Madame Grès: The Sculptor Who Vanished From Fashion History

Madame Grès: The Sculptor Who Hid Everything

There are designers who wanted to be famous, and then there was Madame Grès, who seemed almost determined to disappear. Born Germaine Émilie Krebs in Paris in 1903, she dreamed first of becoming a sculptor, then found a way to pursue sculpture without ever touching marble. She began shaping fabric instead. Silk jersey became her clay. The female body became her armature. Her fingers, pins and relentless eye became the tools. For more than five decades, Madame Grès created dresses that looked less sewn than carved, their tiny pleats and sweeping folds recalling the statues of ancient Greece while moving with the body of a modern woman. She dressed some of the most celebrated women of the twentieth century, yet spent much of her life resisting publicity. And when she died in 1993, the fashion world did not know. It would take thirteen months for the news to emerge.

Early Life: Germaine Krebs Wanted to Be a Sculptor

Germaine Émilie Krebs was born in Paris on November 30, 1903. Accounts of her childhood vary, partly because Madame Grès herself was unusually protective of her past. Later profiles often described her as coming from a respectable, modest bourgeois background, rather than the grand industrial family she sometimes allowed people to imagine.

What is consistent is her early attraction to the arts. She considered becoming a dancer and, more importantly, dreamed of sculpture. Her parents discouraged the idea, seeing artistic independence as an impractical path for a young woman.

Fashion became the compromise.

But even when she entered dressmaking, Germaine Krebs did not think like a conventional couturière. She was interested in volume, proportion and the physical relationship between material and the body. Around the beginning of the 1930s, she worked first as a milliner and then began developing her own clothes under the name Alix Barton. She partnered with Julie Barton before establishing herself as Alix.