7.
Poiret had been more fortunate than his artist-neighbours. His unusual ingenuity, and an advance from his mother on his inheritance of fifty thousand francs, had ensured his rapid success. Within two years of joining the House of Worth, in 1903, he would open his own premises at 5, rue Auber, at the corner of the rue Scribe, attracting customers with his innovative window displays, which he created himself, using artfully placed natural foliage from the Forest of Fontainebleau. In autumn, he introduced golden leaves into assemblages of velvet and other fabrics; in winter, he draped white tulle and muslin against dried branches. As he himself eloquently remarked, he ‘dressed the passing moment’, capturing a mood of modernity in the making and ravishing all who passed his window. Soon ‘all Paris had stopped at least once’. In dressing the backdrop as well as the figure, Poiret was already anticipating the holistic approach to the stage and costume design which came to fruition in 1909 with the debut performances of the Ballets Russes. The production by Sergei Diaghilev and his set designer Léon Bakst would send the world mad for the ballet, and women from all over Paris to Poiret, who would make them clothes mimicking the exoticism of the Russian dancers’ costumes.
Poiret’s first employer, the couturier Jacques Doucet (known for his elegant, flimsy dresses in pastel-coloured, semi-transparent fabrics with ruffles and frills and sinuous curving lines), had realized early on that young Poiret’s interest in dress was essentially theatrical. He had sent him to the Comédie-Française, the Théâtre Libre and the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, with young models dressed in Doucet’s creations hanging on his arm, initially with a view to circulating his dresses among the haut monde. Even Doucet, however, underestimated the extent to which his young recruit instinctively understood the connection between fashion and drama. For Poiret, haute couture was itself a form of theatre. He would soon be dressing leading actresses and designing outrageous confections inspired by the ‘orgy of colours’ that caught his attention when one of the department stores displayed a consignment of carpets from the Far East. When he moved from Doucet’s to the House of Worth, he dressed Worth’s clients in the soft lines, brilliant hues and rich fabrics of the Orient, designing Oriental-inspired jackets in rich silks and satins decorated with flamboyant motifs and vivid colours. At the time, the vogue was for lilac, sky blue or straw: ‘anything that was cloying, washed out, and dull to the eye’. Poiret changed all that, creating gowns in reds, royal blues, bright oranges, ‘and my sunburst of pastels made a new dawn’.
Poiret was soon being sought out by the great actresses, dressing both Gabrielle Réjane, Sarah Bernhardt’s rival and one of the most popular actresses of her day, and ‘la divine Sarah’, darling of the turn-of-the-century stage. In 1900, Bernhardt had a theatre in Paris refurbished throughout in red and gold, decorated with her insignia and renamed after her. She was also one of the leading actresses of the silent movies, making her debut that year in the two-minute Duel d’Hamlet, one of the first examples of the sound-and-image synching system (ear-pieces plugged into a phonograph) pioneered at the World Fair. The year he opened his own premises (1903), Poiret reproduced the costume he had designed for Réjane hundreds of times in many variants, an initiative which anticipated his later invention (in 1922) of the ready-to-wear system of charging a royalty on each garment sold rather than a set price for one individually made garment. This system forms the basis of modern fashion manufacture.
In autumn 1902, Poiret met a girl with brown eyes, tall and slender, with slim hips and long legs, whose influence on him would change the course of fashion design. However, since Denise was only sixteen, he resigned himself to a long wait; it took three years for her parents to consent to their engagement. They finally married in 1906. She became and remained his top model, ‘the inspiration for my creations . . . the expression of all my ideals’. During the next few years, inspired, too, by the paintings of Botticelli, and the statue of the Venus de Milo, which he admired above all works of art in the Louvre and had studied closely, he began to design garments to suit Denise’s slender figure. He would soon be creating the hobble skirt, which quickly became fashionable, despite the difficulty of getting into a carriage, or even walking, in them; then boat-necked, subtly draped, sheath-style garments with ankle-revealing skirts, and coloured, low-heeled boots. ‘To dress a woman,’ as he would one day tell readers of Vogue, ‘is not to cover her with ornaments’; the art of the designer was to show her to her best advantage, creating original garments with contours that accentuated her natural, individual grace: ‘All the talent of the artist consists in a manner of revealment.’
All this might have seemed radical to the point of recklessness, but Poiret’s designs caught on immediately. Already, from about 1902 onwards, his pared-down forms and daring colour schemes became synonymous with the idea of freedom of movement and self-expression, in fashion as in art. Poiret was a true innovator, quickly taken up and feted when Réjane wore his clothes in America, where he was hailed as the king of fashion. In Paris, he made friends with his contemporaries, extending his circle during the next few years from Derain and Vlaminck outwards, to include Picasso, Matisse, van Dongen and, eventually, Modigliani and Brâncus¸i. He collected their works with no particular ambition as a collector; he was simply excited by the work of his new friends. In Montmartre, he befriended Max Jacob, to whom he sent those of his wealthy clients with leanings towards the occult to have their palms read.
Poiret’s success left not only Derain and Vlaminck but all the painters of his acquaintance behind; none managed to rival his spectacularly rapid career rise. In February 1902, Berthe Weill included Matisse’s work in one of her first mixed shows of contemporary artists, but she was as unsuccessful as ever in converting her enthusiasm and support into sales. As for Picasso, he was exhibiting nothing. He had discovered the Saint-Lazare women’s prison, where artists were free to wander in and sketch the inmates at no charge. He was shocked by the presence of children and deeply affected by the spectacle of motherhood rendered poignant by penury and incarceration; at that time, fallen women were sometimes reduced to petty crime as a way of making sure they had a roof over their heads when they gave birth. When he worked up his sketches into paintings, Picasso based the forms of his figures on the simplified forms of El Greco, giving some of them a different setting, removing them to the seashore (taking them home to Barcelona), adding fathers and sons to some of the tableaux and painting whole families as well as individual men and women, in scenes of misery and tragedy that recalled the melancholy work of his friend Nonell as well as reflecting the influence of El Greco. These paintings, characterized by his use of elongated lines and monochromatic blue, were some of the earliest examples of the work he did in what would later be known as his Blue Period. Picasso was still haunted by the death of Casagemas; the misery he recognized and depicted in his subjects were powerful expressions of his own grief and sadness. In autumn 1901, he was living in cheap lodgings in the rue Clichy near the Gare Saint-Lazare, where he continued to mourn Casagemas as he roamed the streets, preoccupied by the sight of the abject poor, whose lives, to his dismay, had begun to seem not entirely indistinguishable from his own.
By December, Picasso was growing restless. He had no money and no prospects and was becoming ashamed of as well as depressed by his poverty. His lack of success made him an outsider, too, casting him down with feelings of demoralization for which nothing could have prepared him. As the beloved son of doting parents, in Barcelona he had grown up with a sense of natural entitlement; in Paris, the world seemed to owe him nothing. Again, he began to yearn for home. At the end of the year, he broke his contract with Mañach, thereby risking his connection with Vollard, but by now that seemed unlikely to amount to much. When Vollard saw ex-amples of Picasso’s work from the Blue Period – paintings of the women from the Saint-Lazare prison with their babies; a man with a blue guitar; a blind man with his frugal bowl of broth – he promptly lost interest; these were hardly works to gladden the hearts of prospective purchasers. Dejected, early in January 1902, aged twenty, Picasso returned to Barcelona, where his parents gave him back his old room.