“The moment you find something of a personal and unique nature, you have to exploit it to the fullest and pursue its realization without stopping and until the end.” This was expressed by Madame Grès (born Germaine Krebs, 1903-1993) at some point in the 20th century. At another time in the same century, Azzedine Alaïa (1935-2017) said: “When an idea is imposed on you, you have to catch it on the fly, think about it and never repeal it.”
An exhibition of Madame Grès costumes grouped with others by Alaïa has recreated in Paris, at the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa (until May 5), this astonishing dialogue between two exceptional beings in the history of 20th century fashion, two individuals who did not coincide in generation, but did coincide in individuality.
Two creators who were born to be sculptors, but who changed clay and stone for fabric: to fold it, drape it and gather it around the woman's body in the manner of the sculptors of ancient Greece, without patterns or molds. Two seamstresses, as they liked to call themselves, who perfected their style, their “original idea”, until the end of the road, and avoided the detours and crossroads with which the fashion system boycotts itself.
Madame Grès' career began in 1934 and ended in 1987, more than 50 years at the helm of her sewing workshop. Azzedine Alaïa's began in 1956 and also lasted the five decades that forged her brand, which remains at the top of the market today. There are many artistic similarities that unite them, and they coincide above all in the sources from which they drank: the masterpieces of classical Greece that, through sculpture and ceramics, remain today, twenty-five centuries later, as canons of beauty. beyond time. Timelessness is, for Madame Grès and Azzedine Alaïa, modernity.
At the 1939 New York World's Fair, Madame Grès represented the intersection of classical antiquity with contemporary fashion. Nothing fascinates as much as a dress made in the style of the Greco-Roman classics, unfinished, made with a single piece of fabric that is draped over the body and joined with fibulae - the modern safety pin! She evidently caught the attention of the surrealists, who populated her dreams with erotic demigoddesses.
Ariadne, the princess who made the thread that would lead Theseus to the exit of the Minotaur's labyrinth. Penelope, who wove by day and unweaved by night to keep her suitors away from her while she waited for the return of her husband Ulysses. The patron saint of looms was Athena, the goddess of strategy, intelligence and manual arts. With this in mind, the Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484-425 BC), in his writings as a traveler and geographer, left very detailed descriptions of the clothing of different citizens, in order to define the age, identity, class, gender, profession and skin color.
Of the dozens of ways of dressing the Hellenes, modern history has reduced the basic elements of ancient clothing to three: the chiton, the peplum and the himation. Always determined by the measurements of the loom, the dresses were made with basic modules of rectangles of fabric that were joined and draped to adapt them to the human body and its natural movement.
In fact, the narrative in Greco-Roman sculpture focuses on the folds imposed on the stone to breathe the air of life into it. There is still the Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre, with the wind in its head, about to spread its wings and take flight!
This entire stretch of art history was well known to Madame Grès, who throughout her career tried to avoid pattern making and cutting to economize on the line and rely only on bias and draping. She found the perfect fabric: silk stretch jersey fabric. She worked with rectangles, in parts. When she finished one, she started the next, like a puzzle.
She liked to have her half-made dresses photographed so that anyone could understand the process. Once the infinite avant-garde versions of classic draping in a modern fabric were finished, his pieces went to the almost divine women who were his clients: Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, María Casares... they embodied the sexuality of their unattainable nudity under the folds, like nymphs or amazons.
In the 1930s, the surrealist photographer Man Ray made a series of positives and negatives of ghostly women dressed in Madame Grès's robes; Equally fascinated by these drapes, Jean Cocteau drew and subtitled them in 1937 for the American magazine Harper's Bazaar. Later they were incarnated in the hands of Alaïa, who caressed other divinities: Tina Turner, Grace Jones and Naomi Campbell.
In fashion and art, it is impossible to escape the Dionysian attraction of classical beauty. It is said that truth lives in beauty, and truth was found in ancient Greece, and there it is, immovable throughout the centuries, passing from hand to hand like a grail. It is not fabric for queens; It is only for naked goddesses with their folds in the wind.
