watercolor
portrait
art-deco
watercolor
historical fashion
watercolour illustration
Dimensions: height 195 mm, width 120 mm
Copyright: Rijks Museum: Open Domain
This fashion plate, Très Parisien, was printed in 1927, likely using pochoir, a printing technique which employs stencils and hand coloring. I can imagine the designer hunched over a table, carefully mixing watercolors to render the dress in shades of yellow and gold, with touches of black for definition. Each stroke builds the form, giving it shape. I wonder what the designer, G-P. Joumard, was thinking about when he made it? Fashion is like painting: both are a form of constant reinvention. He was probably thinking about the cut and the fall of the fabric, but also about the spirit of the age, and the bold, geometric shapes that were influencing every area of design at that time. The angularity of the dress reminds me of Sonia Delaunay's simultaneous dresses, or even a Cubist painting. There is an ongoing dialogue between artists and designers, each one inspiring the other. It's like a game of telephone that has been running for centuries!
Comments
Très Parisien promoted itself as chic and elegant. Between 1920 and 1936 it presented creations by such couturiers as Chéruit, Premet, Philip et Gaston, and Lanvin. The young, svelte models are all ultra-modern, shown talking on the phone, smoking and playing tennis. The illustrations also show that over the course of the 1920s, skirt lengths had risen to just below the knee, before dropping back down to calf length in the 1930s. The small plates were printed on transparent paper using a stencilling technique known as en pochoir and then hand coloured; many of them are unsigned. The signature ‘Joujou’ belonged to Germaine Paule Joumard, who was the director of Très Parisien, as well as one of the magazine’s illustrators.
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