The technique of cutting Madame Gre's dresses. Madame Gré is a great French fashion designer. Creator of dresses worthy of the goddesses of Olympus Greek dress. Secrets of the great fashion designers of France

Madame Grés is a great French fashion designer. Her dresses were a work of art. Her clients included Marlene Dietrich, Vien Leigh, Grace Kelly, Barbra Streisand, Jacqueline Kennedy, Garbo.

Madame Gré's real name is Germaine Emily Krebs. She was born in 1903 in Paris, in a poor family. Germaine dreamed of becoming a ballerina or a sculptor. Later, she studied to be a sculptor, but her family did not support her hobbies.

Germaine began her career by making hats in a small salon. In 1932, she opened her salon "Alex Couture", specializing in sportswear. In 1933, she and her friend Juliette Barton began to create their own clothes under the sign "Alix Barton". And in 1934, Germain takes the pseudonym Alix and, already alone, opens her own salon with with the same name.

Her first successful step was the creation of costumes for Jean Giraudoux's play There Will Be No Trojan War, staged in 1935.

The silhouette of Alix dresses was based on a complete rethinking of tailoring methods. For many years, the shape of the dress was approximately the same: a bodice on top, often with a corset, and a skirt on the bottom. Germain wanted the woman to look like an ancient Greek statue. A feature of the fashion designer was that she worked without using patterns and patterns, which made her models unique. Germain did not use shoulders, linings, stitched folds, she always ensured that the fabric lay strictly in a certain place.

In 1935, Germaine Krebs released a wide coat without any cut. Her models became more and more famous, and in 1939 they won the prize for the best haute couture collection at the International Exhibition in Paris.

But the year 1940 came. The war has begun. According to Hitler's plan, Haute Couture Houses were to move to Berlin so that the capital of the Third Reich would become the capital of haute couture. Salon "Alix" was closed, and Germain fled to the south of France with her family. But, left without a livelihood, she had to return to Paris to start her own business.

“Madame Gre” is a pseudonym that was adopted from her husband, Russian artist Sergei Cherevkov, who signed his paintings “Gre”.

In 1942, Germes opened an atelier, but it lasted until 1943.

In 1941, food and textile cards were introduced by the occupying authorities. To reduce the consumption of materials for the production of clothing, restrictions were introduced on the length of the skirt, the width of the trousers, lapels on clothes, etc. were prohibited. From the materials seized at the factories, German military orders were carried out. At this stage, fashion becomes a form of protest against the occupiers. Fashion designers tried to use as much fabric as possible so that the Germans got less.

Madame Gré was an active participant in this movement. She did not serve the mistresses of the German military, and at a fashion show for the Germans she showed dresses in only three colors - blue, red and white - the colors of the French flag. Madame Gre's house was closed for exceeding the limit on the use of fabric. She hung her national flag on the salon building, after which she had to flee to avoid arrest.

She returned only in 1945, and the House of Madame Gre was reopened.

A blow to the House of Madame Gre was the introduction of the New Look style by Dior in 1947. Fluffy skirts and corsets are back in fashion.

In 1956, Madame Gré was chosen to travel to India to study Indian weaving techniques and adapt them to the Western market. Captivated by rare fragrances, she decided to create perfumes for women.

In 1959, the legendary leather-chypre perfume Cabochard (in translation - stubborn) was released.

In 1947, the couturier was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor.

In 1966, Richard Avedon held a photo shoot with Barbra Streisand for Vogue, where Barbara is wearing a poncho and tunics from Madame Gre.

In 1976, the Grès Boutique clothing line was launched.

In 1982, the perfume production was sold, and Madame Gré invested all the funds in the Haute Couture line. But in 1984, the Fashion House was sold to businessman Bernard Tapie. In one of the interviews, the businessman spoke about his plans: “I will give her the means to devote herself to creativity without thinking about money. She will not need to report to anyone. I will answer questions, and she ... will just be. I don't know how old she is, and I'm betting on a famous woman who can work three days non-stop for her latest collection, something that none of my thirty-year-old colleagues can do." But his words were empty words. Three years later, Tapi sold the production to designer Jacques Estrel. The fashion house was expelled from the Haute Couture Syndicate due to tax problems.

In 1987, Madame Gre's Fashion House was closed.

A few photos from the covers of magazines and photos with models

Sunny's dress itself

Daughter Germaine - Anna hid the death of her mother from the public for a year. Officially, the death of Germaine Emily Krebs was announced in 1994.

Madame Gre had a large number of awards and titles. In 1973 she was elected president of the High Fashion Syndicate, in 1976 she was the first to receive the "Dé d" Or de la Haute Couture" ("High Fashion Golden Thimble") award, and in 1980 she was named "Most Elegant woman in the world" and she became a Chevalier of the Order of the Legion of Honor.

The name of Madame Gre, unfortunately, is undeservedly forgotten. Fashion historians attribute this to the fact that, unlike such names as Chanel, Lanvin, Schiaparelli, which are still known to society, although the Houses of Lanvin and Schiaparelli no longer exist, Madame did not make revolutions in the fashion world, and her technique of creating clothes on models is very complex and almost unreproducible, so few can repeat it. In addition, Madame Gre was deprived of social life. She did not like to talk about her art, did not talk about herself. Compared to other fashion designers, such as Coco Chanel, she looked withdrawn and boring.

Actually Germaine.

Hardworking - a bright light burns through life, lazy - a dim candle

Greek dress. Secrets of the great fashion designers of France

For those who decide to create a Greek dress with their own hands, it will be very useful to find out how two great fashion designers of France created their amazing antique outfits. Two most talented women, whose dresses are exhibited today in the museums of France, as examples of the highest skill of their creators.

Alix Gre

Madame Gré is a great French fashion designer. Creator of dresses worthy of the goddesses of Olympus. Her dresses in the Greek style are unique and unrepeatable. They do not and never have had patterns. Madame Gre did not recognize drawings on paper, because the body of a woman is three-dimensional, and it cannot be decomposed and calculated on the two-dimensional plane of a paper sheet. No sketches - only the living body of the model, the fabric and the hands of the great master

She created her Greek dresses by draping the fabric using the tattoo method directly on the fashion model.

Madame Gre's favorite fabrics are silk, wool, jersey. Like a sculptor, she sculpted them into models worthy of rivaling Greek statues.

Trying to find a flowing fabric with the properties of both drape and muslin, she came up with a silk jersey.

The eyes of the master strictly followed how the fabric flowed through the body. The ability to see, to catch the very moment when the folds lay down, shading the beauty of a particular female figure in the best possible way - this is the great art of Madame Gré. The Art of the Sculpture Drapery Queen. The Art of the Queen of the Greek Dress.

Few can comprehend and reproduce her fantastic technique of creating a dress in the Greek style. The dress was organically formed, created, based on the figure of a woman. It ripened on the model, as a fruit ripens on a tree. Often, one model took more than 20 meters of the lightest fabric.

Models Alix Gré in 1939 received the Prize for the best haute couture collection at the International Exhibition in Paris. It was Madame Gré who was the first fashion designer to receive the Haute Couture Golden Thimble award in 1976.

In addition, she was not only an outstanding fashion designer: for 20 years (1972-1992) Alix Gré led the High Fashion Syndicate

Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, Jacqueline Kennedy, the Princess de Bourbon, the Duchess of Windsor and Barbara Streisand have worn magnificent Greek dresses from Madame Grey.

Her dresses are comparable to the portraits of outstanding masters, and deserve to be immortalized as great masterpieces in art history.

She was born in Paris and dreamed of becoming a sculptor, but became a famous fashion designer who created marvelous dresses light as wind, flowing like water and pure as light, capable of turning a woman into an ancient goddess.

Today, the name of the unsurpassed Alix Gre is undeservedly forgotten ...

Madeleine Vionnet.

“When a woman smiles, the dress should smile with her,” Madeleine Vionnet liked to repeat.

Most of the dresses in the Greek style from Madeleine Vionnet look sluggish and shapeless on the hanger and bloom like a flower only on the female body.

She was the first among fashion designers to create Greek dresses, assembled with just one seam or knot.

Dress in the Greek style - cut.

Madeleine Vionnet masterfully experimented with the cutting technique, played with the fabric, checked, tested its properties: fluidity, heaviness, elasticity.

She created her models on a small wooden doll. She took a piece of fabric, a certain geometric shape (circle, square, triangle). She applied it, fastened it on the shoulders of the doll and began to drape it using the tattoo method, gently laying the fabric in folds and fixing them with a pin.

Thanks to the dizzying cut, a simple geometric shape turned into a dress full of grace and incomprehensible harmony.

When the tailors at the Russian fashion house Adlerberg ripped apart Vionnet's Greek dress and laid it out on the carpet in the living room, they saw simple geometric shapes, not a single wrong line.

She loved complicated draperies, plaits and knots, from which, like jets of water, the fabric spread and flowed in all directions.

To achieve the free flow of the fabric, Madeleine created bias cutting principle- that is, the fabric was not cut along the shared line, but at an angle of 45 degrees. Thus, there was no need for darts and reliefs - the lightest fabric itself flowed around the body, obeying its forms.

Dresses in the Greek style from Vionnet had a very unusual cut - often it was a single piece of fabric, either fastened with one fastener at the back, or without it at all. That's why Madame Gré's clients needed special instruction to teach them the art of putting on her designs. And the ladies who inherited Vionnet's dresses simply didn't know what to do with them.

Dress in the Greek style - fabric and trim.

Another important component of Vionnet's art was fabric. She used exclusively soft fabrics: silk crepe, velvet, muslin and satin.

To cut her Greek dresses on the bias, she needed a fabric at least two meters wide.

Especially for Vionnet, her supplier Biancini-Ferrier produced a new material in 1918: a pale pink crepe made of silk and acetate. The recipe for making "Crêpe Vionnet" is now lost.

Madeleine Vionnet loved fabrics of pure colors, without drawings and patterns. The spectrum with which the fashion designer worked is various shades of white and ivory, as well as matte ones - blue, red, yellow.

When decorating a Greek dress, Vionnet always followed the principle of balanced design of the model, so she sewed the fringe, so fashionable at that time, in separate small pieces. And Madeleine's embroidery was arranged along the main threads of the fabric so as not to disturb its fluidity. This embroidery principle is still used by the Lesage fashion house.

Each Greek dress of the great master was unique. Therefore, her customers were unique women - Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.

Surprisingly combining luxury and simplicity, she turned women into ancient celestials. Christian Dior called her craftsmanship "the pinnacle of haute-couture, which cannot be surpassed."

Many at the time were trying to imitate Madame Vionnet's Greek style dresses, so she came up with a logo that she sewed on the inside of the dresses. She also photographed the dress from three sides and put the photos in an album. A total of 75 such albums have been accumulated and are now in the UFAC (French Union of Costume Designers), along with a collection of 120 dresses.

The secret of Madeleine Vionnet's filigree drapery has not yet been unraveled, as well as the secret of her famous Greek ivory evening dress with a single seam. As a standard of the great skill of a fashion designer, it is exhibited at the Paris Fashion and Textile Museum.

The great fashion architect Madeleine Vionnet lived to be 99 years old...

Two simple women became two great masters. They were not afraid to experiment with drapery, and the fabric itself, flowing and spreading in their hands, revealed the secrets of creating the most beautiful antique dresses.

Yes, yes, you just need to take a flowing fabric, a handful of pins, go to the mirror and the fabric itself will show and tell you everything

FOR THOSE WHO WISH TO COPY THIS ARTICLE to the pages of your blog or diary, we inform you the following:

Copying the text of the article itself is prohibited, even with an active link to the source .

It is allowed to place on the page of your blog or diary only

article title,

Special program daily monitors for unauthorized copies. If any are found, it is immediately submitted statement of claim without any warning letters from our side.

We highly value our work. And we respect the interests of our readers.

Olga Klishevskaya especially for the site.

Gre Madame, Alix (1903-1993) - French couturier. Her real name is Germaine Emily Krebs. She was born in Paris and dreamed of becoming a sculptor, but became a famous fashion designer who created the most exquisite dresses.
Madame Gré has earned her place among the great fashion designers through her skill as a cutter. She cut without patterns, having only fabric at hand, which made her models unique. Alix never used hangers and clips, but only watched how the fabric lay down. She wanted to achieve a fabric that combined the properties of drape and muslin, and came up with a new silk jersey fabric. This great idea was put into practice by Rodier, who created a fabric for Alix in 1935. In the same year, the fashion designer released her famous loose coat without seams, cut from specially ordered a very wide fabric Models "Alix" become very famous, and in 1939 they receive a prize for the best collection of haute couture at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. But the Second World War began, and in 1940 the Alix salon was closed. Germaine Krebs was left without work and fled from occupied Paris to the south of France with her husband and daughter. Left without a livelihood, she made a courageous decision to return to Paris and start a new business there. Pajamas. She called the house of models “Madame Gre”, borrowing a pseudonym from her husband, Russian artist Sergei Cherevkov, who signed his paintings “Gre”. In 1942, Alix opened an atelier, but it did not last long, until 1943. Madame Gré did not want to cooperate with the invaders and behaved defiantly towards them.
In July 1941, the occupation authorities introduced food rationing and rationing cards for fabric and clothing in France. In April 1942, to reduce the consumption of materials in the production of clothing, the following measures were taken: the length of skirts and the width of trousers were limited, unnecessary details (lapels on trousers, etc.) were prohibited. The occupiers forced craftsmen to fulfill German military orders from materials confiscated in French factories. Shoes were especially bad, as all leather stocks were confiscated for military use. Shoes for the civilian population were made from old car tires, ropes, rubber, cellophane and other unsuitable materials. At that time, many workshops mastered the manufacture of traditional French peasant shoes - wooden clogs. Women of fashion wore shoes with wooden or cork soles. During this period of general savings in materials, fashion becomes a form of protest against the invaders. Fashion designers try to use as much fabric as possible for dresses so that the Germans get less. Madame Gré took an active part in this movement: she refused to serve the mistresses of German officers, at a fashion show for the Germans she showed dresses in only three colors - blue, red and white - the national colors of France. The house of "Madame Gre" was closed by the authorities for exceeding the limit of fabric. She hung a large tricolor flag of France on the building of the Fashion House, and it was closed completely, and Alix had to flee to the Pyrenees to avoid arrest. She returned to Paris only in 1945, after the liberation of France, and the Madame Gré House was reopened. The ruthlessness with which fashion can dispense and make what was once considered beautiful ugly must have hit Madame Gré hard when Dior blew up the public with his New Look style in 1947. Everything that Gre was opposed to suddenly returns to fashion: corsets, puffy skirts . Although many women still deny the novelties and wear her dresses. Years after the war, her atelier becomes one of the largest in Paris, with 180 employees and seven working laboratories. western market. Fascinated by rare and exotic fragrances, she conceived the idea of ​​creating a perfume and gifting it to women, as some give jewelry. In 1959, one of the legendary leather-chypre perfumes appeared - "Cabochard", the only thing left of her House in our time. This word means "Stubborn". He anticipated a whole generation of leather-chypre perfumes: Miss Balmain (1967), Aramis (1964), Cachet (1970) and Montana (1986). Her bright personality and uncompromising attitude earned her fame as a master of the classical style. The fashion designer's favorite fabrics were jersey, wool and silk.
Among Madame's clients were Marlene Dietrich, Garbo, Vienne Lee, Princess de Bourbon, Grace Kelly. Jacqueline Kennedy and the Duchess of Windsor. Draperies made of silk and jersey became a distinctive feature of her work. She cut off pieces from a roll of fabric and pinned the smallest folds on the fashion model with pins, collecting the outfit live.
Madame Gre was able to cause a sensation for the last time with a series of her ethnic models, which, unlike the "Greek" dresses of the 30s, did not fit the body, but freely fell and flowed along it. In 1966, the famous photographer Richard Avedon did a photo shoot with Barbra Streisand for Vogue magazine, where she appeared in a poncho and oriental tunics from Madame Gre. For "Baby" Jane Holzer, a model and one of Andy Warhol's "factory girls", the couturier came up with a dress rust-colored silk satin with an unusual armhole. Madame Gre was the owner of many awards and titles. In 1973, she was elected president of the High Fashion Syndicate, which she held for 14 years. In 1976, the fashion designer was the first to receive the "Dé d" Or de la Haute Couture" ("High Fashion Golden Thimble") award, in 1980 she was named the "Most Elegant Woman in the World" and she became a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. The same year, Madame Gres - who has always resisted pret-a-porter - launches her first ready-to-wear collection, Grès Boutique. Madame Gre was not only a creator, but also led for 20 years (1972-1992) the High Fashion Syndicate. In 1982, Madame Gre was forced to sell perfume production, her most profitable enterprise. She invested all her money in the Haute Couture line, but in 1984 she parted with her brainchild and sold the Fashion House to French businessman Bernard Tapie. At that time, this man had not yet undermined his reputation with numerous scandals and lawsuits and was able to charm an elderly woman. In an interview with Figaro journalist Jani Same, the businessman shared his grandiose plans: “I will give her the means to devote herself to creativity without thinking about money. She will not have to report to anyone. I will answer questions, and she ... just will. I do not know how old she is, and I am betting on a famous woman who can work three days non-stop for her latest collection. None of my thirty-year-old colleagues are capable of this.” All these were empty words. Three years later, Tapi sold the company to designer Jacques Estrel. Fashion House Gres has been expelled from the Haute Couture Syndicate due to tax issues. In 1987, Gres Fashion House at 1, Rue de la Paix is ​​finally closed. "They broke furniture and wooden mannequins with axes. Fabrics and dresses were put in garbage bags and thrown into the trash. At one point, the House was empty," Madame Gre's daughter Anna told Lawrence Benaim, a journalist from Le Monde and author of the wonderful book GRES. The death of Madame Gré was concealed from the public for a year by her daughter Anna. Madame's death was officially announced in December 1994. Gre's name is little known to the general public.

paris.chance continues a series of articles on the book Bertrand Meyer-Stable 12 Couturiers. Legendary Women Who Changed the World. Today our heroine is a true Parisian in spirit and birthright. In her "golden" book of clients - princesses, duchesses, first ladies and world-class stars, she has not a single failed collection! Thanks to their artistic perfection, her dresses belong to the history of European culture, like portraits by prominent artists. It was she who had in mind the American designer Bill Blass, saying: "Fashion is not art and never has been, except for what was produced in the atelier of two masters - Cristobal Balenciaga and Madame Gré." Haute couture sculptor Madame Gré, whose car seat was upholstered in mink fur, left this world in complete oblivion and poverty. Today, her name is undeservedly forgotten, it is clearly kept in the shadow of more enterprising contemporaries who managed to create not only a unique style, but also a business empire that perpetuated their achievements. For the project paris.chance it will be a great honor to correct this historical injustice, especially since we have in reserve such a wonderful source as the book by Bertrand Meyer-Stable.

Germaine Krebs was born in 1903 in Paris. We know little about her childhood, but judging by the dream of becoming a ballerina, and then a sculptor, we can conclude that art played a significant role in the upbringing of the girl. The first job in adulthood for the future Madame Gré was the position of an assistant cutter in a fashion house on Place Vendôme. A landmark place for a professional start, especially in the 20s of the last century, when both Europe and America dreamed of Paris. Already in 1930, she began to sell her patterns of dresses and coats to large buyers and commissioners on both continents. Three years later, she becomes co-owner of a fashion house. Alix Barton. I must say, this amazing woman changed names with ease! Fashion history knows her how Germaine Krebs, Marcel Alix, Alix, Alix Barton, Alix Gré, Mademoiselle Gré, Madame Gré- creative search in action! In fact, it was a search for absolute perfection - the perfection of fabric, technology and aesthetics. The new style of drapery she created was recognized after the performance of Giraudou "There will be no Trojan War". Working at that time under the brand name Alix, she managed to come up with such costumes for the performance that the actresses began to wear them in life, forcing Paris to talk about a new fashion designer.

Already in the first collections of Alix Barton, the foundations of the individual style of the future Madame Gré appeared, in particular, her special technique - creating a silhouette by draping a figure with a fabric with a minimum of seams. How did she manage to stand out from other couturiers? First of all, virtuoso drapery technique, and, of course, sculptural aesthetics. In an era when two couturier women triumphed in fashion, representing two polar opposite views on fashion - Vionnet and Chanel, the work of Germaine Krebs was art in its purest form, told in an accessible language of wavy lines and curls. Michel de Brunhoff, who at that time was a permanent representative of the Parisian style in Vogue magazine and opened many haute couture geniuses to the public, was so impressed by the technology of her cut that he devoted two whole pages of the magazine to her, stimulating the interest of overseas clientele.

In 1934, Alix opened her own fashion house, becoming its sole creative director. At that time, the concept of "minimalism" had not yet been introduced into use, but the very aesthetics of minimalism was successfully embodied in the house at 83 Faubourg Saint-Honoré. This is how Bertrand Meyer-Stable describes the setting of the Alix house: “ White-walled salon, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, light wood chairs and armchairs, no decorations; carpet nailed to the floor - light colors, like upholstery. There is no store at the fashion house, here you will not see showcases with handbags or scarves. The interior and furnishings are emphatically strict and ascetic...”.
After the success of her costumes for the play "There will be no Trojan War" she was bombarded with orders from the stars of the stage and screen. She dressed aristocrats and royalty - and everyone admired the originality of her style. As a costume designer, Alix has always been able to accurately convey the tone and color of the play - from the costume of Death for the play by P. Merime to the costume of an Indian boy by R. Tagore. At the 1937 Paris World's Fair, Alix dressed a statue in the Pavilion de Elegance in a pleated dress. She also displayed high relief in a draped dress in the French Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. She explored the forms of the human body like a sculptor and created clothes that envelop this body like a fashion designer: “It rarely happens that a person manages to perform both these tasks with equal success.”

Nickname Gres appeared in the life of Germaine Krebs as a reverse acronym for the name of her second husband - a Russian artist Sergei Cherevkov, who is said to have been furious when he learned that his wife had given him his own pseudonym. But for Germaine (aka Alix), he was very successful. There is no fundamental difference between the Grès style and the Alix style, and the couturier has remained true to the method that made her famous during her first experiments with silk jersey draperies. The show of the first collection of the Grès house fell on the period of the occupation of Paris, and Madame Gres expressed her position through the color scheme.

If individual models of the collection in blue, white and red could suggest the flag of independent France, then the last dress, which combined all three colors in the right order, completely removed all doubts. The Germans closed the house Gres. After the war, the house not only resumed its work, but also reached the peak of success, despite the fact that it was conceptually opposed to new trends in the person of Christian Dior with his flower woman in the New Look style.
Alyx's ideal clothing should be made without seams from a single piece of fabric. Her style is rightly called neoclassicism in French fashion. How to identify the famous Gre fold? According to the organizers of the exhibition Madame Grès, held at the Bourdelle Museum in the spring of 2011, “this is a sequence of folds laid on the fabric in a straight line every 3 cm. The folds have the same depth of -1.5 cm, they are sewn from the inside, and their height from the front side is 2 mm. Especially for dresses consisting of such folds, at the end of the sixties, a silk fabric of exceptional width was made at the Racine factory. 280 cm of such a fabric, after laying in folds according to the Gre technique, turn into 7 cm.

The folds are fixed with a huge number of pins on a wooden mannequin covered with kraft paper. In the course of work, the jersey is unwound from the roll as needed and cut off only once - when the work is completed. The bodice of the dress, laid with folds, is sewn on a bustier with bones ... The skirt (jersey without pleats is used for it) is made up of panels, which are an extended bustier. Usually Gre goes to the skirt for the draping dress. from 13 to 21 meters fabrics."

The novelty of Madame Gré's dresses consists of three components: the novelty of the material, the novelty of technology and the novelty of color. Fabrics with fancy names were created for her: diersafin, derisil, dersatimix. She was the first to work with rayon jersey, and against the background of the heavy dresses of Dior, Veil and Balmain, her suits fit the body like a second skin. Speaking about the virtuosity of her technique, let's give one, but a vivid example - during the period of creation of each collection, Madame Gré made, on average, three pairs of scissors unusable. " When I drape a model with silk fabric, she begins to react to my touch, and I try to guess the meaning of this reaction and use it for my purposes. This is how I give the dress the silhouette and shape that the fabric itself would like to take., - the couturier admitted. Her credo - the body should feel free, so the fabric on her dresses, as if alive, wraps around the body, outlines its shape. The excess is collected in a soft pleated, emphasizing the curve of the waist, the waist is not wide, the hips are heavy, and the neckline is obscene. This is art! Plus, Madame Gre is an unsurpassed colorist who always accurately found the right color and harmonious transitions.

An interesting detail: the shows of the Grès fashion house collections were fundamentally different from the shows we are used to today. The cold whiteness of the salon, the absence of distractions in the form of a show, the door solemnly locked before the start of the defile ... Fashion models went to the podium without hats, jewelry, gloves and almost no makeup. The audience did not scatter their attention, looking at the discharged dolls, but focused on the architecture of each model. " One of the goals I strive for is impeccability,” Madame Gré admitted. - In order for a dress created in one era to be in demand in the next, it must have absolute purity of lines. This is the secret to the model's longevity." By 1967, the great couturier had a creative crisis, but she was helped by the advice of Francine Cressan, editor-in-chief of the French Vogue, to forget about the classics and aim at "young sexy women" in her work. The first breakthrough in an attempt to combine neoclassicism and the erotic eclecticism of the late 20th century was a white silk dress with a black velvet apron for Jacqueline Kennedy. The photo of this dress went around the world! The second wave of success transformed the recluse, which always remained the brilliant, but very difficult to communicate Germaine Krebs. She began to participate in the life of her industry, travel, receive awards, exhibit her works in museums. She had projects in the field of perfumery, a joint project for the production of jewelry with the house of Cartier, and even attempts to find herself in ready-to-wear.

If we set out to make a film about Madame Gre, then we would have to work hard on the psychological portrait of the heroine, especially since she carefully concealed from the public everything that did not concern creativity. Writer and journalist Edmond Charles-Roux called her " a dictator who pretends to be a mouse. This is a great secret. Getting out of her who she is is much more difficult than getting the leader of the mafia to talk. And the designer of the Grès house, Peggy Yuyin Lin, said: “She wore a bunch of keys at her waist and looked like some kind of female version of Bluebeard. She was shivering from the cold, even when she was wearing a fox coat with fur inside. With those whom she loved, she was always soft, ready to help, and with the rest she was arrogant and contemptuous. She was jealous of her friends for their entourage."…. The film about Madame Gre, unfortunately, cannot end with a happy ending. Being a brilliant fashion sculptor, she was unable to resist the uncleanliness of cunning businessmen. Lost a controlling stake Bernard Tapie, she lost control of the situation. She had a chance to witness the fall of her own brainchild with her own eyes - archives were plundered, loans were blocked, and in 1987 the fashion house was declared bankrupt. Even support Hubert Givenchy, a true aristocrat and gentleman, failed to stop the judicial machine. Three floors of the fashion house were emptied in one day. Bailiffs chopped furniture and wooden mannequins with axes, and took out patterns and dresses in garbage bags ....
The death of Madame Gré became the reason for a public investigation and mutual accusations between the French fashion community and the couturier's daughter Anna Gre. In our film, the final shot would be the gaze of already aged Madame Gré, who spent the last years in a special hospital, somewhere far away, where bizarre clouds float above the horizon, and smooth lines of dresses are born from their curves and curls. Gres. Dresses that are not subject to time, like statues of ancient gods and heroes….