Fashion Signs: Sonia Delaunay and Art Deco Design

Following the art nouveau fashion inspiration, 1920s art deco design made by Paris couturiers influenced a new fashion look. Separated in two phases, one from about 1910 to 1924, built around neoclassical, oriental styling, and a second one starting from 1924 to 1930, influenced by modernist touches, Art Deco design brought into fashion new prints and colours.

Sonia Delaunay at her studio, 1925

One of the key designers of the time influenced by art in her way of thinking fashion, is Sonia Delaunay, artist and textile designer, who’s creations have been correlated to Fauvism, Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s paintings. For her, the colours were defined by a ‘dynamic art’ and ‘simultaneity’, term used often in Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s theory. The bold combination of colours and fabrics found often inspiration in music from which Sonia Delaunay constructed the first ‘simultaneous dress’ in 1913, consisting from mixed colours as ‘antique rose, yellow-orange, Nattier blue, scarlet, etc., appearing on different materials[…] woollen cloth, taffeta, tulle, flannelette, watered silk, and peau de soie’.

Simultaneous Dress, 1923

In 1921 she started to see inspiration in Dada Movement and among the Surrealist Poets. So, she developed a new style, called poem-dresses, by juxtaposing geometric blocks of colours and lines of poetry by Tristan Tzara and Philippe Soupault onto garments.

Delaunay’s textiles were very different from the naturalistic design popular at the beginning of the decade. She produced a range of fabrics incorporating geometric shapes like squares, triangles, diamonds and stripes, of both, strong and bold colours like blue, red, yellow.

1925

1929

Simultaneous fashion, 1923

Window display of the designs

Delaunay’s success with fashion stays partly in the adoption of liberating the silhouette for female clothing from the World War I. Her creations and art had influenced the work of contemporary fashion designers as Marc Bohan for Christian Dior, Perry Ellis or Yves Saint Laurent.

Here are some of the creations inspired by Art Deco for AW/12.