The enigmatic sculptor of Paris fashion

Her name was legend for the coterie of fashion insiders such as Jean Cocteau in the thirties, Cristobal Balenciaga in the fifties or Pierre Cardin in the seventies and yet virtually unknown outside that very exclusive, closed world. To those who do not understand Paris, it might even have looked as if this reclusive woman had been dropped from the dictionary of all-time greats who really count, that all true fashionistas keep in their head.

In fact, when Madam Grès died in 1993, interest in her name was so diminished that her daughter was able to keep the news of her death secret for over a year. Obscurity pierced only by the dry research of some future academic seemed her fate. But Paris is not like other fashion capitals in which a designer is quickly forgotten unless he has left a huge empire behind which needs to be kept going by keeping the name alive. One thinks of the current obscurity of Walter Albini in Milan, considered by all Italian designers as the father of modern Italian fashion, or Geoffrey Beene, fearless New York modernist who even Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs claim as a great influence on them, and the only American designer who can be mentioned in the same breath as the great names of Paris. But in Paris the great couturiers are considered artists first and money-makers second and are not so easily forgotten.

Madam Grès may have been in the shade for a while but there never was any question that her name and oeuvre would survive in the capital of fashion, even if not in other parts of the world. And it has. Triumphantly, in an exhibition in Paris that on the day I went was full of all types of everyday French men and women thrilled and enthralled by an exhibition that is as much about their national identity and patrimony as anything to be found in the Louvre or the Quai d'Orsay.

Madam Grès was an enigmatic figure who, since starting her career in the twenties, worked under three separate names. Her real name was Germaine Krebs, but her first label was Alix Barton, which changed to Alix in the thirties before ending with Madame Grès in the forties - the name under which she worked for the rest of her life.

Reclusive, dedicated, Grès was affectionately known as the sphinx of Paris fashion but if that makes her sound cold and detached it was certainly not the case for her customers, who included fashionable women of the eminence of The Duchess of Windsor, all of whom responded to the respect for the female body in clothes made to liberate, not enclose them.

Willy Maywald, Model wears collection by Madame Grès (1939)

© Association Willy Maywald / ADAGP, Paris 2011

They loved the flattery of her carefully conceived shapes in silk, wool and taffeta as much as they loved her palette of pistachio, soft whites and black along with flattering dove greys and the youthful sparkle of canary yellow and subtle red (compare it with Valentino red or any modern version of the colour and you will see immediately how cheap mass-produced colour now is). But above all they loved what the world will always remember her for: the brilliance of her draping, based on the classic Greek style. It was not like today's machine made draping - which swirls around the body in not always flattering horizontal swathes - but hangs vertically, falling softly from the shoulders, caught gently at the waist and flowing free to the ground. And totally flattering to any figure type because everything Grès made was draped and moulded on the figure, almost like sculpture.

And that is why this exhibition works so well in its space in the Musée Bourdelle, the studio of the nineteenth century sculptor, Antoine Bourdelle - an appropriate venue for the woman who had always said she would have like to be a sculptor. For anyone interested in seeing how complex thought can be made into intellectually satisfying fashion or has ever wondered where Japanese fashion took its inspiration this is one really not to be missed.

Colin McDowell is a fashion historian and author of many books on the subject, including Fashion Today.