Happy Saturday. Last week we name dropped French fashion designer Paul Poiret and are behind the scenes on Is It or a Duncan? Holly talked about his designing clothes for her and her daughter and I was kind of like, yeah, that makes total logical sense. It seems like a good time based on that's a poll our episode on poire Out of the Archive. Yeah, and this episode originally came out on jun We hope you enjoyed. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I am Tracy. Today we're talking about one of my favorite designers of all time. Yes, yes, who is that Paul poire I thought it might if you really want to friendship up, but I won't do the full pronunciation throughout the podcast because it starts to get a little His famous quote from was I am an artist, not a dressmaker like he He's one of those people that when you study him, you wonder if he came off to people around him as super conceited and blustering. Yeah, I was gonna say that doesn't sound pretentious at all. But he also was a really hard worker and he really did innovate, So maybe his confidence was just all built off of knowing that he was going to plow through and some actual success and not just grandiose statements. Yeah, and indeed, I mean his work, which was often very outant guard for the times, changed the fashion world in really significant ways. And people may not know his name unless they're really into historical fashion, but odds are you would recognize his designs. Um. You know, his silhouettes tend to be very long and narrow skirts sometimes pants topped off with these very dramatic tunics that tended to be wider, so the top portion of the silhouette tended to be wider than the bottom um and they were really the height of fashion in the nineteen teens, in the early heading into the early nineteen twenties. A lot of his his designs are actually done by other artists at the time. He collaborated with a lot of them. So if you look at drawings by Erte, a lot of those are him. Uh Aribe who he worked with him, we'll talk about briefly. Uh those drawings that are sort of famous, and they're like just pre flapper era people recognize, but they may not realize that a lot of those are Paul Poire, and even the ones that aren't are often influenced by the things that he was doing in fashion. So he was born in eighteen seventy nine and Laisal. His father was a cloth merchant, so he got a lot of exposure to fashion in his early life while his family was working class. Yeah, and his father sent him at a very early age to apprentice with an umbrella maker because as a working class family, they wanted him to have a skill. Uh. But young Paul would actually gather the small scraps left over at the end of the day, the little pieces of silk left over from the umbrella cuttings, and he would make clothes for his sister's dolls. So he was doing fashion and small scale pretty early in his life, and that's a pretty perfect use for umbrella scraps. In his fashion career officially started Couturier Madeleine Chari brought twelve of his designs, and shortly thereafter Poire was hired by Couturier Jacques du Say as a junior assistant, and he quickly worked his way up to head of tailoring in that group, and he was so successful in his position that he was eventually tapped by Doucet to take on jobs designing costumes for stage actresses, and he made a really big name for himself doing this. Um there's one particular garment that's often referenced, which is a mantle he made for a play entitled Zaza, which was worn by actress Gabriel Jean, and it was black tool layered over black taffoda, and it was painted with white irises, and it made a big splash and it was um allegedly very impactful in terms of the emotional moment of the scene in which it appeared, and Poiret sort of started to realize that he could actually be using the stage as a runway to showcase his own designs and build a following. So he kind of became famous for these garments he was making for actresses. It's kind of double a double edged sword, though, because it's rumored that when he was working with celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt, that he was overheard by the actress while he was making fun of her and she had him fired. But that's again kind of a cloaked in rumor. Part of history. Some histories of him will say that happened, some we'll not because at the same time, which was nine undred, Poiret also had to report for a military service, which was mandatory. So it's entirely possible that the Bernhard stories just gossip that took advantage of that timing. Regardless of how he left, the job to say had been really encouraging of his activity and his style. So it was pretty tragic that he left the world for a while. Yeah, I mean, any creative type that gets a lot of encouragement, that's like a perfect situation. So to unfortunately step out of that is not ideal. But he only had to do his year of mandatory service and when he returned to Paris in nineteen o one, he was hired almost immediately by the House of Worth, and that was one of the most prominent design houses in Europe. Um if you look at fashion plates of the Victorian and Edwardian eras many of them, many of the styles and fashions will be credited in the House of Worth. I mean they were huge, uh, And at the time Poiret was hired into the firm, Charles Frederick Worth, who had founded the fashion house had already passed away, and his two sons, Jean Philippe and Gaston, had taken over. Unlike his time working under du Say, he didn't get a lot of encouragement at Worth. Instead of taking advantage of all this theatricality and dramatic style that he had really cultivated, the brother's Worth put him to work on pretty mundane stuff. He tried to inject his style. Don't know what he was doing, but that was not really what the Worth clientele were looking for. They were used to getting stylish clothing that was guaranteed to be seen as stylish and not just experimental stuff. They were not ready for the avant garde. No. The good thing, though, is that he did have an incredible confidence. Even through the rough times at House of Worth. He was certain that he was going to move on to better things, and even when clients were complaining that he was making ugly, crazy clothes, he was really unflappable about it, which is pretty impressive and astonishing. Uh. And in nine three he finally took his future into his own hands and he opened his own shop. And because Pare had charmed many clients, uh, he actually had a great many fans in high places. The King of Portugal allegedly sent two white mules to the designer for the opening of his boutique in Ruabart, and they stood outside on opening day, like the doors were just flanked by these two mules. Just kind of wonderfully odds. They're perfectly theatrical to his designs. In nineteen o three, broke with a major fashion rule by ditching petticoats entirely. Yeah, I mean that's huge. We think of it today and it seems like, well, you don't need a petticoat, but you did then. Yeah, Well, and that's that. This was if you were out without a petticoat, It wasn't just that your clothing didn't look right. You were being immodest and indecent without petticoats on. Yeah. Uh. So he carried on for a couple of years in his new shop, and in nineteen o five Pare married his wife Denise, and the pair had really known each other since childhood. She was not exactly known to be like a great beauty. She had really been kind of a simple girl from simple beginnings, because remember his childhood started in very simple places. But through her marriage with Paul, she really became something of a style icon, and she served as his muse. Uh. And she would wear her his fashions as the pair toured Europe and eventually other places together. Um. And they had five daughters together throughout their marriage and later in life. Uh. Paul would say, sort of unkindly of Denise. She was extremely simple, and all those who have admired her since I made her my wife would certainly not have chosen her in the state in which I found her. That makes me angry. It's a little snarky, but things did not. I did not say Rosie with the two of them forever, but for a while she was his muse, and I think she became the style director of his design house for a while. And you know, he really clearly loved the female form and love to dress it and wanted to free it from a lot of the things that people were kind of watted up in terms of the rules of clothing. Yeah, there were lots and lots of layers, and Denise was a huge pardon kind of that movement towards a freer mode of dress. In Pre produced an album of fashion designs. It was illustrated by Paul Iribe called simply rope. To Paul Plory. At this point in his career, Grecian clothing and Japanese kimonos and certain caftin styles from Middle Eastern and North African cultures were really influential in Paris designs. He wanted to make garments that used simple rectangles instead of really complicated shapes. He developed lots of designs that celebrated the so called Direct War revival. Slouett so very columnar and n six was also the year that he did something again controversial, when he replaced the corset as a foundation garment for his designs with a much less restrictive girdle. And this is a huge deal. Um, this is like a kin to women burning their brawls in the sixties, except it was a man doing it for fashion. Well, and it really happened. But you know, in terms of like the cultural touchstones that people think of, this is really big to basically say the undergarments are stupid and wrong, let's get rid of those. We're going for a more natural shape. Um, no petticoats, no corsets, complete mayhem. Really in terms of what had gone before, Yeah, and again it wasn't just about what the clothes looked like it was about all these ideas of modesty that were tied to it and in decency and like what what good ladies of quality wore when they were going out and he threw those out the window. And he wasn't the only designer, we should say, doing these things, like Vienna was doing similar stuff, but he was kind of so outspoken about it, and he had such a flair for the dramatic that he got the most attention in the press and societally for what he was doing. But when you mentioned the modesty issue, that brings us to a scandal that took place. Yes, there was a scandal in nine nine involving uh Poire and British Prime Minister H. H. Asked With and his wife. The story goes that lady asked With was a fan of Paris work and invited him to show his designs at ten Downing Street. As is sometimes the case with fashion shows, things got a little bit out of hand. Rumors started to spread of really wild happenings and models running around the famed residents in various states of undress. The scandal really nearly caused ask With resignation, and it came to be known as the Gowning Street scandal. And then um, once that blew over and we moved forward a little bit to nineteen eleven, we really hit what is in the history of Paul Pore a huge, huge year. First, he did something that had never been done before, which is that he expand his brand, and that's not something we normally attribute to things that were going on in the early nine hundreds, like the idea of a fashion designer having a brand. Uh. And he produced a fragrance line that was named after his daughter Rosine, and it was really successful and it eventually became Fragrances and Cosmetics and continued to selve very very well. He he also opened a decorative arts school for underprivileged girls, which was called a Cole Martin, and that was named after another of his daughters. He used the artwork the girls produced to create fabric prints, which they sold in a shop adjacent to the school. This really delights me. Yeah, I feel like it was the spoon Flower of the kind of and it really ended up becoming like a lifestyle brand at that point because it also they also sold things like stationary and you know, small little house items there that had often used the designs of these girls, and so his sort of home line became known as the Martin Group. After this school and the the attached store just really cool, uh. And then he invented around in nineteen eleven what was called the Robe de Minute, and this is again one of those things that is so simple but really mind blowing for the time. It was basically a simple column of silk cut almost like a T shirt, and it allegedly took only thirty minutes to assemble, so compared to the structured Edwardian fashions that were still pretty prominent at the time, this was basically like walking around in a nightgown. So to show up at an evening party in this, which was usually what his wife did, she was like wearing his really kind of cutting edge designs before anyone else did, which is why she became a fashion icon. Really was pretty brazen and took a lot of bravado and it was um ultra revolutionary. But again we should point out that it's not on its own. He's not the only one doing these sorts of things. This is also around the time that Italian designer Mariano Fortuni was producing his really ultrasimple Grecian style silhouettes that took advantage of his secret and famous silk pleading techniques. So there was this um aesthetic developing in fashion circles for simpler but really beautiful garments um in this Grecian columnar style. Yeah, and if you're not really familiar with with what Edwardian fashions look like, we can just they were very fitted and think of Titanic. Yeah, think of Titanic, very fitted, many layers of underpinnings underneath that there's just a laggling on. Yeah. Fussy's a great word, like you really had to have help to get into your clothes, and not so much the case even though the lines were simpler. I think people think of Edwardian clothing is being simpler because it's the next phase after Victorian, which was very fussy and everything had a Brazilian tassels on it. Um, the clothing got the lines got simpler and sharper, but and there wasn't as much crazy embellishment, but all those layers were still there. So you still had on your bloomers and your pantaloons and a chemise and a corset and possibly a corset cover and then a gown, possibly an undergown, you know, petticoat, I mean all. And he basically got rid of all of that and said, just wear a simple silk sheath. It's fine, I mean And everybody was like, what, that's bold to do? What? He was sparked by a just an exoticism after traveling to Moscow in nineteen eleven. This was a huge influence on his work from this point. Shortly after he came back to Paris on June nineteen eleven, he hosted the historically famous party called the thousand and Second Night. There was allegedly a new translation of The thousand and one Night's making the round in Paris at the time, although we haven't really been able to confirm that. In time for this episode, guests were required to attend in Persian styled clothing or they had to be Uh. They had to allow the host to dress them once they got there. Uh. This was actually a ploy on Poires part. He was dressing his guests in his new line of designs that were inspired by his travels um specifically a production of Scheherazade he saw at the Ballet Roust and his newfound interest in Orientalism, and it's it's really sort of where I think this party and this line of clothing is really where his style kind of gets put under the magnifying class in terms of the future, Like that's what a lot of people associate with him or the is that line of clothing, and that's actually where he debuted the harem pants that he became famous for and the lampshade dresses that he is also known for today. The lampshade dresses really, when you say that, I think sometimes people that might not know have a hard time picturing it. They really were these tunic style dresses that had wire in the hem to pull them out from the body so it looked like a lampshade um. And these less confining shapes actually became incredibly popular and they kept Party very busy filling client orders. Even though they were completely crazy and way beyond what had been going on in fashion previously. People just really jumped on it. They loved it well if you had a chance not to be. And of course it was all those layers of clothing. Yeah, because we've we've talked a lot before about how what people think of is. Of course it's often not how they were actually worn, right. It was not really a tight lacing thing that we think of today, but it was still a lot of clothing. All that stuff that you're wearing is really heavy and and once you get out of all of that and realize that you can walk around your life without twenty five pounds of fabric hanging off of your body, it's pretty liberating. Well, and it's also worth mentioning I think that this was all happening in the summer. Like the idea of suddenly being free of all of that extra clothing in the hottest time of the year, which it would have been for Europe at the time. Um, that's got to be pretty appealing, and I'm sure that factored into the success the quick acceptance of these very new styles poire and and He's traveled to the United States, where they were received with great delight by the fashion crowd. He gave a series of lectures in Manhattan, and the two of them toward department stores and showed off all the latest designs from their collection. It's interesting to know I was looking at something while I was prepping for this that said that he found um American women too thin and not very fashionable, but they seemed so eager. He was fine with it. He was, we can work with this. Also in nineteen thirteen, he turned once again to his roots in the theater, and most notably he designed costumes for Jacques Rochepin's Laminarette, and he once again saw the opportunity to use the stage as a runway, and he put his lampshade to Knicks front and center. So even though it had been a couple of years at that point, those were still very popular and he was still pushing them, uh and you know, doing very very well as a theatrical designer. But then nineteen fourteen changed everything for the House of Bore. He had come to be known as La magnifique for his innovative and original creations. But World War One saw him once again called into military service, this time as a military tailor, and he said to have streamlined the production of uniforms during that time. But because he was busy with his service and wasn't pretty seeing any new designs, his fashion house was using the handful of ideas that he had left behind when he went back to the army, So they were kind of just recycling this handful of concepts that he had to try to push out new stuff, but they really without him at the home. It's a bit of a struggle. In nineteen fifteen, while he was still serving, he was able to return to Paris for a little bit of time to design a new collection, but two tragedies struck his family right at the same time. His daughter Rosine died after contracting an ear infection and his daughter Gaspar died from the Spanish flu. The new collection didn't happen because of these two events. No new designs came from the Poire brand until after the war was over. This was really a turning point in Pare's life, although it wasn't apparent how much impact it had until later. So once he returned to his work in fashion after the war in nine, he picked up exactly where he left off, designing these high waisted gowns that were inspired by other cultures and that featured a lot of dramatic detail. He continued to produce his same style of design, but because his aesthetics seemed to have really frozen at the period right before he left to serve in World War One, his lick was too outdated. Coco Chanelle had arrived on the scene with her Little Black Dress in and the overworked theatricality of Pire's designs was immediately seen as old fashioned and out of mood. So that same year that Chanelle debuted The Little Black Dress, Pire, who was desperate at that point to save his fashion house, sold the rights to his company to financial backers. He still worked there, but he didn't own it, and his design really struggled. He continued to attempt to innovate, but it seemed like he didn't have the inspiration, so it was very forced and his design when people describe his designs at the time, they sound like they're kind of overworked, in a little bit lacking. Uh. And in an effort to rekindle public interest in his work because he wasn't bringing in customers, he staged this huge spectacle of three decorated barges on the banks of the sin for an art Dakaratif's exhibit, and you know, it was this huge, big event for part of his housewear line. But because his theatricality, which served him really well in times of plenty, it nearly bankrupted him when in this period when he didn't have that much ready money and it was you know, a period of struggle for the designer, so he couldn't pull off those same big, crazy things that he had been doing before because it was too expensive and people weren't into what he was doing anymore now, especially once you get into the twenties and the thirties, people were not about extravagance anymore. So this is really a downward turn. After and then after twenty three years of marriage, Denise Pare filed for divorce in claiming that he was just relentlessly cruel to her. And the following year, in ninety nine, the backers who had bought the poor a design house just four years before, closed the shop's doors. They had already had it with the spending and they knew that they couldn't sustain the business, and they sold off every assets scrap, which is sort of heartbreaking, like it was literally sold by weight. Sad. It's really upsetting, um, but we didn't lose everything. Pori was also unfortunately forced to sell most of his personal assets, so the furniture and paintings that he had had in his townhouse at the time were sold off and he had to move to a much smaller apartment. At this point, he turned to writing for a couple of years. He published on Dressing This Age in nineteen thirty and his autobiography King of Fashion in ninety one. The publications didn't get him back on his feet, and by nine thirty three he was designing dresses in department stores for housewives. Yeah, quite a step back from what he had been doing, And by six he was discovered working in a bar. But people that talked to him found him as confident as ever. He really thought he was going to make a comeback in fashion. Paul Pot died in n in poverty. He had been living on public assistance, and Elsa Shipparelli, who he had befriended and encouraged when she was young and starting out, paid for his burial. And so even though it seems that he has a sad ending, it kind of turns around later after he's gone for a bit. Uh. In May of two thousand five, Denise's wardrobe, which it turned out had actually been carefully preserved by the family, so thank goodness, it was not sold off in that bulk um clear out that the backers had done was auctioned off. And when this happened, it suddenly put Poiret's designs back in the public eye, and so even though he had been marginalized at the end of his life, the interest in his work was like instantly reignited. People saw these designs and it was like, how did we ever forget this person? Like how did we let this fall into obscurity. Then in two thousand and seven, the exhibit poire King of Fashion opened at the met To Great Fan Fair in ps Uh. And while party is long gone, his impact on fashion still remains. He was, of course the first couturier that used draping rather than tailoring to create gowns. Uh, you know, freeing women from restrictive corsets that have been de rigger up to that point. And in fact, you know, in getting rid of all of those fussy layers, he just completely changed fashion forever. Like now, you know, of course, garments are draped, and you know, if you watch Project Runway, you see people that do a lot of draping techniques to create these really flowing, beautiful gowns. That's still happening, and he was the first that really did it commercially. He's also the person that debuted the idea of nude stockings. Instead of black tights. Yeah, just quite revolutionary. And now we have options for both, but at the time it was black tights or nothing. Both are neither, Both are neither or does not having co drink? And he, as I said, was the first designer who really had a brand, so fragrance home design, lifestyle products. He was doing this in the early nineteen hundreds, like what Ralph Lauren does today wouldn't ever have happened without this kind of idea. Sparking and fashion marketing was also something that he really pioneered. He was a person that was out there doing his own pr telling people how great he was promoting his brand, which no fashion houses were doing that way at the time. Some have said that we would not have the avant garde designers of today if there had been no poor A. Imagine a world without Jean Pon Jean Paul Gautier. I think you don't want us to do that. I wouldn't. I would cry, I love and pants for ladies. Yes, um, yeah, that wasn't really happening. Prior to that. There were some sporting costumes in late Victorian an early and Wardian era, but it usually involved bloomers that were cut a little more like pants under a full dress, so you could do sporting things and not expose anything, but you still add on a jillion layers and yards and yards and yards of fabric. So he just completely revolutionized the way we dress. And it's sort of interesting because we think today of core um as being other. I think most people on the street don't think of that as being, you know, the thing that really influences their day to day fashion. But he was kind of doing this influencing even though it was in more tour circles, and it's echoed out you know since then. It reminds me of Downton Abbey, and there's an episode in which Lady Sybil comes to dinner. Yes, yes, Paul, I love, I love I love his work. I highly encourage anybody to um go googling and looking for pictures of it because some of it's just mind blowing. He also did do some really really skinny skirts that were hard to walk in. Yeah, we wor't forgive him of we were talking about that earlier. But have we have all of these getting rid of restrictive layers and getting rid of course it's and getting rid of all these things that bind people, and but then having these skirts that were so so tight that you couldn't really walk in them. I have a theory that is unsubstantiated. I haven't done the reas to prove or disprove it, but I wonder because he was so influenced by Asian cultures such as he knew them um and you know, it's considered very um much a part of like Geisha culture, to take the very tiniest steps. It's part of like the delicate and graceful way that Geisha move and their shoes are actually designed to kind of promote this sort of movement. And I wonder if he was trying to mimic that a little bit in a more western style. But I don't know. I'm I'm just speculating it. I hate skirts like that because I am tall lady. I take very giant steps all the time. You're a long striker. I have two skirts that I bought at the same time, not realizing when I tried them on that they were going to cause me not to be able to do that. I have never worn them since getting them home from the store. So, for you, pants or things that don't have a hymn that keeps me from blocking. There you go. They so much. Bring winning us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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Happy Saturday. Last week we name dropped French fashion designer Paul Poiret and are behind the scenes on Is It or a Duncan? Holly talked about his designing clothes for her and her daughter and I was kind of like, yeah, that makes total logical sense. It seems like a good time based on that's a poll our episode on poire Out of the Archive. Yeah, and this episode originally came out on jun We hope you enjoyed. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I am Tracy. Today we're talking about one of my favorite designers of all time. Yes, yes, who is that Paul poire I thought it might if you really want to friendship up, but I won't do the full pronunciation throughout the podcast because it starts to get a little His famous quote from was I am an artist, not a dressmaker like he He's one of those people that when you study him, you wonder if he came off to people around him as super conceited and blustering. Yeah, I was gonna say that doesn't sound pretentious at all. But he also was a really hard worker and he really did innovate, So maybe his confidence was just all built off of knowing that he was going to plow through and some actual success and not just grandiose statements. Yeah, and indeed, I mean his work, which was often very outant guard for the times, changed the fashion world in really significant ways. And people may not know his name unless they're really into historical fashion, but odds are you would recognize his designs. Um. You know, his silhouettes tend to be very long and narrow skirts sometimes pants topped off with these very dramatic tunics that tended to be wider, so the top portion of the silhouette tended to be wider than the bottom um and they were really the height of fashion in the nineteen teens, in the early heading into the early nineteen twenties. A lot of his his designs are actually done by other artists at the time. He collaborated with a lot of them. So if you look at drawings by Erte, a lot of those are him. Uh Aribe who he worked with him, we'll talk about briefly. Uh those drawings that are sort of famous, and they're like just pre flapper era people recognize, but they may not realize that a lot of those are Paul Poire, and even the ones that aren't are often influenced by the things that he was doing in fashion. So he was born in eighteen seventy nine and Laisal. His father was a cloth merchant, so he got a lot of exposure to fashion in his early life while his family was working class. Yeah, and his father sent him at a very early age to apprentice with an umbrella maker because as a working class family, they wanted him to have a skill. Uh. But young Paul would actually gather the small scraps left over at the end of the day, the little pieces of silk left over from the umbrella cuttings, and he would make clothes for his sister's dolls. So he was doing fashion and small scale pretty early in his life, and that's a pretty perfect use for umbrella scraps. In his fashion career officially started Couturier Madeleine Chari brought twelve of his designs, and shortly thereafter Poire was hired by Couturier Jacques du Say as a junior assistant, and he quickly worked his way up to head of tailoring in that group, and he was so successful in his position that he was eventually tapped by Doucet to take on jobs designing costumes for stage actresses, and he made a really big name for himself doing this. Um there's one particular garment that's often referenced, which is a mantle he made for a play entitled Zaza, which was worn by actress Gabriel Jean, and it was black tool layered over black taffoda, and it was painted with white irises, and it made a big splash and it was um allegedly very impactful in terms of the emotional moment of the scene in which it appeared, and Poiret sort of started to realize that he could actually be using the stage as a runway to showcase his own designs and build a following. So he kind of became famous for these garments he was making for actresses. It's kind of double a double edged sword, though, because it's rumored that when he was working with celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt, that he was overheard by the actress while he was making fun of her and she had him fired. But that's again kind of a cloaked in rumor. Part of history. Some histories of him will say that happened, some we'll not because at the same time, which was nine undred, Poiret also had to report for a military service, which was mandatory. So it's entirely possible that the Bernhard stories just gossip that took advantage of that timing. Regardless of how he left, the job to say had been really encouraging of his activity and his style. So it was pretty tragic that he left the world for a while. Yeah, I mean, any creative type that gets a lot of encouragement, that's like a perfect situation. So to unfortunately step out of that is not ideal. But he only had to do his year of mandatory service and when he returned to Paris in nineteen o one, he was hired almost immediately by the House of Worth, and that was one of the most prominent design houses in Europe. Um if you look at fashion plates of the Victorian and Edwardian eras many of them, many of the styles and fashions will be credited in the House of Worth. I mean they were huge, uh, And at the time Poiret was hired into the firm, Charles Frederick Worth, who had founded the fashion house had already passed away, and his two sons, Jean Philippe and Gaston, had taken over. Unlike his time working under du Say, he didn't get a lot of encouragement at Worth. Instead of taking advantage of all this theatricality and dramatic style that he had really cultivated, the brother's Worth put him to work on pretty mundane stuff. He tried to inject his style. Don't know what he was doing, but that was not really what the Worth clientele were looking for. They were used to getting stylish clothing that was guaranteed to be seen as stylish and not just experimental stuff. They were not ready for the avant garde. No. The good thing, though, is that he did have an incredible confidence. Even through the rough times at House of Worth. He was certain that he was going to move on to better things, and even when clients were complaining that he was making ugly, crazy clothes, he was really unflappable about it, which is pretty impressive and astonishing. Uh. And in nine three he finally took his future into his own hands and he opened his own shop. And because Pare had charmed many clients, uh, he actually had a great many fans in high places. The King of Portugal allegedly sent two white mules to the designer for the opening of his boutique in Ruabart, and they stood outside on opening day, like the doors were just flanked by these two mules. Just kind of wonderfully odds. They're perfectly theatrical to his designs. In nineteen o three, broke with a major fashion rule by ditching petticoats entirely. Yeah, I mean that's huge. We think of it today and it seems like, well, you don't need a petticoat, but you did then. Yeah, Well, and that's that. This was if you were out without a petticoat, It wasn't just that your clothing didn't look right. You were being immodest and indecent without petticoats on. Yeah. Uh. So he carried on for a couple of years in his new shop, and in nineteen o five Pare married his wife Denise, and the pair had really known each other since childhood. She was not exactly known to be like a great beauty. She had really been kind of a simple girl from simple beginnings, because remember his childhood started in very simple places. But through her marriage with Paul, she really became something of a style icon, and she served as his muse. Uh. And she would wear her his fashions as the pair toured Europe and eventually other places together. Um. And they had five daughters together throughout their marriage and later in life. Uh. Paul would say, sort of unkindly of Denise. She was extremely simple, and all those who have admired her since I made her my wife would certainly not have chosen her in the state in which I found her. That makes me angry. It's a little snarky, but things did not. I did not say Rosie with the two of them forever, but for a while she was his muse, and I think she became the style director of his design house for a while. And you know, he really clearly loved the female form and love to dress it and wanted to free it from a lot of the things that people were kind of watted up in terms of the rules of clothing. Yeah, there were lots and lots of layers, and Denise was a huge pardon kind of that movement towards a freer mode of dress. In Pre produced an album of fashion designs. It was illustrated by Paul Iribe called simply rope. To Paul Plory. At this point in his career, Grecian clothing and Japanese kimonos and certain caftin styles from Middle Eastern and North African cultures were really influential in Paris designs. He wanted to make garments that used simple rectangles instead of really complicated shapes. He developed lots of designs that celebrated the so called Direct War revival. Slouett so very columnar and n six was also the year that he did something again controversial, when he replaced the corset as a foundation garment for his designs with a much less restrictive girdle. And this is a huge deal. Um, this is like a kin to women burning their brawls in the sixties, except it was a man doing it for fashion. Well, and it really happened. But you know, in terms of like the cultural touchstones that people think of, this is really big to basically say the undergarments are stupid and wrong, let's get rid of those. We're going for a more natural shape. Um, no petticoats, no corsets, complete mayhem. Really in terms of what had gone before, Yeah, and again it wasn't just about what the clothes looked like it was about all these ideas of modesty that were tied to it and in decency and like what what good ladies of quality wore when they were going out and he threw those out the window. And he wasn't the only designer, we should say, doing these things, like Vienna was doing similar stuff, but he was kind of so outspoken about it, and he had such a flair for the dramatic that he got the most attention in the press and societally for what he was doing. But when you mentioned the modesty issue, that brings us to a scandal that took place. Yes, there was a scandal in nine nine involving uh Poire and British Prime Minister H. H. Asked With and his wife. The story goes that lady asked With was a fan of Paris work and invited him to show his designs at ten Downing Street. As is sometimes the case with fashion shows, things got a little bit out of hand. Rumors started to spread of really wild happenings and models running around the famed residents in various states of undress. The scandal really nearly caused ask With resignation, and it came to be known as the Gowning Street scandal. And then um, once that blew over and we moved forward a little bit to nineteen eleven, we really hit what is in the history of Paul Pore a huge, huge year. First, he did something that had never been done before, which is that he expand his brand, and that's not something we normally attribute to things that were going on in the early nine hundreds, like the idea of a fashion designer having a brand. Uh. And he produced a fragrance line that was named after his daughter Rosine, and it was really successful and it eventually became Fragrances and Cosmetics and continued to selve very very well. He he also opened a decorative arts school for underprivileged girls, which was called a Cole Martin, and that was named after another of his daughters. He used the artwork the girls produced to create fabric prints, which they sold in a shop adjacent to the school. This really delights me. Yeah, I feel like it was the spoon Flower of the kind of and it really ended up becoming like a lifestyle brand at that point because it also they also sold things like stationary and you know, small little house items there that had often used the designs of these girls, and so his sort of home line became known as the Martin Group. After this school and the the attached store just really cool, uh. And then he invented around in nineteen eleven what was called the Robe de Minute, and this is again one of those things that is so simple but really mind blowing for the time. It was basically a simple column of silk cut almost like a T shirt, and it allegedly took only thirty minutes to assemble, so compared to the structured Edwardian fashions that were still pretty prominent at the time, this was basically like walking around in a nightgown. So to show up at an evening party in this, which was usually what his wife did, she was like wearing his really kind of cutting edge designs before anyone else did, which is why she became a fashion icon. Really was pretty brazen and took a lot of bravado and it was um ultra revolutionary. But again we should point out that it's not on its own. He's not the only one doing these sorts of things. This is also around the time that Italian designer Mariano Fortuni was producing his really ultrasimple Grecian style silhouettes that took advantage of his secret and famous silk pleading techniques. So there was this um aesthetic developing in fashion circles for simpler but really beautiful garments um in this Grecian columnar style. Yeah, and if you're not really familiar with with what Edwardian fashions look like, we can just they were very fitted and think of Titanic. Yeah, think of Titanic, very fitted, many layers of underpinnings underneath that there's just a laggling on. Yeah. Fussy's a great word, like you really had to have help to get into your clothes, and not so much the case even though the lines were simpler. I think people think of Edwardian clothing is being simpler because it's the next phase after Victorian, which was very fussy and everything had a Brazilian tassels on it. Um, the clothing got the lines got simpler and sharper, but and there wasn't as much crazy embellishment, but all those layers were still there. So you still had on your bloomers and your pantaloons and a chemise and a corset and possibly a corset cover and then a gown, possibly an undergown, you know, petticoat, I mean all. And he basically got rid of all of that and said, just wear a simple silk sheath. It's fine, I mean And everybody was like, what, that's bold to do? What? He was sparked by a just an exoticism after traveling to Moscow in nineteen eleven. This was a huge influence on his work from this point. Shortly after he came back to Paris on June nineteen eleven, he hosted the historically famous party called the thousand and Second Night. There was allegedly a new translation of The thousand and one Night's making the round in Paris at the time, although we haven't really been able to confirm that. In time for this episode, guests were required to attend in Persian styled clothing or they had to be Uh. They had to allow the host to dress them once they got there. Uh. This was actually a ploy on Poires part. He was dressing his guests in his new line of designs that were inspired by his travels um specifically a production of Scheherazade he saw at the Ballet Roust and his newfound interest in Orientalism, and it's it's really sort of where I think this party and this line of clothing is really where his style kind of gets put under the magnifying class in terms of the future, Like that's what a lot of people associate with him or the is that line of clothing, and that's actually where he debuted the harem pants that he became famous for and the lampshade dresses that he is also known for today. The lampshade dresses really, when you say that, I think sometimes people that might not know have a hard time picturing it. They really were these tunic style dresses that had wire in the hem to pull them out from the body so it looked like a lampshade um. And these less confining shapes actually became incredibly popular and they kept Party very busy filling client orders. Even though they were completely crazy and way beyond what had been going on in fashion previously. People just really jumped on it. They loved it well if you had a chance not to be. And of course it was all those layers of clothing. Yeah, because we've we've talked a lot before about how what people think of is. Of course it's often not how they were actually worn, right. It was not really a tight lacing thing that we think of today, but it was still a lot of clothing. All that stuff that you're wearing is really heavy and and once you get out of all of that and realize that you can walk around your life without twenty five pounds of fabric hanging off of your body, it's pretty liberating. Well, and it's also worth mentioning I think that this was all happening in the summer. Like the idea of suddenly being free of all of that extra clothing in the hottest time of the year, which it would have been for Europe at the time. Um, that's got to be pretty appealing, and I'm sure that factored into the success the quick acceptance of these very new styles poire and and He's traveled to the United States, where they were received with great delight by the fashion crowd. He gave a series of lectures in Manhattan, and the two of them toward department stores and showed off all the latest designs from their collection. It's interesting to know I was looking at something while I was prepping for this that said that he found um American women too thin and not very fashionable, but they seemed so eager. He was fine with it. He was, we can work with this. Also in nineteen thirteen, he turned once again to his roots in the theater, and most notably he designed costumes for Jacques Rochepin's Laminarette, and he once again saw the opportunity to use the stage as a runway, and he put his lampshade to Knicks front and center. So even though it had been a couple of years at that point, those were still very popular and he was still pushing them, uh and you know, doing very very well as a theatrical designer. But then nineteen fourteen changed everything for the House of Bore. He had come to be known as La magnifique for his innovative and original creations. But World War One saw him once again called into military service, this time as a military tailor, and he said to have streamlined the production of uniforms during that time. But because he was busy with his service and wasn't pretty seeing any new designs, his fashion house was using the handful of ideas that he had left behind when he went back to the army, So they were kind of just recycling this handful of concepts that he had to try to push out new stuff, but they really without him at the home. It's a bit of a struggle. In nineteen fifteen, while he was still serving, he was able to return to Paris for a little bit of time to design a new collection, but two tragedies struck his family right at the same time. His daughter Rosine died after contracting an ear infection and his daughter Gaspar died from the Spanish flu. The new collection didn't happen because of these two events. No new designs came from the Poire brand until after the war was over. This was really a turning point in Pare's life, although it wasn't apparent how much impact it had until later. So once he returned to his work in fashion after the war in nine, he picked up exactly where he left off, designing these high waisted gowns that were inspired by other cultures and that featured a lot of dramatic detail. He continued to produce his same style of design, but because his aesthetics seemed to have really frozen at the period right before he left to serve in World War One, his lick was too outdated. Coco Chanelle had arrived on the scene with her Little Black Dress in and the overworked theatricality of Pire's designs was immediately seen as old fashioned and out of mood. So that same year that Chanelle debuted The Little Black Dress, Pire, who was desperate at that point to save his fashion house, sold the rights to his company to financial backers. He still worked there, but he didn't own it, and his design really struggled. He continued to attempt to innovate, but it seemed like he didn't have the inspiration, so it was very forced and his design when people describe his designs at the time, they sound like they're kind of overworked, in a little bit lacking. Uh. And in an effort to rekindle public interest in his work because he wasn't bringing in customers, he staged this huge spectacle of three decorated barges on the banks of the sin for an art Dakaratif's exhibit, and you know, it was this huge, big event for part of his housewear line. But because his theatricality, which served him really well in times of plenty, it nearly bankrupted him when in this period when he didn't have that much ready money and it was you know, a period of struggle for the designer, so he couldn't pull off those same big, crazy things that he had been doing before because it was too expensive and people weren't into what he was doing anymore now, especially once you get into the twenties and the thirties, people were not about extravagance anymore. So this is really a downward turn. After and then after twenty three years of marriage, Denise Pare filed for divorce in claiming that he was just relentlessly cruel to her. And the following year, in ninety nine, the backers who had bought the poor a design house just four years before, closed the shop's doors. They had already had it with the spending and they knew that they couldn't sustain the business, and they sold off every assets scrap, which is sort of heartbreaking, like it was literally sold by weight. Sad. It's really upsetting, um, but we didn't lose everything. Pori was also unfortunately forced to sell most of his personal assets, so the furniture and paintings that he had had in his townhouse at the time were sold off and he had to move to a much smaller apartment. At this point, he turned to writing for a couple of years. He published on Dressing This Age in nineteen thirty and his autobiography King of Fashion in ninety one. The publications didn't get him back on his feet, and by nine thirty three he was designing dresses in department stores for housewives. Yeah, quite a step back from what he had been doing, And by six he was discovered working in a bar. But people that talked to him found him as confident as ever. He really thought he was going to make a comeback in fashion. Paul Pot died in n in poverty. He had been living on public assistance, and Elsa Shipparelli, who he had befriended and encouraged when she was young and starting out, paid for his burial. And so even though it seems that he has a sad ending, it kind of turns around later after he's gone for a bit. Uh. In May of two thousand five, Denise's wardrobe, which it turned out had actually been carefully preserved by the family, so thank goodness, it was not sold off in that bulk um clear out that the backers had done was auctioned off. And when this happened, it suddenly put Poiret's designs back in the public eye, and so even though he had been marginalized at the end of his life, the interest in his work was like instantly reignited. People saw these designs and it was like, how did we ever forget this person? Like how did we let this fall into obscurity. Then in two thousand and seven, the exhibit poire King of Fashion opened at the met To Great Fan Fair in ps Uh. And while party is long gone, his impact on fashion still remains. He was, of course the first couturier that used draping rather than tailoring to create gowns. Uh, you know, freeing women from restrictive corsets that have been de rigger up to that point. And in fact, you know, in getting rid of all of those fussy layers, he just completely changed fashion forever. Like now, you know, of course, garments are draped, and you know, if you watch Project Runway, you see people that do a lot of draping techniques to create these really flowing, beautiful gowns. That's still happening, and he was the first that really did it commercially. He's also the person that debuted the idea of nude stockings. Instead of black tights. Yeah, just quite revolutionary. And now we have options for both, but at the time it was black tights or nothing. Both are neither, Both are neither or does not having co drink? And he, as I said, was the first designer who really had a brand, so fragrance home design, lifestyle products. He was doing this in the early nineteen hundreds, like what Ralph Lauren does today wouldn't ever have happened without this kind of idea. Sparking and fashion marketing was also something that he really pioneered. He was a person that was out there doing his own pr telling people how great he was promoting his brand, which no fashion houses were doing that way at the time. Some have said that we would not have the avant garde designers of today if there had been no poor A. Imagine a world without Jean Pon Jean Paul Gautier. I think you don't want us to do that. I wouldn't. I would cry, I love and pants for ladies. Yes, um, yeah, that wasn't really happening. Prior to that. There were some sporting costumes in late Victorian an early and Wardian era, but it usually involved bloomers that were cut a little more like pants under a full dress, so you could do sporting things and not expose anything, but you still add on a jillion layers and yards and yards and yards of fabric. So he just completely revolutionized the way we dress. And it's sort of interesting because we think today of core um as being other. I think most people on the street don't think of that as being, you know, the thing that really influences their day to day fashion. But he was kind of doing this influencing even though it was in more tour circles, and it's echoed out you know since then. It reminds me of Downton Abbey, and there's an episode in which Lady Sybil comes to dinner. Yes, yes, Paul, I love, I love I love his work. I highly encourage anybody to um go googling and looking for pictures of it because some of it's just mind blowing. He also did do some really really skinny skirts that were hard to walk in. Yeah, we wor't forgive him of we were talking about that earlier. But have we have all of these getting rid of restrictive layers and getting rid of course it's and getting rid of all these things that bind people, and but then having these skirts that were so so tight that you couldn't really walk in them. I have a theory that is unsubstantiated. I haven't done the reas to prove or disprove it, but I wonder because he was so influenced by Asian cultures such as he knew them um and you know, it's considered very um much a part of like Geisha culture, to take the very tiniest steps. It's part of like the delicate and graceful way that Geisha move and their shoes are actually designed to kind of promote this sort of movement. And I wonder if he was trying to mimic that a little bit in a more western style. But I don't know. I'm I'm just speculating it. I hate skirts like that because I am tall lady. I take very giant steps all the time. You're a long striker. I have two skirts that I bought at the same time, not realizing when I tried them on that they were going to cause me not to be able to do that. I have never worn them since getting them home from the store. So, for you, pants or things that don't have a hymn that keeps me from blocking. There you go. They so much. Bring winning us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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