. His spring 2003 collection was not shown during
the Paris ready-to-wear fashion week in October of 2002, but instead during the haute couture
presentations earlier that year. Simultaneously, he became the designer for a new line of clothing
produced in conjunction with the Adidas sportswear company called Y's 3. This agreement came
about after Yamamoto first designed an astoundingly successful set of trainers, athletic shoes, and
sports shoes for Adidas in 2001.
Karl Lagerfeld
Karl Lagerfeld was born on 10 September 1938 to a wealthy family in Hamburg, Germany. He moved
to Paris in 1952 and first came to the attention of the fashion world two years later when he won a
competition prize for his design of a woolen coat. In 1954 he was hired as a design assistant by
Pierre Balmain, one of the premier couture houses of the early postwar period. In 1958 he parted
ways with Balmain and became art director at the House of Patou, where he remained until 1962.
For most of the next fifteen years he designed for a number of companies and under a variety of
contractual and freelance agreements.
Known for his bold designs and constant reinvention, he was hailed in Vogue as the "unparalleled
interpreter of the mood of the moment." Lagerfeld died in Paris on February 19, 2019.

He was associated especially with Chloë (1963-1983), where he created styles that simultaneously
were elegant and focused on the young. Many of his most striking designs for Chloë had an art deco
flavor, being very streamlined and body conscious. He also utilized prints to excellent effect. At the
same time, he worked as a freelance designer for Krizia, Valentino, Ballantyne, and other companies.
Beginning in 1965 he designed furs for Fendi. His ability to design simultaneously for several
different houses has been a defining characteristic of his career; Lagerfeld became known as a man
who was never content to do just one thing at a time.
Lagerfeld probably is most admired for his work at Chanel, where in 1982-1983 he took over
responsibility for a company that had become somnolent, if not moribund, and very quickly made it
exciting again. Taking the basic vocabulary established by Coco Chanel, he modernized it,
introducing new materials, including denim, and exaggerating such details as the "double C" logo.
Remarkably, his work for Chanel has remained as vital in the twenty-first century as it was in the
mid-1980s.
In 1975 Lagerfeld formed his own company and in 1983 became artistic director of the House of
Chanel. While continuing his responsibilities at Chanel and at Fendi, he formed Karl Lagerfeld S.A.
and KL to market his own ready-to-wear lines. Karl Lagerfeld S.A. was acquired by Dunhill (the parent
company of Chloë) in 1992, and Lagerfeld returned to Chloë at that time and held the post of chief
designer until 1997, when he was replaced by Stella McCartney. When he left Chloë, he regained
control of the company bearing his own name; in the early 2000s Lagerfeld was designing for Karl
Lagerfeld/KL, Chanel, and Fendi. He has also designed costumes for many films and theatrical
productions.
In 1984, which he built around the idea of what he described as "intellectual sexiness." Over the
years, the brand developed a reputation for quality tailoring with bold ready-to-wear pieces like
cardigan jackets in bright colors. In 2005 Lagerfeld sold the label to Tommy Hilfiger.

Manish Arora
As one of the most widely recognised Indian designers in the world, Manish Arora boasts a
dedicated following and significant critical acclaim from a host of influential industry insiders.
Inducted into the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt à Porter des Couturiers in 2009, Arora was also invited
by the French minister for culture to exhibit his work for two months in the windows of the Palais
Royal in Paris.
The celebrated designer, who oversees the production of three in-house labels alongside an
eyewear range, was appointed as creative director of French fashion house Paco Rabanne in early
2011. After presenting his inaugural collection for Spring/Summer 2012, Arora left the position in
May 2012 to focus on growing his own business and in November that same year announced a joint
venture arrangement with retailer Biba Apparel to extend the brand’s operations in India.
Manish Arora is considered by many as “the John Galliano of India”. He is inspired by Indian cultural
heritage, but he presents his designs with a modern and international twist. Many of his designs are
embellished with traditional Indian crafts, including appliqué, beadwork and embroidery.

In his own words: “Fashion, for me, is not just clothing; – it’s the whole character. I build these
fictitious characters in my mind right from the beginning of the collection. I make them up in my
mind and work towards that personality that doesn’t exist. It’s a fantasy character, but I imagine
what that person would be like, and that’s the end result that you see in the shows”.