Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from HouseofWorks.com

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly from I am Tracy Zoolos

and today we're talking about one of my favorite designers of all time.

Yes, yes, who is that? Paul Poirey. I thought it might be.

Or if you really want to French it up Paul Poirey.

But I won't do the full pronunciation throughout the podcast because it starts to get a little fun.

Field awkward. His famous quote from 1913 was, I am an artist not a dressmaker.

Like he's one of those people that when you study him you wonder if he came off to people around him as super conceded and blustery.

Yeah, I was going to 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...

Yeah, some actual success. Yeah, not just grandiose statements.

Yeah, and indeed, I mean his work which was often very avant-garde 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.

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.

And they were really the height of fashion in the 19 teens, in the early, heading into the early 1920s.

A lot of 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.

Erieb, who he worked with, and we'll talk about briefly, 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 Poiret.

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