Text by Ådne Dyrnesli, Communication Advisor, the National Museum, Norway
Inside a small paper bag is a bundle of light peach-coloured fabric. Gloved hands carefully pull it out. It is wound up – like a cinnamon roll in silk. Textile conservator Eva Düllo carefully unwinds the garment and inspects the seams, threads and cords.
The folds in the silk she has in her hands hold a secret. This is a Delphos gown from the 1920s – an apparently simple, full-length dress with folds, or pleats as they are called. No one has ever managed to duplicate them.
‘The Fortunys took the secret to the grave’, says Janne H. Arnesen, collection advisor at the National Museum in Norway.
Many people have tried, but the silk only retains the pleats for a few days or weeks before the frictionless fabric flattens out again.
‘Here we have a dress that is one-hundred years old, and the pleats are just as firm as when they were first made’, says Arnesen.
Until recently there was no one who thought Henriette Nigrin had anything to do with the design, but now, after a century in the shadow of her husband and collaborative partner Mariano Fortuny, she enters centre stage as the dress’s creator.
Into the Museum
‘I wonder if this is the original belt’, mumbles the conservator Eva Düllo, deep in concentration. ‘But we must find that out later’.
The National Museum recently bought this peach-coloured dress at auction, and now it will replace a green Delphos that has been on show for quite some time.
‘We’ve given the green dress a hard run ever since it entered the museum’s collection in 1992’, says Janne H. Arnesen. ‘In recent years we’ve recognised the need to limit its display.’
The National Museum aims to present its collection but also to preserve it for posterity. This is why it’s important to alternate between the works that are exhibited, so they can last longer.
Before this new dress can enter the museum, it needs nitrogen treatment. This means it must be deprived of oxygen for four consecutive weeks.
‘One, two, three.’
The conservators carefully lift the dress and place it in a new box that is stacked together with other objects that will undergo the same treatment. A green plastic bag is drawn over the boxes and inflated. The lack of oxygen kills vermin without damaging the dress’s fragile materials.
A Second Skin
Delphos was made in Venice by the married couple Henriette Nigrin and Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo. It came in one size, the pleats enabling it to fit the shape of whoever wears it.
‘The pleats enfold the body like a second skin’, explains Janne H. Arnesen.
This special tussah silk is hand-dyed. It requires a lot of colour and must be dyed in several rounds, a process giving the cloth a shimmering, painterly quality. The dress can be adjusted at the shoulders by a string with attached beads made of Murano glass.
The dress was produced from 1907 to about 1950.
‘It’s rare that a high-fashion garment is in constant production for such a long time’, says Arnesen.
Delphos was atypical for its time, both in style and maker. The dress created a new style, and this is precisely why Arnesen thinks it was produced for so many years.
Today Delphos is a coveted object for fashion collectors, stylists and the rich and famous, but how did the dress end up as one of the fashion world’s greatest icons?
A Textile Heaven
Henriette and Mariano met in Paris in 1902, but the details of their meeting are unclear.
Henriette was a model, 24 years of age and recently divorced – an unusual circumstance for a young woman at the time. The painter and multi-artist Mariano was in his early 30s, and although he lived in Italy, he was staying in Paris at the time. He was known as the magician from Venice due to the pioneering lighting systems he developed.
It must have been a special meeting, for just a few months later Henriette joined Mariano on his return to Venice, and they moved into Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei, which has now become the Fortuny Museum. Henriette and Mariano lived and worked in Palazzo Orfei for almost 50 years. Here Fortuny had his painting studio, experimented with lighting systems for theatre productions, built scenography and developed and sold textiles. He also had an avid interest in history and a well-stocked library.
‘Together, Nigrin and Fortuny established a textile heaven where they created fabrics in Renaissance, ancient Egyptian and Medieval styles’, says Arnesen.
They worked together closely, with Nigrin developing fabrics and colours and dyeing the garments. Fortuny also owned a textile factory and continued his work as a visual artist.
‘Sometimes it is unclear where the work of one begins and the work of the other ends’, notes Arnesen.
Together, Nigrin and Fortuny created several iconic garments inspired by history, art and mythology. Examples are the scarf Knossos, named after the ancient Minoan city, velour capes with intricate patterns, and, most iconic of all, Delphos.
Inspiration from History
Delphos shares its name with, and is inspired by, the antique statue ‘The Charioteer of Delphi’, unearthed in 1896.
‘Nigrin and Fortuny drew inspiration from the good craftmanship that existed before ‘evil’ machines came on the scene’, relates Janne H. Arnesen. ‘They looked to Chinese and Japanese textile arts and to antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.’
The statue of the charioteer, of which the National Museum has a plaster cast, shows a young man in a full-length tunic called a chiton. He originally stood in a horse-drawn chariot, but now all we see are the reins in his right hand.
Ancient Greece was all the rage in the early 1900s, and knowledge of the statue spread throughout Europe through plaster casts and drawings. Fortuny drew the statue in one of his sketchbooks, and the sketch reveals what interested him most: the chiton is drawn carefully while the rest of the figure is unfinished.
At the same time as Nigrin and Fortuny drew on historical references, they also took certain liberties.
‘The dress was inspired by a statue from ancient Greece, but you could buy all kinds of overgarments for it’, says Arnesen. ‘You could be a medieval princess one day and wear a kind of Japanese kimono the next day’.
Across the Fashion Divide
The early 1900s is the golden age for what we today call haute couture, tailor-made garments in season-based collections.
‘The fashion system such as we know it today is established at this time, with collections for spring/summer and fall/winter’, explains Arnesen.
The term haute couture was launched in 1858 by Charles Frederick Worth. To be allowed to use it, fashion houses had to follow a set of rules, determined by the French fashion industry’s governing body, Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, in 1868.
Rule number one was to have a studio in Paris. You also had to create seasonal collections, and the garments had to be tailor-made for the customer.
Nigrin and Fortuny, however, did not live and work in Paris, nor did they make seasonal collections, and the Delphos was ‘one size fits all’. They specialised in handicraft, perfected techniques and focused on individual models such as Delphos, which was produced for over 40 years.
‘Delphos has travelled, from being a bit odd to fitting perfectly into the fashion scene’, explains Arnesen.
Liberation from the Corset
With its thin, pleated silk , Delphos was originally a ‘tea gown’, intended for informal gatherings.
‘It was probably not meant as an evening gown, but people ended up using it as that’, says Arnesen.
In the 1800s and early 1900s, women wore corsets and various types of padding to manipulate their body shape and clothing, but during the 1920s these practices waned. Several parallel tendencies caused the fashion scene to change.
‘If you want the standard narrative, then this is liberation from the corset’, declares Arnesen.
Sports and leisure become popular; now one is supposed to be active, healthy and fit. What is the healthy, natural body like, and how can it be used as the basis for making clothes? This creates a backlash against the corset and the manipulation of the body. There is, at the same time, enormous interest in clothing from other parts of the world, particularly Japan. The simple Delphos adapts to the wearer’s body, and with its historical references, it glides right into the fashion scene. It is sold in shops in New York, Paris and London.
Arnesen is nevertheless somewhat critical of liberation from the corset:
‘This dress, without supporting undergarments, requires a perfect body. You can very well call it a liberation , but it’s of course not a liberation for all body types.’
Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo dies in 1949, and Henriette Nigrin ceases all creative production. She uses the last 16 years of her life to catalogue, organise and donate works and objects from her husband’s estate. She donates Palazzo Orfei to the municipality of Venice, so it can become a museum. Nigrin also ends production of the dresses she has created, among others, Delphos.
‘It is not until Nigrin ceases production that the dress dies’, says Arnesen.
Afterwards, it is Fortuny who has received all the credit for it. He is the one about whom books are written and research is conducted, and it is his name that is on museum labels, also in the National Museum in Norway.
A New Story
‘Nigrin was reduced to a muse’, says Arnesen, ‘and only in recent years have we become aware of her contribution.’
Recently, a Spanish lawyer started looking through the couple's documents and found the patent application for the pleating technique used for Delphos. There it was, written in black and white: ‘This patent is the property of Madame Henriette Brassart, who is the inventor. I am applying for the patent in my name due to time constraints. [...] 10 July 1909 in Paris. Fortuny ’. Brassart is the maiden name of Nigrin’s mother.
‘She was much more than a muse, and here we see that she was the one who developed the dress from A to Z’, says Arnesen.
Researchers have also recently found letters and photographs confirming that it was Nigrin who developed the dress, plus a passage in Fortuny’s autobiography where he gives her credit for Delphos.
‘In hindsight it’s easy to see what we could have done better’ , sighs Arnesen, ‘how did we miss this?’
The patent shows that ceramic pipes and heat were involved, but it doesn’t give a complete picture of the process. No one at the factory learned the full process. Rumour has it that the pleating was done under water, and that it depended on just the right weather and humidity to stay in place.
In the wake of this discovery, several museums have changed their labels and catalogue texts to show that Nigrin is the dress’s creator, not Fortuny.
When the new dress now enters the National Museum’s exhibition, the label states that Henriette Nigrin designed it.
‘The new dress comes with a new gaze and a new story’, says Janne H. Arnesen.
Hidden Secrets
Conservator Eva Düllo dons blue rubber gloves and switches on the lamp over the table where the peach-coloured silk dress lies. The dress has been without oxygen for four weeks, and now she can finally study it.
Even though the auction house in England sold the dress as ‘unmarked’, she discovers something inside one of the ribbons on the inside.
‘Look here!’ She carefully unfolds the ribbon, which is no wider than a fingernail.
Inside is a hand-painted label with red letters: ‘Fortuny’. The band has been used to tighten up the dress under the arms, and Düllo thinks it may have been replaced or added sometime after the dress was new.
‘It has a different colour than the silk of the dress’, she says as she displays it, ‘and the seam is a bit frayed.’
The dress comes with a belt, and here new snap buttons have been added. The dress is in good condition, but it shows signs of wear. It has some stains, but Düllo says the practice of washing garments in the conservation process has almost completely stopped. Instead, the wisdom is to preserve traces of a lived life .
The cord holding the dress together over the shoulders is a bit fragile, so Düllo inserts a new thin cord that can bear the weight of the fabric, yet without removing the original cord.
‘It’s unthinkable to replace the original cord’, says Düllo. ‘The new one ensures that the original isn’t destroyed.’
Competition from Others
Although production ended around 1950, Delphos didn’t completely vanish.
In the 1950s the practice of manipulating the body with corsets and thick sculptural fabrics reemerged. Delphos lay dormant for 20 years, but then came the 1970s, with an emphasis on naturalness, flower power and fluttering full-length dresses.
‘Delphos, with its delightful natural colours and pleats that come alive atop the body, hits the ’70s like a bullet’, recounts Janne H. Arnesen.
Delphos rises again and becomes an icon. Fashionista Tina Chow is photographed in a peach-coloured Delphos in 1977, the art collector Peggy Guggenheim celebrates her 80th birthday with a bang wearing Delphos in 1978, and Lauren Bacall sports a red Delphos at the Oscars in 1979.
Today the dress is a museum piece, but it remains relevant, and many people are interested in it. Delphos has been featured in photo series in Vogue, in the TV series Downton Abbey, and it has been seen on the red carpet several times in recent years.
‘We competed with Hollywood stars, stylists, fashion collectors and bidders who were just hunting for the coolest dress’, says Arnesen, recalling the process of acquiring the new dress.
Final Touches
With such a long life, it’s no surprise that Delphos has been used in many different ways.
‘We also see that some have worn it with a corset underneath’, says Janne H. Arnesen.
As the peach-coloured dress is now to enter the museum, decisions must be made as to how to exhibit it.
‘The two Delphos dresses in the National Museum’s collection are both from the 1920s’, says Arnesen. ‘So we choose to display them as if worn by a body from that time period, unmanipulated to any great extent. If they had been from 1912, it would be tempting to give them a little Titanic twist’, she laughs.
The new acquisition will be put on a mannequin before entering the gallery room. The conservator Eva Düllo has carefully adapted the mannequin and will now see if it fits the dress.
‘It’s always a bit scary’, she says while putting on her gloves.
Two people are needed for the procedure, and together with the conservator Anna Javér, she carefully pulls the dress over the mannequin. They study the fit, discuss the sleeve length and how to mount the belt around the waist.
‘We don’t have a sedentary job’, says Javér as she stands on her knees and looks up at the sleeve openings. ‘We kneel and lie on the floor. We get very close to the objects; it’s a fantastic privilege.’
Adapting the mannequin can take anything from one day to several weeks. The dress will then be photographed for the online presentation of the collection, and only then be mounted in the exhibition – with a new label, a new story and a new perspective.
‘The dress will be on display for two years; then we’ll do a new evaluation’, says Arnesen.
Delphos is displayed in Room 15 in the Collection Presentation at the National Museum, Oslo.
Literature
Bañares, Silvia. 2017. ‘A short biographical note on Henriette Nigrin, creator of Delphos.’ Datatèxtil, no. 36, pp. 73–84. https://raco.cat/index.php/Datatextil/article/view/321854.
Fortuny. 26 March 2023. ‘Creative Bloom.’ https://fortuny.com/stories/newsletter/creative-bloom.
Fortuny. 28 January 2021. ‘Be the Muse: Henriette Nigrin.’ https://fortuny.com/stories/newsletter/be-the-muse-henriette-negrin.
Fortuny. 8 December 2023. ‘The fashion of love.’ https://fortuny.com/stories/newsletter/the-fashion-of-love.
Smith, Wendy Ligon. 2022. Fortuny: Time, Space, Light. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Special thanks to Paula Ramírez Jimeno, curator at Museum del Traje, Madrid, for sharing her knowledge about Fortuny.