Paul Poiret: Fashion is a Feast.

Five hundred and fifty objects

Paul Poiret: Fashion is a Feast ran at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 107 rue de Rivoli, Paris, from 25 June 2025 to 11 January 2026. It gathered some 550 works: clothing, accessories, fine and decorative arts.

It was curated by Marie-Sophie Carron de la Carrière, who oversees MAD's fashion and textile collections from 1800 to 1946, with assistant curator Marie-Pierre Ribière. Anette Lenz was artistic director. The space was designed by Christopher Dessus and atelier Paf.

Paul Poiret was born in 1879 and died in 1944. In 1898 he trained with Jacques Doucet. In 1901 he joined the house of Worth. In 1903 he opened his own house. Within a few years his name was tied to a major change in how Parisian women dressed.

The exhibition does not tell this as a biography. It lays out what he made and who he made it with, and lets visitors see how widely a creative life could spread.

Dropping the corset

At the start of the twentieth century, fashionable women's dress still relied on the corset, a frame that tightly shaped the torso. Poiret offered fluid lines that fell with the body, in vivid colour. MAD describes this as freeing the body from restrictive corsetry.

Among the pieces named is the Joséphine evening gown of 1907, from what MAD calls the Manifesto collection. The name says a lot. This was not one pretty design but a statement about how to dress.

Then the Mosaïque evening dress, around 1908. An evening coat from around 1910. And the La Perse coat of 1911, made with the painter Raoul Dufy. In that coat, fabric is no longer only something to sew. It is a surface to paint on.

Once the corset is gone, the body can move at its own rhythm. Clothing no longer dictates the figure; it follows it. A simple sounding change, yet it altered how a woman sat, walked and breathed.

A feast of many courses

The title's word feast is meant literally. Poiret was known for the parties he gave, among them La Mille et Deuxième Nuit, the Thousand and Second Night. At the 1925 International Exhibition, he took part with three barges moored on the Seine.

But the larger feast was the way he brought disciplines together. In 1911 he founded the Martine school, which taught design to girls from poor backgrounds. The same year he founded Les Parfums de Rosine. He worked with painters, sculptors and decorators: Paul Iribe, Raoul Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Lepape, Louis Süe, Léon Bakst.

So the exhibition moves through fashion, decorative arts, perfume and food. Each is a course in the same meal. A dress, a perfume, a printed textile, a staged evening: they speak one language of colour, freedom and pleasure.

Perhaps this is what makes Poiret memorable. He did not treat clothing as a separate trade. Beauty, for him, was a space to live in, from the cloth against the skin to the scent in the room to an evening on the river.