Bar hardcore fashion geeks and 19th-century history buffs, few have probably heard of Charles Frederick Worth. It’s a name with a stodgy Britishness that belies the fact that, in 1858, the man who bore it basically founded French fashion as we know it. That’s the précis of the exhibition Worth: Inventing Haute Couture, which opened at the Petit Palais in Paris this week, 200 years after Worth’s birth.
You might not know his name, but you’ll recognise his clothes, if you’ve looked at any painting from the mid-19th century onwards. He dressed almost every woman of note — from dollar princesses to actual princesses, including Empress Eugénie of France, the wife of Napoleon III. Elisabeth of Austria wore Worth for her coronation as Queen of Hungary; the Russian Tsarinas of Alexander III and Nicholas II both did too. The Comtesse Élisabeth Greffulhe, a socialite who inspired Marcel Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes in In Search of Lost Time, was a major client. On display at the Petit Palais are a number of her dresses, including a weighty evening gown of gold lamé, trimmed in fur and entirely smothered in embroidery and pearls, which she wore to upstage her daughter at the latter’s wedding in 1904.
Worth first helped popularise the crinoline, later deflating the shape entirely, pulling fullness to the back and evolving it into the bustle, which became equally emblematic of Victorian style. He invented a cut of dress known as the “princess” line, where the waist seam is removed to emphasise vertical lines, and which is still used by designers today. And, most significantly of all, he originated the very notion of the fashion designer, of a single figure dictating an aesthetic.
“Before him, the couturier would go to the client and she would choose the textile, the style,” says Annick Lemoine, chief curator of the exhibition and director of the Petit Palais. “With Worth, it changes. They come to him, and he decides. He invents.”
Worth, to a degree, invented himself — certainly when it came to being an arbiter of high style. He was born in rather unglamorous Lincolnshire and was apprenticed to leading British textiles merchants aged 11, selling fabric to well-heeled women and their dressmakers. Bear in mind, there was no such thing as a “couture” house back then, much less a fashion designer — but Worth learnt the worth (pun intended) of excellent fabrics, which is something his later designs were renowned for. He also studied paintings in London’s National Portrait Gallery, where a later passion for reinventing historic styles was said to originate.
After working with two establishments in London, Worth moved to Paris in 1846, aged 20, to seek his fortune. Although he spoke no French, he managed to get a job at Gagelin-Opigez & Cie, another textile purveyor, who also sold ready-made shawls and small goods. Proving himself their best salesman, in 1851 he persuaded the company to start a small dressmaking business, which was unusual, as dressmaking was seen as a female domain. In 1858, he decided to strike out alone, and reshape fashion.
By nature, Worth wasn’t really an architect of silhouettes, nor did he seek to transform the lives of women through his designs in the manner of, say, Gabrielle Chanel with her jersey and unfitted suits, or Paul Poiret, who began as a designer at Worth before founding his own house and helping abolish corsets from fashion in the early 20th century. Rather, Worth was an astute decorator, embellishing and adorning silhouettes with luxurious fabrics and novelties of trim and passementerie so extravagant his approach became retrospectively known as the “upholstery” style.
Worth pitched himself as an artist. He equated his colour sense to that of Eugène Delacroix and stated that an outfit by him was “as good as a painting”, all the while sporting a velvet beret and smock. “Before, couturiers were seen as merchants,” says Lemoine.
Worth’s posturing was rabidly covered by the press — in 1867, the British literary magazine All the Year Round described him as a “great man-milliner, a wizard of silks and tulle . . . who rules fashionable Paris”. Milliner was then the word given to dress designers, before the term haute couturier was popularised — by Worth, as it happens. In 1871, Émile Zola satirised Worth in his novel The Kill — he changes his name to “Worms” — as “the couturier of genius to whom the great ladies of the Second Empire bowed down”. For the French writer, Worth and the nascent business of high fashion had already become emblematic of decadence and greed. Sound familiar?
Worth was a canny and astute businessman. It is well documented that he invented the designer label, bearing only his signature — “like a painter”, says Lemoine. He introduced a new way of displaying clothes on women “modelling” them live for prospective buyers. His earliest model was his wife, Marie Vernet, who netted him his first aristocratic client, the Princess Pauline von Metternich. He also pioneered seasonal collections, and was arguably the first to exploit historical styles as inspiration for new clothing.
In an even broader sense, Worth helped transform fashion from a series of small-scale local dressmakers working for individual clientele into big business. Although he was still making custom clothes — meaning that each item was handmade and fitted to a specific woman, with variations in trims and colours unique to her — it was on a scale previously unimaginable.
The house reached new heights of success after Worth’s death in 1895, creating, under the leadership of his sons Gaston and Jean-Philippe, some 10,000 garments each year by 1900. Part of the exhibition shows the seven floors of activity that comprised Maison Worth at its peak, including photography, tailors and rooms dedicated to creating dresses to ship to international clients, much like today’s ecommerce hubs. Accordingly, the Petit Palais show has loans from around the world, including pieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the Palazzo Pitti in Florence.
During the interwar period, Worth lost its lustre. No longer seen as an innovator in style, it fell out of fashion. The Paris house closed in 1954, though a London branch staggered on until the 1970s. In 2010, the label was relaunched, showing couture collections until 2013.
Yet Worth is still whirling around on television screens today. The HBO series The Gilded Age does a swift line in Worth rip-offery, often to stunning effect. But his true legacy is in inventing the fashion industry as we know it today: the dictatorial power of the designer, the significance of the brand, the lure of a label. As Lemoine asserts, “Worth is still alive, in a way.”
Worth: Inventing Haute Couture, until September 7 at Petit Palais in Paris
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