Madame Grès - The birth of a fold
Marceline Camard
Co-Founder & Fashion Expert at Kiobuy - Join the Luxury Lifestyle Future
Madame Grès, or rather Germaine Emilie Krebs is a key reference of fashion, as elegant as radical. First attracted by dance, sculpture and painting, she becomes a milliner and was the first costume designer of Jean Giraudoux for La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu. After the Second World War, her partner having sold her house, she must rebuild it and installs it at 1st rue de la Paix.
As passionate about fashion as uninterested in her own style, she will wear her life on only rolled collars and turbans in her hair; Unlike Coco Chanel, she never wore her creations, but asked her workers to imagine her clothes.
But if Madame Grès remains internationally known, it is for her major invention: a fold, shaped by a particular jersey she commanded, formed during the construction of the dress, then sewn. She managed to reduce a stretch of 280 cm wide to only 7 cm by many tight folds, the only ones able to give the appearance of an antique drape to the dresses of Greek inspiration that she imagined. Like vestals, her customers, all dressed in cream or black, could indulge her creations both day and evening. And Madame Grès dressed up the greatest fashion lovers: from Greta Garbo to Grace Kelly, from Jane Birkin and Edith Piaf to Danièle Mitterrand, they all worshiped her style.
