Paul Poiret - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Poiret was born on 20 April 1879 to a cloth merchant in the poor neighborhood of Les Halles, Paris. His parents, in an effort to rid him of his natural pride, apprenticed him to an umbrella maker. There, he collected scraps of silk left over from the cutting of umbrella patterns, and fashioned clothes for a doll that one of his sisters had given him. While a teenager, Poiret took his sketches to Madeleine Chéruit, a prominent dressmaker, who purchased a dozen from him. Poiret continued to sell his drawings, eventually to major Parisian couture houses, until he was hired by Jacques Doucet in 1896. His first design, a red cloth cape, sold 400 copies. Poiret later moved to the House of Worth, where he was responsible for designing simple, practical dresses. The "brazen modernity of his designs," however, proved too much for Worth's conservative clientele. When Poiret presented the Russian Princess Bariatinsky with a Confucius coat with an innovative kimono-like cut, for instance, she exclaimed, "What a horror! When there are low fellows who run after our sledges and annoy us, we have their heads cut off, and we put them in sacks just like that."