The life in blue of fashion designer Jeanne Lanvin

Stéphane Bern, edited by Alexis Patri 3:56 p.m., December 28, 2021

We are in 1889, in Paris, on the other side of the Seine and Saint-Germain-des-Prés where she was born.

Jeanne Lanvin, the first of a modest family of 11 children, inaugurates her first fashion house: Lanvin (Melle Jeanne) Modes.

She knows that to make a name for yourself, you need an address worthy of making elegant women dream.

It will be rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, already one of the most prestigious in the capital.

She is only 22 years old, no other money than the few savings she made when she was apprenticed to a neighborhood milliner.

But she already has business acumen.

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Her mother was a seamstress and her father was a newspaper clerk.

It was self-taught, without sewing or drawing, that Jeanne Lanvin learned the trade, before starting to sell her own confections.

It is not thanks to her dresses that the stylist is known, but through her hats.

She worked for some time with Félix, a hatter who sent her to Spain to perfect the art of headgear. 

Shades of blue, from her daughter's dresses to French uniforms

But soon, in her shop where they are already snapping up the refined pieces from her collection, discerning customers start ordering her toilets.

They understood that the talent of Jeanne Lanvin would be a must to shine in Parisian evenings.

And now, in a few years, Lanvin's creations are on the verge of representing the Parisian woman in all her splendor.

The year 1909 marked a turning point.

Jeanne Lanvin passed into the big leagues, and signed her first haute couture collection with many ladies' outfits: there are dresses, coats, but also wedding dresses.

And a color that already denotes others: blue.

Blue is a color she likes.

As proof, this repertoire of colors that she acquired in 1905. An extraordinary color chart in which Jeanne can appreciate no less than 80 different shades of blue.

If the blue figure in all its collections from its beginnings, it is also the one that prevails in the design of several dresses for her own daughter, Marguerite, who becomes the first source of inspiration for Jeanne Lanvin, who very early designs her a guard. - incredibly refined dress. 

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It is there, for these so personal creations, in her role of mother and no longer of milliner, that we can read the sensitivity of Jeanne Lanvin.

Because for her daughter, who is only a child, she favors paler blues, soft blues.

But rich blues, all the same, we never fall into baby blue. 

While France is going through the hard hours of the First World War, Jeanne Lanvin decides to pay tribute to those who fight in the trenches.

The hairy uniforms are blue, almost sky blue, barely a little darker.

Lanvin la patriote designs a collection that highlights this color.

Fashion knows how to capture the spirit of the times, Jeanne Lanvin understood it well.

By doing this, if only by intuition, she laid the groundwork for a brand that must embody the greatness of France.

A color from all over the world

Surprisingly, it is precisely not in France that Jeanne Lanvin will make her capital encounter with blue.

When the war was over, the French began to travel again.

And Jeanne too.

The designer travels the world, bringing back inspirations, antique objects, samples of fabrics or traditional costumes from the countries visited: Indian saris, Chinese costumes, toreador clothes, ethnic fabrics.

In 1920, Jeanne Lanvin was 53 years old.

She offers herself a vacation in Italy, where she had already gone and even married, very young, to Emilio Di Pietro, a simple office worker with an aristocratic name.

He is Marguerite's father.

But Jeanne divorced him after seven years of union.

She is now married to the vice-consul of France in Manchester, which she decides to visit in Florence.

It is there, in the capital of Tuscany, that she will marry blue forever.

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Jeanne Lanvin is dazzled by discovering the works of the Quattrocento painter, Fra Angelico. The blue pigments he used centuries earlier on his paintings are of a depth never equaled by his color charts. She is damned for her works. It’s a revelation for her. The Italian religious iconography, which represents so well the fall of the fabrics, the drapes, subjugates her. But it's a bit as if she only retained the blue. And the patina of time has not altered the deep and intense blues of Fra Angelico.

Jeanne Lanvin is therefore returning from Italy with this very particular blue in mind.

And when Jeanne Lanvin has something in mind, she is ready to give herself all the means to achieve it.

Not content with simply designing dresses, she takes it into her head to be able to create her own dyes.

This is how, in 1923, Lanvin opened his own dyeing plant in Nanterre.

Intimate settings now on display at the museum

It will no longer be satisfied with the sole choice of its fabric suppliers.

She will thus be able to define herself the colors of the fabrics that she will use in her haute-couture creations.

Jeanne Lanvin has a new string to her bow: she is a colourist.

And what color range will she favor for her own factory dyes?

The blues, of course.

From then on, the fashion scrutineers of the time counted up to 25 different blues in the collections offered by the seamstress.

Blue for Jeanne Lanvin has become a passion.

Can a passion really be explained?

Its quintessence is the discovery of Fra Angelico.

But blue, for Jeanne Lanvin, has finally always been present.

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Jeanne Lanvin uses blue for the dresses she designs. But also in his personal life. The designer decides, with the help of her decorator, to decorate entire sections of her mansion, bought after the war, in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. It was there that she lived until her death, sharing her time with her house in the suburbs of Paris. Blue, she intends, in her interior, for what she has most intimate: her bedroom and her boudoir. The dyes with which she drapes them are a deep, intense blue. A blue that comes closest, no doubt, to the works of Fra Angelico.

You can see this by visiting the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris which, in its permanent collections, offers visitors the opportunity to enter the intimacy of Jeanne Lanvin.

In his boudoir and his room anyway.

We discover sumptuous furniture, floor lamps in the greatest art-deco style, mirrors, porcelain vases displayed in display cases on either side of a sofa.

And blue, of course, predominates.

A woman of fashion ... and of the theater

But Jeanne Lanvin loves color, colors. His work links the fashion, art and inspirations of the time. Jeanne is an art lover. As such, she has in her personal collection paintings, in particular by impressionist painters such as Renoir, Degas, or Fragonard. But also Vuillard, from whom she commissioned a portrait of her, posing as a businesswoman.  

Flirting with the world of the arts, Jeanne Lanvin was also ordered to order costumes for the theater. Friend with Louis Jouvet, she made the most beautiful costumes of the time for the director. And sees himself ordering a dress, blue obviously, for Yvonne Printemps. Yvonne is a friend of Jeanne, who wears Lanvin as well in the city as on the stage, and which she makes her muse for a perfume. But above all, she is one of the most prominent actresses of her time. 

And a theater, there is one that Jeanne Lanvin has marked forever.

This is the Daunou theater, located near the Paris Opera.

When one of her best friends, Jane Renouardt, a silent film actress turned director, decides to have the interior of the room dressed by the great seamstress, Lanvin does so.

And reveals a blue enhanced with gold.

The theater, still open today, has never departed from these colors.

It perfectly embodies the work of Jeanne Lanvin, decked out in blue.