Pattern and color rule the decorating world today, the splashier and more boho the better. So it stands to reason that style gurus are thrilling again to French couturier Paul Poiret, once hailed as the “greatest living dress artist,” who also happened to be a high priest of free-spirited home furnishings.
“I saw Poiret’s fabrics for the first time in our archives four years ago and fell in love—but it didn’t occur to me to bring them back,” says Dara Caponigro, creative director of Schumacher , referring to a collection that Paris’s portly genius created for the American fabric company in 1929 and which debuted a year later. “Now he’s relevant again because people are embracing maximalism.” Thus, Schumacher’s relaunch of the nine punchy, polychrome patterns, from giant magnolia blossoms to darting antelopes.
Though Poiret’s fashions were fantastically exotic—a legendary 1913 tunic flared like a lampshade—it was his Fauvist palette that seduced a world becoming disenchanted with sweet pastels. “Everything pale and washed-out and insipid had been the rage,” Poiret wrote in King of Fashion, an impressively self-congratulatory memoir. “All I did was let loose a few wolves among these lambs: reds and purples and royal blues that made the rest come to life and begin to sing.”
Those wild colors were mirrored in his fabrics’ powerful, primitive motifs. Many were adapted from naive watercolors by École Martine, the workshop he founded in 1911 and staffed with working-class girls. “He was looking for young women with an untutored eye and the kind of originality that could spring from the untouched,” explains Erica Warren, a textiles curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, home to some original examples of the Schumacher prints. “This philosophy wasn’t new to Poiret, but he certainly capitalized on it.”
One of Caponigro’s favorites is Plumes, which, like several of the new offerings, comes in a wallpaper. “It’s just delightful—big, glamorous, hand-drawn ostrich feathers against a ground of dots,” she enthuses. “Poiret’s designs are funny and spirited but still sophisticated. Even if you’re a minimalist you can’t help but appreciate them.” fschumacherom
