SCAD FASH honored Horst P. Horst and Madame Grès

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Preparing to showcase the work of two fashion giants - photographer Horst P. Horst and the high fashion designer known as Madame Grès - representatives from the Savannah College of Art & Design hosted a preview Wednesday in Manhattan.

Both exhibitions will be held at the SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta along with "Horst P. Horst: Essence of the Times" from October 6 to April 16 and "The Art of Draping" from November 10. until June 30. The legendary Horst, whose name is synonymous with Vogue due to his years working for Condé Nast publication, studied art and architecture before becoming a photographer. Eighty examples of his work will be featured in the exhibition.

Coordinated in collaboration with the Azzedine Alaïa Foundation, the Madame Grès exhibition will mark the first time in 15 years that her work has been presented in the United States. At Wednesday's media preview at Bottino, curators from the SCAD Museum of Art and SCAD FASH talked about what's in store.

SCAD Fashion Show Director Rafael Gomes scrolled through some of the striking images and designs that will be featured in each show. Working with the director of the Alaïa foundation, Olivier Saillard, Gomes noted how the organization has an "incredible" collection of around 700 objects. This fall's show will feature designs from the 1930s to the 1980s.

With the help of Gert Elfering, owner of the Horst estate, the upcoming exhibition will highlight Horst's work from the 1930s to the 1990s. "The stories for both are remarkable. Both were fleeing the fascists of the 1930s. They were so successful in what they were doing. It will be a great inspiration for our students to see these two timelines for these two great artists,” said Elfering.

He also touched on some of their biographical background, explaining how the fashion designer, whose first name was Germaine Emilie Krebs, wanted to become a sculptor but her parents disapproved. “But she did it anyway. She did it with fabric,” he said.

Originally creating successfully under the pseudonym "Alix" in the 1930s, she ran into trouble in the 1940s designing dresses for the wives of Nazi officers, Gomes said. However, it was later discovered that the designer had sewn the Star of David with blue thread inside some of those designs as a resistance because she was Jewish, Gomes said. Grès' workshop in Paris was forced to close with the official reason being that it was a time of rationing and her dresses could require up to 60 feet of fabric due to all the detailing and pleating. She then spent the remaining war years in hiding in the south of France and reopened her studio after the war.

People who worked with Madame Grès said the environment felt like a convent because she required silence to create and was very strict, Gomes said. One of his former employees discussed with Saillard some of his intricate techniques so that SCAD students in Atlanta and Savannah could learn them from him and use them on oversized t-shirts. Noting that some of Madame Grès' early dresses had no boning even though they looked like it, Gomes said she relied on limited stitching, twisting or braiding to make the wearer feel safe in the garment.

Gomes noted how the dressmaker later fell on harder times at the end of her life and designers like Pierre Cardin, Hubert de Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent helped her financially. His death was also concealed by his daughter Anne Grès until December 1994, more than a year after his burial in the south of France. “The official story was that she was mad at the fashion industry for not giving her mother the credit she deserved. There was also this big retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [in the fall 1994] that was coming. The girl didn't want either...