CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/24/2015

Modern Taste

This 1919 portrait of Denise Poiret in a silver evening gown designed by her husband, French couturier Paul Poiret, is reproduced from Modern Taste: Art Deco in Paris 1910-1935, published by Fondacion Juan March. Art Historian Tim Benton writes, "In many ways, Art Deco is a style conceived and largely consumed by and for women. The great couturiers of the 19th century had established Paris as the center of world fashion and their 20th century followers fought tooth and nail to maintain this dominance. And it was the couturiers who were not only the first patrons of Art Deco but also the ones who gave it its characteristic panache. Before the war, it was Poiret who made dramatic changes in the way fashion was conceived and marketed and in so doing changed the shape of the fashionable woman. Freeing the body from the corset and heavy underwear, Poiret idealized an image of the young, slender body… This kind of figure crops up repeatedly in the sculpture of the period."