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actresses, including Sarah Bernhardt and the courtesan Réjane. Then he quickly outstripped Worth and Doucet to become the fashion guru of the moment. His greatest contribution toward the history of dress was in his outright rejection of a fundamental convention. This was the fierce division of a woman’s body to two. Previously, the abdomen and rib cage were encased in armorlike corsets, while the lower half was swathed in voluminous skirts, plumping out the behind. (Proust said that women looked as if they were “made up of different pieces that had been badly fitted together.”)8 Instead, Poiret utterly shocked his contemporaries by doing away with this rigid division and making dresses that clung revealingly to the body in soft, fluid lines, from a high waist just below the bust. Provoking still further outrage, he insisted his clients must dispense with their armored corsets. This gave the Poiret silhouette a particularly sinuous and alarmingly natural effect, driving furious critics such as Worth to denounce it as “hideous and barbaric.” Worth thundered that Poiret’s clothes were really “only suitable for women of uncivilized tribes.”9

Fashion is a fabulously subjective pastime, and contemporaries were unable to see that Poiret’s designs weren’t really so outlandish. Above all, they were a reflection of fashion’s frequent tendency to look over its shoulder to the past. Poiret’s major inspiration was in fact the postrevolutionary Directoire period, whose “classical” understatement was in turn inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. At the same time—largely under the influence of the Ballets Russes—all things exotic and oriental were then much in vogue, and Poiret’s intense palette of colors as well as his layered dresses and turbans earned him the description “Pasha Paris.” In strong contrast to the Belle Epoque craze for embellishment, which was synonymous with haute couture since its beginnings, any ornament or elaboration in Poiret’s dress, hairstyles or millinery was very spare. As with Gabrielle’s hats, it was the very simplicity of Poiret’s designs that some at first regarded as disturbing.

By 1913, Vogue announced that Poiret had become the “prophet” of simplicity, and quoted his claim that “it is what a woman leaves off, not what she puts on, that gives her cachet.” Poiret was interested in the underlying structure of clothing, saying that he rejected the confusion of richness with what is beautiful, and costliness with what is elegant. As the first truly modern designer, while his vision was an original one, Poiret found phenomenal success not only as a result of the design of his clothes.

In newly urbanized France, this young entrepreneur understood that a name needed constant airing, to appear in as many different guises as possible. And in those rapidly changing times when many were unsure, Poiret was sure, and promoted his own way of life as an idealized lifestyle that his clients were able to purchase. The first designer-entrepreneur to use the now ubiquitous concept of the “brand,” Poiret not only put his name on perfumes but also on cosmetics and accessories. Indeed, his strategy of extending the designer’s name far beyond the simple promotion of clothes would eventually become the financial pillar of almost every twentieth-century fashion house.

Meanwhile, as far as the traditionalist Worth was concerned, fashion had become a “meaningless jangle, hopelessly out of tune.” And while this description synchronized with the growing restlessness of an age of fast motor cars and flying machines, several other couturiers were catching up with Poiret’s simpler, unstructured shapes. Indeed, during the first decade or so of the century, high fashion was making a momentous move away from the Belle Epoque’s leisure, consumption and waste toward what was memorably described as “conspicuous outrage.” Indeed, flouting traditional standards of “good taste” was almost becoming the rule.10 Gabrielle’s unusually simple hats had already placed her in the category of unconventional and daring, but with her next step, she was