Fashion's Picasso: Paul Poiret

I wrote a small historical article on him for a magazine assigment, so here's some background on his life..

Fashion's Picasso: Paul Poiret 

 Poiret has been deemed, “Fashion’s Picasso,” for his vivid colors, rejection of corsets, disregarding padded busts and doing away with tiny waists of almost every popular runway fashions of his time. He was clearly a non-conformist in the fashion industry and made drastic changes in the way the entire world viewed fashion. He is such an important designer because he changed not only the way women wore their clothing but also the way women carried themselves in general. Constricting whalebone corsets allow little freedom in the bosom area that Poiret so obviously promotes. He did not agree with the style of how corsets constrict the waist and wanted a change. Corsets have also been speculated to cause severe health problems and even death.

(this photo shows women's bodies while wearing a corset, and normally)

But don’t get Poiret wrong, he took the constriction of the bosom and simply applied it to a lower region of the female figure: the hemline. By doing this, he took constricted fashion to a new level in a rather abstract way that has never been seen before. “Is this where the name, “Picasso of fashion,” comes from?” you ask. 
“I freed the bosom, shackled the legs, but gave liberty to the body,” Poiret said.

After he left his initial work place in Paris called House of Worth, he opened his own shop in 1903. History has it his customers submitted to his every wish due to the amount of trust they bestowed in him. But in order to make up for the lose fitting bosom area, he put women into skirts with hems so narrow that they could hardly walk. 

love, polly