SCAD FASH to Spotlight Horst P. Horst and Madame Grès
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Gearing up to showcase the work of two fashion powerhouses — the photographer Horst P. Horst and the haute couture designer known as Madame Grès — representatives from the Savannah College of Art & Design hosted a preview Wednesday in Manhattan.
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Both exhibitions will be staged at SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta with “Horst P. Horst: Essence of the Times” running Oct. 6 through April 16, and “The Art of Draping” set for Nov. 10 through June 30. The legendary Horst, whose name is synonymous with Vogue due to his years of working for the Condé Nast publication, studied art and architecture before becoming a photographer. Eighty examples of his work will be featured in the show.
Coordinated in collaboration with the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, the Madame Grès exhibition will mark the first time in 15 years that her work has been presented in the U.S. During Wednesday’s media preview at Bottino, curators from the SCAD Museum of Art and SCAD FASH talked up what’s in store.
SCAD’s director of fashion exhibitions Rafael Gomes scrolled through some of the striking images and designs that will be featured in each show. Working with the Alaïa foundation’s director Olivier Saillard, Gomes noted how the organization has an “incredible” collection of about 700 items. This fall’s show will feature designs from the ’30s through the ’80s.
With the help of Gert Elfering, who owns the Horst Estate, the upcoming exhibition will spotlight Horst’s work from the ’30s until the ’90s. “The stories for both are remarkable. Both of them were escaping fascists from the 1930s. They were so successful in what they were doing. It will be a great inspiration for our students to see these two timelines for these two great artists,” Elfering said.
He also touched upon some of their biographical backgrounds, explaining how the fashion designer, whose given name was Germaine Emilie Krebs, wanted to become a sculptor but her parents disapproved. “But she did it anyway. She did it with fabric,” he said.
Initially designing successfully using the alias “Alix” in the ’30s, she ran into problems in the ’40s for designing gowns for the wives of Nazi officers, Gomes said. However, it was later discovered that the designer had sewn the Star of David with blue thread inside some of those designs as a form of resistance because she was Jewish, Gomes said. Grès’ studio in Paris was forced to close with the official reason being that it was a time of rationing and her dresses could require up to 60 feet of fabric due to all the details and pleats. She then spent the remaining war years hiding in the South of France and reopened her atelier after the war.
People who worked with Madame Grès said the environment was like a convent because she required silence to create and was very strict, Gomes said. One of her former employees discussed with Saillard some of her intricate techniques so that SCAD students in Atlanta and Savannah will be able to learn them from him and use them on oversized T-shirts. Noting how some of Madame Grès’ earlier dresses had no boning even though they look as though they did, Gomes said she relied on limited stitching, twisting or braiding to make the wearer feel secure in the garment.
Gomes noted how the couturier later fell on more difficult times at the end of her life and designers like Pierre Cardin, Hubert de Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent helped her out financially. Her death, too, was cloaked by her daughter Anne Grès until December 1994 — more than a year after her burial in the South of France. “The official version was that she was upset with the fashion industry for not giving her mother the credit that she deserved. There was also this big retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [in the fall of 1994] that was coming. The daughter also didn’t want to say anything because the company was going bankrupt. Her mother was having health issues and died. She kept it secret for more than one year,” Gomes said. (Her death actually was discovered after WWD published an “interview” with the designer, the first in decades. The faxed questions actually had been answered by her daughter.)
Emphasizing Madame Grès’ impact on so many designers, Gomes cited the late Isabel Toledo and Ralph Rucci among the American ones.
Through Horst’s work, the hope is that museum visitors will grasp the breadth of his 60-year career. “Adapting, not just adopting” techniques, the lensman excelled in his medium, even though he first studied under the famed architect Le Corbusier. But hanging out in Paris with a bunch of artists and aristocrats, Horst met his mentor Baron George Hoyningen-Huene, a standout French Vogue photographer, whom he first assisted and modeled for. A year later, Horst put his artistic skills to use handling his own shoots and quickly establishing himself as a Vogue photographer in Paris.
Gesturing toward the 1939 iconic black-and-white image of a woman wearing a corset with her back to the camera and her face buried in her extended right arm, Gomes said that image, “The Mainbocher Corset,” was taken at an early-morning Vogue shoot. “Then they got the news that the Germans were invading Paris and they needed to leave immediately. The model started crying and this is how he got that image. She was crying. War was coming. The Nazis were invading Paris,” Gomes said. “As a German gay photographer, he needed to leave. He left on the last boat to the U.S. The following day the [S.S.] Normandie capsized.”
Just as Grès inspired future generations of designers, so too did Horst inspire other artists and photographers, including Madonna, who struck a similar corseted pose to the aforementioned Horst photograph in her music video “Vogue,” Gomes said. Horst also created elaborate majestic sets that were usually lit with one light from above and two from below, highlighting cinematic portraits off Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli to prove that point.
The photographer sometimes collaborated with the artist Salvador Dalí and was inspired by his Surrealism, which seemed to have stayed with Horst through the ’80s, according to Gomes. The photographer later transitioned “incredibly” into color, which was rare for most black-and-white photographers in the same way that many actresses in silent films didn’t fare as well with “the talkies,” he said. Still confirming the final edit with the Horst Estate, SCAD FASH expects to showcase about 80 images. Given the depth of his editorial work, the photographer routinely threw away his negatives after a magazine would buy an image or two.
To illustrate Horst’s contemporary style, Gomes pulled up a 1942 Vogue cover shot of a woman in what looks like a V-sit position with arms and legs extended beneath “Vogue” lettering that is comprised of images of women in different athletic stances. The issue was released around the time of the Olympic Games in Berlin, when the American track star Jessie Owens won four gold medals. “Horst had an incredible eye and composition. He worked very well in black-and-white, and in color,” Gomes said. “Later on in the ’70s when he came to the U.S., after a year he started shooting for a military magazine, became an American citizen and went on to photograph first ladies in the White House. He was also very successful photographing for American Vogue.”
At Diana Vreeland’s suggestion, Horst shot fashion designers in their homes to reflect how they lived — a novel concept at that time. That created a new set of challenges for Horst, who was accustomed to orchestrating his own compositions that involved sketching, creating sets and controlling the lighting and everything else involved with a shoot. Showing Horst’s “Garden of Hell” image of Vreeland reclining on a vibrant red chintz settee in her all-red living room apartment, Gomes said, “In people’s homes, he had to work with what he had. The set was how they lived. Then he needed to create a composition with what was available. It was a completely different approach for him. He had never done it before. And he mastered it very well.”
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