Sculpting the fabric: Madame Grès’ emotional and innovative Pleating
Technique
Authors: Becho Anabela 
Published: February 2023

Madame Grès (1903-1993) worked for six decades in the exclusive world of
Parisian haute couture, creating clothes as if they were living sculptures,
always in search of the ideal dress.Her legacy was designs marked by a
ceaseless quest for absolute beauty. Her long,draped dresses crafted with
obsession and technical mastery are a profound reflection on fashion, time
and memory. In its undying association with sculpture, her oeuvre encloses
an inherent affirmative, solid, timeless perpetuity. Respect for the
principles of design lies in Grès’s discourse with textiles; because it is a
discourse, a thought that is transformed into matter, that grows pleat by
pleat in a game of alternating light and shade. The couturier's folds
enclose successive pain and mystery, melancholy and persistence, obsession
and conviction. There can be no doubt that Grès’s gowns were designed for
the female form, in the cutting and manipulation of the fabric, in a
prodigious, precise technique in which nothing could be left to chance. This
is why they are perfect examples of the highest calling of
design.Nonetheless, it is precisely in the relationship between body and
gown, the harmony and tension between the organic and inorganic, that Grès’s
work goes beyond mere design. It moves naturally into the real world of
creation, as the couturier’s gowns do not just dress the body; they become
the body itself, in which fabric and flesh turn into a single, indivisible,
absolute entity. Even though her oeuvre was much wider than the so-called
“goddess dresses”, the long draped gowns, reminiscent of eternal time,
became her archetype. Incontrast with the ephemeral nature of fashion, it is
my goal to show in the course of this paper that precisely the opposite can
be true, through the observation of the French couturier’s meticulous,
emotional and innovative pleating technique, in which the role of
avant-garde materials is crucial. The expressive use of pleating and drapery
in all its limitless variation and fluidity along the outside is rightly
considered to be Grès’ hallmark. Grès had a profound respect for the textile
material, honouring its integrity, preferring not to cut it, and reducing
its size through successive pleats — the amplitude of her dresses’ skirts
could occasionally reach twenty metres in diameter. Grès’s work was
unmistakably modern, though it did not seem to belong to a particular age.
At the same time, it takes us back to a distant past and forward into the
future. The evocative power of her gowns is absolutely breathtaking. It is
ingrained in their materiality, the details of their construction, and the
quest for perfection and for beauty. Although a woman of her time, bound by
a cultural context specific to her epoch, there is a deliberate quest for
timelessness at the very heart of Grès’ work, which, I argue, can be
perceived in her technique. In a manual process, wrapped in an emotional
dimension, each draping, rib, or pleat is worked minutely, actively taking
part in the construction of the garment’s final shape. The initial width of
the fabric could be reduced to a few centimetres by an exquisite pleating
technique: to be kept in place the folds were sewn at the back, a sartorial
innovation in the universe of Parisian haute-couture. Time seems to be
suspended by this technical detail. In the light of the French philosopher
Henri Bergson's theory, this suspension can be seen as durée, a moment of
simultaneity, an experience of temporality based on a constant interaction
between the past (the classical approach), the present (the moment of the
making of the dress) and the future (the preview of the following repetitive
gesture of making). In the draping of the fabric, we become conscious of the
physical dimension of the hand that created the sculptural object, that
carved the cloth as if it was stone, involving the body in a game of hide
and seek, concealing and revealing its contours, emphasising its movements.
It is this tension between the body and the fabric that brings the dresses
alive, as the result of an emotional relationship between the humanity of
the making process and the technical innovation of the textile material.