At the end of July 1925, Paris hosted the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. For the occasion, the Alexander III Bridge has been transformed into Boutique Street and is packed with visitors. The front of number 16 is striking, with its large curved Art Deco letters that read: “Sonia Delaunay. Simultaneous.” In the window, a colorful display: bags, scarves, furs and a hat. Whoever designed and embroidered them by hand welcomes customers from all over the world in the back of this pop-up store from the last century. Sometimes He escapes to help the models put on the dresses he has created and accompany them to the outdoor fashion show.
Ninety-nine years before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games imagined by Thomas Jolly and ninety-eight years before the privatization of the Pont-Neuf by Pharrell Williams for the Louis Vuitton parade, Sonia Delaunay transformed the Alexandre-III bridge into podium. The world then discovered her talent as a stylist. Always ahead of his time, the artist of a thousand faces, to whom the Roger-Viollet and Zlotowski galleries pay tribute in Paris, until November 16, will mark the history of fashion in his own way in this vibrant era of the crazy years. twenty. , which saw the fame of Jeanne Lanvin, Gabrielle Chanel and Madeleine Vionnet explode.
It was a coincidence that Sonia Delaunay, a young mother and already recognized painter, launched herself into fashion, a discipline quite frowned upon in the art world. In 1911, she created a crib blanket, made from various pieces of fabric, for her son Charles. “I composed it for fun and I did it to my liking.” she remembers in the documentary Sonia Delaunay, shots for a monograph (1972), by Patrick Raynaud, with his accent and his “r”s rocks that he brought from Ukraine, where he was born in 1885.
This textile mosaic inspired by Ukrainian artisan traditions will be the starting point for her so-called “simultaneous” dresses. “I know that each color has its own life,” he says, thus explaining simultaneity, an invention of the Delaunay couple that explores the interaction of colors. In the program “Quatre temps”, broadcast in 1968 on the first channel, she laughingly told Jacques Dutronc, who questioned her: “I made my first dress in 1913, using tailoring samples that my husband brought home to me. »
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