The Golden Age of Couture, which began with Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look collection and lasted for about a decade, still shines in the collective consciousness. Billie Eilish as Marilyn Monroe at the Met Gala is but one example of how gala and red-carpet dressing continue to be informed by a 1950s notion of glamour. Of course women have many more options today; they can play haute, or not.
The lofty couture elegance of the past is known to us through garments, as well as photographs and drawings. One of the preeminent documentarians of the time was the illustrator René Gruau. “His stature had been comparable to that of star photographers, although later he was nearly forgotten,” notes Joëlle Chariiau, a gallerist who worked with the artist for 40 years and is the editor of the just-released tome René Gruau: Master of Fashion Illustration (Prestel). “I can say that knowing his work better than anyone else, and having loved the person behind it, I felt I owed him a good book.”
With an introduction by critic Holly Brubach, the book includes work spanning four decades. Gruau’s drawings from the late 1940s through the 1960s are the best known and also the most engaging. How could they not be? He was a member of a cultured coterie of talents, including Christian Dior, Pierre Balmain, and Jacques Fath, and others who, notes Brubach, “constituted an alternative aristocracy—one based on taste,” who were defining what post-war luxury would look like. They were also, quite literally constructing new feminine archetypes with clothes and underpinnings that controlled and shaped the body, willing life to follow art.
In Gruau’s case art also imitated life, as he often drew from live models, one of whom was Vogue editor Susan Train. Even so, the lasting impact of his work comes down to his ability to perfectly capture an ideal of womanhood or glamour with an economy of line. A line so confident that it’s almost declarative, regardless of whether the artist was documenting a specific look or conjuring a mood more subtly. (See the famous Dior Parfums ad of a woman’s hand gripping the paw of a leopard.)
Gruau worked for many designers; he also inspired them. Asked to describe the allure of his work, Chariau references “the quality of his drawing, his excellent knowledge of fashion, his imagination, the originality of his ‘mise en page,’ the efficiency of his line, and at last the great charm of his drawings. Both Monsieur Dior himself, and John Galliano, when he was at the house of Dior, seemed to have fallen under the spell of that charm; both named dresses after the artist, whose drawings helped mold their own visions of beauty.
Born in Italy in 2009 as Count Renato Zavagli Ricciardelli della Caminate, the artist took his French mother’s maiden name professionally. His parents’ divorce left the countess penniless. Gruau was no dilettante, he needed to work; though his personal familiarity with a life of luxury and leisure certainly informed his art. “Contemporary viewers may be forgiven for interpreting his drawings as chic fairy tales of the kind that, for a long time, served as fashion propaganda good for sales,” Brubach writes. “But Gruau’s world did in fact exist.”
And he conjured its scent and its gestures with a line that was buzzingly alive, yet preserved the moment delicately, as in amber. The “ability to distinguish between stillness and movement in a medium that is flat, stationary, and circumscribed by edges is one of the many small miracles at work in Gruau’s art,” writes Brubach. As a result of this skill, his drawings operate much like history itself, which though seemingly fixed, is ever evolving.
Below, some of Gruau’s work for Vogue.
