Mariano Fortuny

A talk given to the Friends of the Collection on 8 March 2020 by Dr. Kate Strasdin

The work of Mariano Fortuny represents a reaction against the Edwardian fashion which was the subject of Julia Fox’s talk. Fortuny produced his clothing at the same time as a wider debate about the merits of aesthetic dress and the dress reform movement. This advocated a more natural style of dress for women, casting off corsets and wearing less structured garments. Kate Strasdin first came across the work of Fortuny when she was working at Killerton. Some Fortuny dresses had been given to the National Trust collection there, having been found in a barn.

Fortuny came from an artistic family and was an artistic polymath: painter, engraver, sculptor, textile and wallpaper designer, and inventor of stage lighting as well as couturier. He felt there should be no boundaries to design: all artists could be all of those things.

He took his costume design inspiration from the simple drapery of the classical era. He appreciated the unfettered nature of the clothing and felt that in some way it represented a way of dressing which was not beholden to the prescriptive fashion system, preferring drapery to shaping.

He was fascinated by the different properties of textiles and tried out different chemical processes to manipulate the surface of the cloth, including paste resist dying and voiding methods. His textile designs were inspired by a wide range of sources — from Persia through to the Renaissance and medieval. But his designs are timeless.

Fortuny is best known in costume design for his highly secret pleating process. Photographs of his earliest Delphos gowns show a wavelike regularity to their pleating. It is likely that the panels of silk were sewn loosely by hand, selvage to selvage, the width of the fabric, with a thick basting thread. When the stitch reached the edge the needle was reversed to about three quarters of an inch above the last line of stitches and a new row was made. This process then continued back and forth in a zigzag pattern throughout the entire length of the fabric. At the end of the panel the thread was pulled tight creating a narrow bank of cloth which was then passed through heated ceramic rollers. The process did not set the pleats permanently: clients would have to send their dresses back to Fortuny to have the pleats reset if they were inadvertently dampened or they were flattened out at the seat.

His range of Delphos dresses were produced from about 1911 to 1942 in myriad shades and colours, but in a limited range of shapes, long or slightly shorter, all in one piece, but the actual fabrication and design stayed the same for the entirety of its production. The first dress was created about 1907 and they continued to be made until about 1950, not long after his death, when production became more difficult because the process of manufacture had remained a secret.

A Fortuny dress box was like a hat box: the dress was tightly twisted and knotted to try to retain the pleating. The depth of the pleating meant that they naturally coiled into the box. 

He did not just design the Delphos dress however. His idea was to create a wardrobe which was endlessly interchangeable. He designed wraps, capes, light-weight jackets and shawls in tonal shades that could be worn with different shades of dress. A Fortuny wrap is one of the most valuable items in our Collection. Some of the dresses have sewn seams but others are held together by Murano glass beads on silk cords.

He collaborated with the glass designers of Murano, embellishing his Delphos dresses with small opaque beads attached to thin silk cords. These served a practical purpose too, helping to weigh down the extreme light weight of the silk and anchor certain parts of the dress in place. The handmade glass beads were entirely in keeping with the approach Fortuny took to the creation of his garments. Fortuny saw himself as an artisan rather than as a designer.

Fortuny liked to design garments which could be worn over the top of the Delphos dress and these too often consisted of simple designs made of artisan textiles. He did not limit himself to heavy fabrics but experimented with lighter printed textiles as well as including diaphanous silk wraps.

Originally the garments were intended as a kind of casual wear not as formal dress. but their popularity meant that they were adopted by different people for different occasions. Fortuny became famous almost in spite of his efforts to create garments which were artistic and largely unfashionable. This was largely due to celebrity endorsement from women who wore the Delphos dress and loved its aesthetic.

It is by the Delphos dress however that Fortuny will always be best known: the mysterious, hand made, curiously pleated garment that was never supposed to be fashionable but which took the artistic world by storm. Holding a Fortuny dress is to hold something which feels of obvious high quality. The weight of it, the shine of the cloth and the tactile nature of the cord and beads do seem to support the idea that fashion can also be art. Objects of dress are not just ephemeral or unimportant; they are the story of the human body.