Jeanne Lanvin to Be Focus of New SCAD FASH Exhibition

Rosemary Feitelberg
·5-min read

This spring’s opening of “Jeanne Lanvin Haute Couture Heritage” at SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta will be a bucket-list event for the Savannah College of Art and Design.

During a preview of the exhibition on Thursday at the Walker Hotel in TriBeCa, SCAD’s director of fashion exhibitions Rafael Gomes spoke enthusiastically about what will be the first U.S. exhibition dedicated to the work and life of Jeanne Lanvin. The fact that the house’s creative director Peter Copping will show his first collection for Lanvin on Sunday only amplifies the expected interest and Gomes’ enthusiasm. Copping will travel to the U.S. for the April 4 opening.

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Running through Aug. 31, “Jeanne Lanvin Haute Couture Heritage” will feature 63 Lanvin designs, and fashion illustrations, including 11 original ones from the 1928 fall collections, as well as photographs. Dresses and sportswear will be on view, but some of the pieces are so fragile that they will have to be displayed horizontally.

Gomes noted that although there was a Lanvin retrospective at the Palais Galleria in Paris in 2014, this will be the first exhibition for the house in the U.S. The majority of the pieces will be on loan from the Alaïa Foundation since Azzedine Alaïa collected a good deal of Lanvin pieces. The Lanvin Archives are pitching in too, as is the Parodi Costume Collection in Miami. The latter’s octogenarian founder Gonzalo Parodi still works every day restoring dresses, Gomes said. “She has this entire studio with these huge tables, big magnifying glasses and curved needles like in an operating room, saving dresses every day,” he said.

Scrolling through images of the Lanvin dresses that will be featured in the exhibition, Gomes paused at an embellished midnight blue dress, and then showed another image of the same dress in a 1926 Vogue editorial, as well as in an ad in the same issue. “Yes, very Vogue,“ Gomes said of the editorial-advertising combination.

Moving on to an image of a colorful floral “robe de style,” he said that style required “months and months” of restoration by Parodi. Although the cotton used in the garment’s embroidery was still in very good condition, the problem was its weighted silk. In the past, silk was sold not by the yard but by its weight, so silk was submerged in a solution with microscopic metal fragments, he said. As a result, the dress became so fragile that the slightest movement would damage it. After Parodi painstakingly repaired it, the result made Gomes cry, he said. A children’s version of the same style is part of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, he said.

Visitors to the Lanvin show will learn about the founder, the eldest of 11 children, who started working at the age of 13 in a millinery shop on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, delivering hats. Instead of paying for bus fare, she would walk to make the deliveries to save money. (She would also follow the bus.) After apprenticeships, she started her own millinery shop in 1889 and then established her namesake fashion house in 1893. After her daughter Marguerite was born in 1897, she served as her muse and clients noticed the child-size creations, and they would order those too as well as the hats, Gomes said.

Paul Iribe, (who was Coco Chanel’s lover,) created the Lanvin logo using a photograph of the mother-and-daughter as a template. By 1908, Lanvin had added a children’s clothing department to her store.

Showing vintage photos of Lanvin’s workers sewing, Gomes noted that it provided child care for hundreds of workers. That gave employees the peace of mind of knowing their children were safe and helped with productivity, Gomes said. A sign of Lanvin’s devotion to her own daughter, whose name can mean daisy, is the daisy motif that appears in several Lanvin creations, he said.

Her daughter also succeeded her mother, after the founder died in 1946. Gomes also cited some of the celebrated designers who worked for the house including Castillo, Claude Montana and Alber Elbaz. The Lanvin Archives still have the founder’s office just as she left it behind — books, fabrics, the mirror et al. Her fondness for blue will also be on display at this spring’s show. The team turned to Pantone to recreate the signature blue that the designer favored. “It’s almost as though you are inside of a Lanvin box,” Gomes said. Jean Lanvin’s love of blue will also be evident in the two dresses that will on view in the show. “She loved this shade of blue that was very well-known during the Renaissance, when it would be created with lapis lazuli, which was so expensive because it came from Afghanistan,” Gomes said.

Pausing to look at a photo of Lanvin riding a camel in Egypt, Gomes said her worldwide travels gave her great inspiration and offered a chance find new fabrics and techniques. SCAD is also getting ready for another exhibition “Christian Dior” at SCAD FASH in Lacoste, France, which will run from May 7 to Sept. 30. Curated by Dior Héritage and the Christian Dior Museum in Granville, it will feature an array of floral-themed pieces that won’t all be Dior.

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