The beginnings of Chanel's fashion brand lie in the French seaside resorts. In 1912, Coco?then still Gabrielle?Chanel opened her first boutique in Deauville; shops in Biarritz, Monte Carlo and Cannes soon followed. There, her simple, sporty designs met with a cosmopolitan clientele who carried her fashion back to the capital, Paris. In the 1920s, the Chanel brand thus experienced its first heyday, driven by the artistic and social upheaval of those years, the Roaring Twenties. This lavishly illustrated catalogue documents in drawings and photographs the extraordinary productivity of the designer who maintained friendships with artists such as Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and others. In the 1920s, Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes were performing on the Riviera. The book reveals the Slavic influence in Chanel's creations, highlighting a network of correspondences with female artists close to Diaghilev's circle, such as Natalia Goncharova and Sonia Delaunay. The book also features La Pausa, Gabrielle Chanel's dream villa built in 1929 near Monaco.
Tracing the origins and influences of the iconic French fashion house in the 1920s, from the Riviera to Paris.
The beginnings of Chanel's fashion brand lie in the French seaside resorts. In 1913, Coco-then still Gabrielle-Chanel opened her first boutique in Deauville, an upscale seaside resort just a few hours west of Paris. Soon after, she opened shops in Biarritz, Monte Carlo and Cannes. It was in these ritzy beach destinations that her simple, sporty designs first flourished.
Sofie Dawo (1926-2010) was one of the most important representatives of Concrete textile art in the second half of the 20th century. Based on the principles of the Bauhaus, but with the courage to experiment, the German artist developed her own artistic position. In a radical departure from traditional weaving designs, she explored the qualities of both tested as well as new materials, often working in series. Dawo's skillful research of the properties of her fabrics and materials allowed her to move beyond the two-dimensionality of the woven surface and create works with a sculptural character.
This publication draws on the estate of her long-underrepresented oeuvre, which includes not only woven pieces but also hitherto unseen drawings. Both bodies of work demonstrate the extent to which Sofie Dawo understood her weaving art as an autonomous genre.
