Madame Grès: The
Art of Draping

In The Art of Draping, nearly 80 garments by Madame Grès from Alaïa’s unique collections are presented to the public for the first time. The designs on view — which date from the 1930s, when Madame Grès was creating under the name Alix, to the 1970s, when her timeless creations were still the peak of modernity amid ever newer generations of designers who arrived on the scene — include her celebrated draped “Antique” gowns, which have continued to bring her renown and glory in the many decades since.

The exhibition begins with a selection of Madame Grès’ white, ivory, and chalk designs that reveal the Hellenic majesty of her draping. A set of draped black designs, as well as designs with cut volumes, likewise demonstrate the timeless nature of her creations and the persistence of her style, which became a kind of personal writing. “I never create a dress from sketches. I drape the fabric on a model, then I study its nature thoroughly, and that’s when I pick up my scissors.” Able to produce infinite variations through her craft, Madame Grès did not just excel in draping. In the 1950s, she was also unequaled in her skill with taffeta and woolen fabrics. Her short cocktail dresses, oblique and profiled, and her fluid day gowns sparkle in all their lightness. Her adeptness at simple forms and the cutting solutions and methods to achieve them, elevated to the level of aesthetic principles, can also be seen in her evening ensembles with their savvily cut volumes and generous dimensions, which bear witness to the designer’s taste for traditional clothing with flat-pattern cutting.

Particularly gifted in subdued and muted tones, Madame Grès was also an inventive colorist with her own vocabulary. Cleverly staged as if within an intimate theater, selected designs from various decades — in hues of reddish brown, chestnut, cinnamon, hyacinth, taupe, tortoise shell, bronze, verdigris, almond green, redcurrant, sunny yellow, all shades of beige, off-whites, and deep blacks — create a chromatic harmony that serves her art, presented in all its jewel-like grandeur.

The Art of Draping is curated by fashion historian and curator Olivier Saillard and organized by Rafael Gomes, creative director of SCAD FASH museums.

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