Here's to you, Monsieur Poiret

There's nothing like a little caviar and couture in the morning. Vogue magazine and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute hosted a meet-and-greet today at the Art Deco jewel of a restaurant Prunier to introduce their big spring exhibit. "Poiret: King of Fashion," which opens May 9, addresses one of history's most important fashion innovators, Paul Poiret, who opened his couture house in 1903. Poiret is famous for liberating women from corsets by making columnar chemises and coats fashionable, only to restrict their gaits when he invented the hobble skirt. He brought Orientalism into fashion, incorporating rich colors, fabrics, jewelery and fur trim into his work. He was also the first fashion designer to create and market his own perfume in 1911.

The exhibit will be organized into vignettes that highlight creative themes of Poiret's work, including his use of draped, unstructured fabrics, his interest in the Wiener Werkstatte and the Ballets Russes, his collaborations with such artists as Paul Iribe, Georges Barbier and George Lepape, all complimented by paintings, illustrations and furniture. The core of the exhibition will be pieces the museum acquired during the 2005 auction of clothing from Poiret's estate. Several of those garments were made for and worn by Poiret's wife and muse,  Denise.

Denise sounds like quite a character. The mother of five children, she is described by curator Harold Koda as a gamine, but audacious. "She was wearing skirts that revealed the leg up to the hip line in the early years of the 20th century." She also wrote on the tags in her dresses where and when they had been worn, like a fashion diary of sorts.

Poiret, on the other hand, was his own worst enemy. After introducing such innovations as the chemise dress, he second-guessed himself later in life, even contemplating returning to the corset in the 1920s. He spent his final years in debt, having been surpassed by the modernist designers who would move forward into the 20th century and beyond, most notably Coco Chanel. As the famous story goes, in their chance encounter on the street in the 1920s, Poiret noticed Chanel wearing all black, and asked, "For whom, madame do you mourn?" To which Chanel replied, "For you, monsieur."

The conservator at the Costume Institute put the kibosh on bringing the precious garments over to Paris for today's event, so the curators had replicas made. A gold lame Grecian column dress was oonstructed with such economy that only three rectangular pieces of cloth were used to make it. Koda is working with animators to illustrate how Poiret's clothing can be deconstructed into the simplest of forms.

A rich brown velvet wrap coat looked pretty good too. In fact, they could slap labels in them and relaunch the line. Because if there's one thing that covering fashion in the 21st century will teach you, it's that there are no dead designers, only dormant ones.

(Photos: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)