Meet Madame Grès The Sculptor of Fashion

I have recently become particularly enamored with the fantastic French designer Madame Gray, who specialized in statuesque Grecian mid-century masterpieces of fashion. Despite her work being extraordinarily popular she does not sit alongside the other fashion greats of this period, however this comes as no surprise as many prominent women have been written out of the male-dominated annals of history. The story of Madame Gray is a truly interesting and poignant one. Gray was born Germaine Krebs in Paris in 1903. She originally wanted to be a sculptor but was unsuccessful. She then ventured into millinery, changing her name to Alex Barton. Her design house would be known as Alex from 1934 through 1942. She first gained attention by designing the costumes for Jean Giraudoux's play The Trojan War Will Not Take Place and quickly became a leading designer of the day, whose clients included everything from duchesses to movie stars. Grace Kelly, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich are a few of her more famous clients. In 1942 she created the name Gray, a partial anagram of the first name of her husband at the The New York Times called her couture house the most intellectual place in Europe to buy clothes. I wanted to be a sculptor, for me it's the same thing to work the fabric or the stone, Gray once said. And it is a truth universally acknowledged that Gray was indeed a true sculptor of fabric. Her favorite fabric was silk jersey and a single dress could take from 13 to 21 meters. Her talent for pleating could reduce nine feet of fabric into a mere 2.8 inches. The drapery of her gowns also showed her technical virtuosity. Long swags of continuous strips of fabric would be incorporated into the front and back of a gown, giving her work a sense of classical antiquity. She also introduced the idea of cutouts, creating little windows in her gowns, which revealed the back or shoulder. Wearers of her gowns have said that they felt perfectly secure in her gowns, so impeccable was the construction. Her work was truly art, and she never went down the more viable route of ready-to-wear, which many of her contemporaries were doing but remained faithful to her couture background. Her work has a minimalist style, before it was ever fashionable, with a focus on stunning pleating and drapery, which had a uniquely feminine touch for the period. Whilst other designers of the time were overworking their looks and putting their customers and models in corsets, Grey never used restrictive undergarments and worked with soft fabrics, such as silk jersey and taffeta which were gentle against the female skin. She tended to work directly with the fabric, cutting and pining it onto models according to her sketches, with little preparation of twolls and patterns. Grey also incorporated within her style, in particular evening wear, a rather risque sensuality. She often featured cut out shapes of erogenous zones in prominent positions on her dresses, which simultaneously left the garment rather revealing, quite unusual for this era's formal wear. So, Grey often used 20 to 30 meters of fabric on just one dress and could take three meters of fabric and reduce it to a tiny seven centimeters through pleating alone. Not only did this give her dresses volume, but also an inner structure that required no extra reinforcing garments such as corsets. Grey referred to herself as a sculptor of fabric, rather than fashion designer. During World War II, Grey fled Nazi-occupied Paris after an argument with Barton, however she retuned a year later in 1941 to open her own couturier business. The Germans were very disapproving of her excessive use of fabric and were also angered, because Grey would not tell them the secrets of her unique fabric techniques. She was soon forced to close by the Nazis. Grey was famous for her Grecian style, which was wore by many celebrities of the era and still continues to be popular today. In fact, many of her pieces could easily be on today's catwalks and nobody would consider it vintage. She was not limited to this though and used a variety of different colors and techniques to create very different items, particularly when it came to daywear. Her signature fabric techniques and sleeve construction on daywear are still clearly evident though. Asymmetrical dresses, draped in the antique as if molded on the body, dresses in volume. When she works with fault or taffeta, her creative requirements differentiate her from her contemporaries. Insensitive to passing fads, to the trends which mark the collections of a season, she prefers to sculpt unique pieces, the number of which are collectible. We recognize a masterpiece by Madame Grey by its purity, the apparent simplicity of her art always conceals the extreme complexity of her craftsmanship. Madame Grey went from strength to strength in the thriving post-war fashion industry of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1972, she was elected president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture and soon after she became the first recipient of the Dédor Golden Thimble Award, the highest honor from the Chambre Syndicale. Grey had an extraordinarily long career, working until the late 1980s. Throughout this period, which encompassed huge changes in fashion, her work remained consistent and timeless. Once one has found something of a personal and unique character, its execution must be exploited and pursued without stopping, she said. Her work remains timeless. Any one of her elegant gowns could be seen walking a red carpet today. It is easy to see the extreme purity Grey would strive for in her work. During 1970s period Grey began to turn over her creative control and in the early 1980s she actually sold the entire company, which was soon brought to ruin by the new owner. Her name, reputation and business which she had so meticulously built up over her lifetime, was now finished. She retired to an apartment penniless and in obscurity, occasionally sewing orders for friends. At some point her daughter transferred her to a nursing home and nothing more was said or thought of Madame Grey, that is until the rather strange circumstances surrounding her death. At some unknown point, Grey died quietly in her nursing home, but her daughter kept her death a secret for a full year. After the truth was discovered by a journalist, daughter Anne claimed that the secret was because she couldn't afford the tombstone her mother deserved. During this period, when it became public that Grey had indeed died, a retrospective of her work had taken place in New York and the curators said that they had been communicating with Grey in the lead up to it. However it was now clear that at this point she had been dead. Daughter Anne had been the one communicating with the curators, posing as her mother, writing jovial letters with quotes and declaring that she was honored to have the retrospective. There must have been embarrassment and shame in the Grey household surrounding her fall into obscurity and poverty whilst her contemporaries were becoming international fashion sensations. Personally I find Grey career and life quite fascinating and believe that this true artist of the fashion world should no longer be lost to history's selective memory. Madame Grey was a remarkable couturier in the 20th century, known for using delicate pleats which turned ordinary fabric into Greek sculpture. A unique genius of design that is worthy of our remembrance of her.