Paul Poiret is en Vogue

Cat spent a good portion of last night sitting in a hospital room, waiting for her friend Dominique to pop out her first sprog. Let’s just say it wasn’t easy going, so Cat had plenty of time to finally read the May Vogue. And by read, Cat means flip through and look at the pretty pictures.

Overall, Cat was nonplussed by the fashion spreads, except for the piece on Paul Poiret, the turn-of-the-last-century designer who redefined fashion. As Vogue’s Hamish Bowles puts it:

"In the years before World War 1, Paul Poiret’s star rose like a comet – as his contemporaries Picasso and Stravinsky were reimagining art and music with either iconoclastic brilliance, so he redesigned fashion to create a seductive lifestyle world to reinforce his exceptional vision."

The photographs are sumptuous and evocative. The clothes are decadent and over the top. And they’re not just vintage pieces trotted out, they’re reimaginations of Poiret’s work by some of today’s most significant talents. In the pictures above, for example, the plum dress is by Christian Lacroix and the silver gown is by Prada.

“Nobody better epitomized Poiret’s work than [illustrator Georges] Lepape, whose drawings inspired this dress,” Lacroix told Vogue.

Why the love fest for Poiret? He’s the subject of a special exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that opened on May 9 and runs through August 5. It’s a pilgrimage Cat will most definitely be making this summer. In the meantime, we’ll all have to make do with a tour by New York Magazine and MoMA Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton.