Jean Patou

The Designer Who Ended the Flapper Look

Patou opened his couture house in 1919 and is defined by a reversal. He is known as the designer who did away with the flapper look, by lengthening the skirt and returning to a natural waistline. The flapper silhouette of the 1920s was straight, short and waistless, so both of his changes work against it in the same direction: a longer skirt restores length, and a natural waistline restores the body's own shape as the garment's structure. He is called a revolutionary for it, which is worth pausing on, because the revolution consisted of returning to something older. In fashion, restoring a suppressed feature at the moment the prevailing style has exhausted itself is as decisive a move as inventing a new one, and it requires reading the timing of taste rather than simply following technique.

Sportswear, Swimwear and the Cardigan

His second, larger claim is about what women wore outside formal dress. Patou is credited with introducing sportswear for women, and is considered the inventor of the knitted swimwear and the tennis skirt, and was the first designer to popularize the cardigan — together, a move of fashion towards the natural and comfortable. These are garments for activity rather than display: clothes to play tennis in, to swim in, and a knitted layer to put on and take off. Knitted swimwear matters as an invention because knitting stretches, which is what a swimsuit needs and woven cloth cannot give. The tennis skirt matters because it is a purpose-designed garment for a woman playing a sport, at a time when women's sportswear was largely adapted from ordinary dress. The cardigan matters differently — he is described as the first to popularize it rather than invent it, which is the distinction between originating a garment and making it fashionable. His market explains the direction: his clothes were marketed mostly to wealthy American women, the clientele with the leisure, the resorts and the sporting life that this kind of clothing served.

Joy: The Perfume That Carried the House

When the stock market crashed, the market for luxury fashion crashed with it, and the House of Patou survived through its perfumes. Joy, a floral scent, is the best known of Patou's perfumes, and it was created by Henri Almras in 1935, at the height of the Depression, for Patou's former clients who could no longer afford his Parisian haute couture clothes. The logic is exact: a perfume lets a former couture client keep buying the house's name at a fraction of a dress's price, so fragrance preserved both revenue and the client relationship through the years when the clothes were unaffordable. Yet Joy was positioned at the very top rather than as a cheap substitute. On its introduction it was called the world's most expensive perfume by American socialite Elsa Maxwell, and it remained two to three times the cost of most department store scents, because each ounce is purported to contain the essence of ten thousand flowers, including Bulgarian roses and Grasse jasmine, as well as Michelia champaca alba. It became the world's second best-selling scent, after Chanel No. 5 — expensive and widely bought at once. Patou died in 1936, a year after Joy's creation. His sister and her husband, the Barbas, continued the house; Jean Kerlo and Karl Lagerfeld are among the designers associated with it, and the Patou perfume license later passed to Proctor & Gamble Prestige, which remained faithful to the tradition of extravagant fragrances made with extravagant ingredients.