Word: vionnet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...started her career as a creative photographer, but she has come a long way from the conception of drama that "Greek Lady, 1959" shows. Her recent portraits have left black and white tragedy for what seems a puppet stage. Her precisely-composed arrangements disconcert. A personage like Vionnet may be thought of in terms of pure design, color, fashion and grooming, but it somehow reduces Imogen Cunningham to see her elfed in this very miniature lens. Ezra Pound's hands, large and blurred between his knees in front of the camera, couldn't be frozen...
Died. Madeleine Vionnet, 98, grande dame of French couture; in Paris. Vionnet, as she was simply known, began her trade as an apprentice seamstress at the age of eleven in 1887, opened her own fashion house in 1912, and flourished till her retirement in 1940. She preferred to drape fabric on a wooden mannequin rather than sketch her designs. Her main innovation was the bias cut, in which cloth is scissored at an angle to the weave, rendering it more elastic and clingy. Her soft, often layered dresses moved with the wearer's body and helped to usher...
...change lies in France's exquisite fabrics-luxuriant silk, crepe de chine, shantung, georgette, satin. These are meticulously cut and joined, often on the diagonal introduced in the 1920s by Madeleine Vionnet -who is inactive but still alert at 97. The "bias cut" makes clothes drape sexily against the body. Since the favored fabrics of 1974 are gossamer-thin and always unlined, they need, even demand ample length to prevent skirts from being unintentionally hoisted at the slightest breeze. The result is a calf-length skirt that is wider, freer and not quite as long as the ill-fated...
...Queen. played with amusing coquetry by Marilyn Ann Carington, conveys an air of nuanced gentility, not without redemptive power in Genet's scheme of values. She is the world-weary purveyor of artifice-a figure "half mythological and half conventional" like Mme, de Vionnet in The Ambassadors. Beneath her polished regality lurks desire for total capitulation to the revitalizing force which the Blacks as revolutionaries represent...