A Fashion for Extravagance: Art Deco Fabrics and Fashions (1985)

In the Art Deco period art, design and fashion all enjoyed a surge of glorious inventiveness. Fashion, inspired from the centre of haute couture in Paris, took off in revolutionary new directions. Dress could be decorated with intricate, heavily beaded embroidery, or bold pictorial designs or dramatic geometric patterns. Nothing was too exotic to be tried.

The division between fashion and art was very narrow, and well known artists such as Raoul Dufy and Sonia Delaunay turned their skills to designing textiles for the couturiers. Colourful, eccentric figures such as Paul Poiret and Mariano Fortuny were generating ever newer and more daring ideas/Specialist embroidery houses like that of Felix Lallement were supplying magnificent hand-worked embroideries to be used in the most extravagant haute couture.

A Fashion for Extravagance gives a unique and inspiring insight into this glamorous and exciting world. Illustrated in full colour is Sara Bowman’s hitherto unpublished collection of original working designs and embroidery samples from the period, including many from the Maison Lallement and Poiret’s special design house, the Atelier Martine. Through these rare and beautiful examples the reader can have an insider’s glimpse of the artists and designers of the Art Deco period as they first experimented with the new ideas that would form the glamorous fashions of Pans in the 1910s and 1920s. Set alongside this collection are photographs of the fabrics and fashions designed by some of the most famous names of the period – Dufy, Poiret, Fortuny, Erte and Sonia Delaunay – and the accompanying text conjures up their distinctive, fascinating and ephemeral world. The book as a whole offers not merely a unique visual feast, but also many new insights into the burgeoning of Art Deco fashion design.