The Fortuny Gown

Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo was born in Granada, the ancient Moorish capital of Spain, in 1871, of a family of Spanish artists. As he grew, he was surrounded by a profusion of treasures that his parents collected: rare pieces of Hispano-Moresque pottery, Persian carpets, Islamic metalwork and armory, along with a rich collection of traditional fabrics and textiles. Like everything associated with his father, who died when Mariano was three, this world held a special fascination for Fortuny: as a boy he had amused himself by dyeing pieces of material different colors. His own textiles were imbued with the same antique quality possessed by the fabrics, mellowed with age, that had surrounded him as a child. The designs on the velvets, brocades, silks and chasubles in his parents' collection were imprinted upon his imagination many years before he started his own production.

After the elder Fortuny's death, his mother moved the family to Paris, where she organized a small salon for the friends and followers of her late husband, and also encouraged Mariano to start painting. Along with painting, he learned etching at an early age. In 1889, his mother moved again, this time to Venice. The start of Fortuny's most creative period coincided with his move to the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei in 1899. It was a magnificent palace built in the thirteenth century and became an ideal work place, a building full of large, open spaces in which he could give full rein to his various talents. It eventually became the Palazzo Fortuny, the house of the magician.

Physically, he was described as about six feet tall, well-built and very distinguished-looking. His piercing blue eyes, neatly trimmed beard and beautiful hands, and his manner of dress made a great impression on people meeting him for the first time. Ugo Ojetti, a journalist and critic who knew Fortuny well, gives us this description of him: He is simple and sober as an anchorite. He always wears summer clothes, even when the bora is blowing, always of the same colour and made from the same material: an Inverness cape of black cloth, a lightweight suit of dark blue serge, a white silk cravat, a black slouch hat and low-heeled patent leather shoes or sandals of plaited red leather. His personal preference in dress was for the sixteenth century. He agreed with the painter George Frederick Watts when he said, The ugliness of most things connected with our ordinary habits is most remarkable. His penchant for dressing up in fancy dress and in disguises, at an early age, revealed a love and feeling for dress that was basic to Fortuny's later development: the designer of dresses and fabrics, both for the theater and for everyday use.

The elements which came to have the greatest influences on Fortuny were the art of the past and that of non-Western cultures where the concept of progress and change did not exist until the arrival of European colonists. His favorite periods were Classical Greece, the Renaissance and the great Venetian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which still surrounded him. Of all non-Western cultures, the one he preferred was the Arabic, during the era of its greatest expansion when it extended from Morocco to India, passing through Persia and the Near East.

In the early 1900s, textiles and fashion played an important part in everyday life. The homes of the middle classes were crammed with fabrics; most were in the taste inherited from the preceding generation, but new styles and designs were beginning to emerge in tune with the new aesthetic and functional concepts promoted by reformers of the new applied arts.

One of Fortuny's main sources of inspiration was Richard Wagner. The legends that provided the basis for Wagner's musical dramas also furnished Fortuny with a vast range of images, which he developed in his paintings and engravings. Wagner and 'Wagnerianism' were essential elements of the fin-de-siecle, and as a young man, Fortuny was introduced to Wagnerian music and mythology. His Wagnerian experience was a decisive milestone in his career, introducing him to new aesthetic possiblities. He went on to do much work in the theater, specifically related to lighting and set design. This theater work lead him, during the course of research, to his first serious contact with the art of costume. He designed the costumes for several theatrical productions, but his first purely fashion garment was the Knossos scarf. The scarf was made of silk and was rectangular in shape, printed with geometric, asymmetrical patterns and motifs inspired by Cycladic art. The scarves could be used in a number of ways, allowing great freedom of expression and movement to the human body. It was from these simple scarves, which showed him how to fuse form and fabric, that Fortuny developed his entire production of dresses.

For their full effect, Knossos scarves needed to be worn as embellishments to a particular type of dress. This dress appeared around 1907 and was called the Delphos robe. It is undoutably Fortunys most famous creation and eventually became the hallmark of his work. The Delphos robe, which was made of pleated silk and very simply cut, hung loosely from the shoulders and was a revolution for the tightly corseted women of 1907. His dresses can be related to the reform movements of the period. The exponents of both Modernism and the Aesthetic Movements were aiming for the creation of a modern style freed from the restraints of convention. Dress, they felt, should be artistic, hygienic and functional, and not subject to the whims of fashion which had created a kind of clothing that imprisoned the body like a rigid shell. Followers of the Aesthetic Movement looked back nostalgically to Classical Greek and medieval dress for their models. It is principally in the paintings of artists such as Albert Moore, Frederick Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, Sir Alma-Tadema and William Godward that one sees the best evidence of the ideal Aesthetic dress. (As an aside, Isadora Duncan had shown the need to reform dress as well as dance and was known to have worn Fortuny dresses. I found myself wondering if she had also worn the Knossos scarf and was this the infamous scarf which strangled her as it became tangled in the spokes of her car?)

The model originally described in Fortuny's patent was a Delphos with batwing sleeves, but numerous variations were subsequently produced, some with short sleeves, some with long, wide sleeves tied at the wrist, and others were sleeveless. As a rule, the dresses had wide, bateau necks and there was a belt printed with geometric and foliar decorations which could be used or not. All the dresses reached to the floor, and Fortuny himself preferred them to cover the feet. The border of the dress, sides and cuffs were usually finished with a series of small Venetian beads in different colors, which were both ornamental and functional, in that they weighed down the dress. It is still a mystery how the pleats in the Delphos were achieved and there remains much conjecture about the process involved in their creation. Today there are Delphos dresses over forty years old whose pleats are still as tight and crisp as when they were new.

Before being made up, the silks in the dresses were dyed every color imaginable. The soft, gentle shades favored by the Aesthetes predominated, but in Fortuny's hands they gained a special richness and brilliance. The silk was dipped several times, each application enriching the color which, due to the transparency of the dye, possesed an ambiguous and living quality that made it change according to light and movement. He never used the same design or identical color combination in any two pieces of fabric. Proust spoke of a particular velvet as "being of an intense blue which, as my gaze extended over it, was changed into malleable gold, by those same transmutations which, before the advancing gondolas, change into flaming metal the azure of the Grand Canal." (119)

All the dresses were produced in his studio. They were made by hand, individually, as were all the materials that went into them: the pleated and printed silk, the velvets, the cords that were used to gather them or unite the different parts, the linings which were of satin , silk, wool, the belts, the labels. Everything was made on the premises, including accessories as the dresses had no pockets, their wearers needed bags, which Fortuny made from his own multi-colored velvet in very simple designs.

Of all the outdoor and indoor gowns that Mme de Guermantes wore, those which seemed most to respond to a specific intention, to be endowed with a special significance, were the garments made by Fortuny from old Venetian models. Is it their historical character, or is it rather that each one of them is unique, that gives them so special a significance that the pose of the woman who is wearing one while waiting for you or while she talks to you assumes an exceptional importance, as though the costume had been the fruit of a long deliberation and your conversation was somehow detached from everyday life like a scene in a novel?


-The Captive

Parisian high society was aware of Fortuny's creations and longed to possess them. These influential women of the beau monde, whose lives Proust was to describe in such minute detail, made him aware of Fortuny. On at least sixteen occasions throughout Remembrance of Things Past there are references to Fortuny or to his dresses. In the volume entitled The Captive, Fortuny constitutes a whole leitmotiv and is the only character in the whole of Proust's long work who retains a real-life name and identity. The descriptions, comments and associations go far beyond the needs of literature, reflecting a very real knowledge of and fascination for his dresses.

Proust had an additional reason for being familiar with Fortuny's work and with the artist himself. In 1894 Proust was introduced to Reynaldo Hahn and they became best friends. Reynaldo's sister, Maria, married Fortuny's uncle, Raymundo de Madrazo, in 1899. In 1916 Proust, forever obsessed with detail, wrote to Maria from the Boulevard Haussman with a series of questions: "Do you know, at least, whether Fortuny has ever used as a decoration for his dressing gowns those pairs of birds, drinking in a vase, for example, which appear so frequently in St. Marks on Byzantine capitals? And do you know if in Venice there are any paintings (I would like some titles) in which any mantles or dresses appear that Fortuny may have (or could have) gained inspiration from?" Maria having replied affirmatively, Proust could write with confidence that Albertine's dress, a gift from the narrator, "swarmed with Arabic ornaments, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultanas behind a screen of pierced stone, like the bindings in the Ambrosian library, like the columns from which the Oriental birds that symbolized alternatively life and death were repeated in the mirror of the fabric."

As Guillermo De Osma writes in Fortuny, The Life and Work of Mariano Fortuny (this article could not have been written without the existence of this book), "Fortuny invented fashion outside fashion, fashion that does not change, fashion as art. It is hard to image a woman today wearing a Poiret, a Paquin or a Patou. Dresses by these well-known designers and fashion innovators are marked by the stigma of fashion: they were created with the notion that they would not be used the following season or the following year, when they would in any case have lost their magic. Fortuny's, by contrast, are timeless clothes. Their beauty lies in the elegant simplicity, the perfect cut, the quality of the material and the sensuality of the colors. All these elements, perfectly integrated, make a Fortuny garment a work of art."