Paul Poiret

Paul Poiret (1879–1944) was a French fashion designer who helped popularize uncorseted dress and vivid styles drawing on theatrical and non-European sources.

Corset: A close-fitting, often stiffened garment worn to shape and support the torso. Poiret promoted dresses that abandoned the corseted waist as the basis of women’s fashion.
Les Ballets Russes: A Paris-based ballet company founded by Sergei Diaghilev that transformed modern dance and stage design. Its lavish performances helped bring Orientalist costumes and color into the Parisian cultural world Poiret inhabited.
Charles Frederick Worth: An English-born couturier who established the modern Paris fashion house in the nineteenth century. Poiret began his career at Worth’s house before establishing his own label.
Paul Poiret and the First World War: The wartime disruption that interrupted Poiret’s fashion business and altered its prospects. Military service and changing conditions weakened the couture house’s position during the war.
Directoire style: A late eighteenth-century French fashion style marked by high waistlines and relatively simple dresses. Its high-waisted silhouette offered Poiret a historical model for dresses that did not depend on corsets.
Paul Iribe: A French illustrator and designer whose work helped shape early twentieth-century fashion imagery. His illustrations presented Poiret’s designs as a coherent, modern visual world.
Mariano Fortuny: A Spanish-born artist and designer known for finely pleated dresses and innovative textile techniques. Fortuny’s restrained, technically distinctive garments offer a counterpoint to Poiret’s theatrical silhouette.
The New Look: Christian Dior’s 1947 fashion silhouette, with a fitted waist and full skirt. Dior’s return to a sharply defined waist contrasts with the uncorseted ideal Poiret had promoted.
Hobble skirt: A narrow skirt that restricts the wearer’s stride, fashionable in the early twentieth century. Poiret’s hobble skirts show that freedom from corsets did not always mean freedom of movement.
Les Parfums de Rosine: A perfume house founded by Paul Poiret in 1911 and named for his daughter. Poiret extended his fashion business into fragrance with one of couture’s early designer perfume lines.

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