Dresses made of art – Weekend – Kommersant
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The Madrid exhibition is the case when the popular genre of “dresses against the background of paintings” is justified both factually and substantively: the paintings here create the context of a large culture, to which these dresses belong. The analogy with art turns from purely formal and decorative into a tool of real fashion analysis.
Let’s start with what usually ends: the exhibition will be of interest to those who are not at all interested in either fashion or Chanel, because, among other things, this is an elegantly organized retrospective of Picasso’s most important periods. Picasso/Chanel is one of the first events in the calendar of events for the 50th anniversary of the death of Picasso, which will keep the museum world busy all next year, especially in Spain and France. Here are works not only from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, but from all over the world, including from private collections. And Chanel dresses, presented, of course, with the alignment of formal – color and geometric – rhymes with pictures, do not spoil this retrospective at all.
But the matter is not limited to rhymes alone – the point of the exhibition is to show how the juxtaposition of fashion and art works, how and where the lines of their interaction actually go, at what points they really intersect.
The curator of the exhibition, Paula Luengo, believes that one of these points of intersection between Chanel and Picasso (and Cubism in general) is the same Chanel scale (white, black, beige, blue), which is customarily traced back to its orphan past. But when her early works are next to the cubist paintings of Picasso, Braque and Gris, not only the proximity of the palettes becomes obvious, but also a more curious thing: Chanel, who opened her first Parisian store in 1910, already then understood that the fashion phenomenon spread far beyond the dresses. That art is the space where modernity is born and formed, which can be turned into dresses. That in the context of cultural modernity, these dresses will gain strength. This understanding secured her place in history.
Other points of intersection between Chanel and Cubism are quite obvious: straight lines instead of curves, planes instead of volumes, emphatically simple materials instead of expensive ones. Chanel uses jersey and cotton in the same way that the Cubists use gouache and pieces of newspaper, she combines them in her outfits with muslin and fur, just as the Cubists combine painting with scraps of wallpaper and pieces of wood in their collages and assemblages. The creators of the exhibition tell us that the dress is for her, like a canvas for the cubists, she builds her own “syntax of individual elements”: she places functional details, puts bright color spots of jewelry on a discreet background.
And Chanel dresses, placed next to Picasso’s canvases, become almost literally part of them. A small Chanel handbag made of multi-colored rectangles looks like Picasso’s “Woman Reading”, while the motley beige-brown-black silk ensemble seems to be a repetition of his study for “Nude with Drapery”.
But this visual analytical layer is the most superficial, the most obvious. A more important story unfolds in the section of the exhibition dedicated to Olga Khokhlova. She was a devoted Chanel client even before she married Picasso in 1918 (Chanel is said to have made the wedding gown and attended the wedding herself). In numerous portraits of Picasso, Olga Khokhlova is depicted in dresses that are easily identified as Chanel, the curators found beautiful Chanel pieces from that period and placed them next to the portraits.
In these portraits, in these outfits, you can see a really deep connection between Chanel and Picasso and the Cubists in general. By elongating the silhouette using straight lines, cinching the waist and bust, flattening the cut and simplifying the shape of her dresses, Chanel breaks radically with the Belle Epoque aesthetic with its voluminous volumes, curves and whimsically squirming lines. And he does this on roughly the same grounds on which Cubism and Picasso break with the previous tradition of post-impressionism – that is, in this Chanel consciously follows radical modern art. Picasso creates a paradigm of modernity in art, Chanel follows this paradigm in fashion, both of them – of course, in different areas – create a new socio-cultural phenomenon of modernity. It is here that all the most frequently reproduced clichés about Chanel fit in: the “little black dress”, and the rejection of the corset, and the “chic of poverty” – they all destroy the patriarchal image of a woman, replace the traditional “feminine” silhouette with its curves and bulges with a flat one, straight and shortened, where the chest, waist, and hips are as straight as possible.
You understand this by looking at how naturally Olga Khokhlova looks in the portraits of Picasso, and perhaps the “intimacy” of these portraits, which is customary to sing, is to some extent provided by Chanel dresses. And in the portraits, and in the photographs, and in the home chronicle of that time, you can see how free her body is of the dancer in these dresses – and those same dresses standing next to her look exceptionally modern.
Chanel’s modernist work with the silhouette brings her closer not only to Picasso and contemporary painting, but also to modernist dance, the main producer of which at that time was, of course, Diaghilev. They first worked together in 1924 at the ballet “Le Train Bleu”, for which Chanel made costumes – almost sports, because the ballet was invented as an ironic homage to the then fashion for sports, in which Chanel herself was extremely involved. The scenery for the ballet was made by Picasso, it was their second joint work. The first was Antigone at the Theater de l’Atelier in Montmartre in 1922.
Both performances are beautifully presented at the Picasso/Chanel exhibition. The original costumes have not survived, but reconstructions of the costumes of “Le Train Bleu” for the 1992 production at the Paris Opera (and a recording of the ballet itself) can be seen, as well as a 1923 Paris Vogue report for the release of “Antigone” with special footage of Chanel’s costumes. In the Le Train Bleu hall hangs the same Picasso gouache that Diaghilev saw in his studio and asked to make a curtain from it, and an ecru-colored silk dress of 1927, made by Chanel for playing tennis, which could well be presented on a moodboard Prada, for example. In the “Antigone” hall there are magnificent grisaille-gray “Three Graces” of 1923 from the collection of Almina and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. As well as an exceptionally well-preserved red-figure Greek vase of the 4th century from the British Museum – the only one known with the image of Antigone. And a series of Chanel’s light classical-empire lace dresses, perfectly matching all this.
As we said, this is the case when putting dresses next to paintings really made sense. Art clarifies the essence of fashion, shows its origins, helps to understand the mechanisms of its work – where there is a real connection between us, and not just a formal one. There are such examples in modern fashion: if you put Miuccia Prada’s clothes in the context of arte povera with his cult of “poverty” and “everyday life”, then the origins and mechanisms of Prado’s ugly chic become clear, and if you look at what Alessandro Michele does through a kaleidoscope aesthetics of camp in general and pop art of the 60s and 70s, then the world of the Gucci carnival is built into a large cultural tradition. It is this great cultural tradition from which they arose and which they, in turn, shaped, that the Picasso/Chanel exhibition gives to the work of Gabrielle Chanel.
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