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Henriette Negrin and the Delphos Dress

in 2021 the Victoria and Albert Museum changed the catalogue labels for the Delphos dresses in its collection.  Previously they had been credited to Mariano Fortuny, a Spanish artist and theatre lighting specialist who lived in Venice and Paris.  Now it was recognised that they were created by Henriette Negrin who lived with him from 1902, the couple marrying in 1924.

It is an interesting confusion - one which seems to have completely taken over textile histories, art books, fashion museums - for if anyone actually read the original documents it is there written by Mariano Fortuny on the patent application that the design for the machine which creates the fine irregular undulating pleats is the property of Henriette.

And I think that it is also an example of how presumptions and a brand like Fortuny’s need for simplicity go together to create a nonsense.  A fabrication, a veiling of the truth as it were.

The story of the Delphos dress.

Henriette and Mariano met in Paris some time around 1902.  He had rented a large studio to experiment with stage lighting, she was recently divorced from a painter - it isn’t know how or where they met but on July 14th 1902 she moved to Venice with him and they set up home within his workshop on the third floor of the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei, which is now the Fortuny museum.  We know the date as Mariano’s mother Cecilia remarked that Henriette arrived on the day the Bell fell from the Campanile - something she took to be a bad omen.

They began to travel a lot - sketching as they went - and Henriette was particularly interested in the pleated outfits shown on Greek pottery.  Archaeology was incredibly fashionable in the early C20th and a bronze sculpture of a charioteer had been excavated in Delphi in 1896.  Henriette made a drawing of it.

This was the inspiration for the Delphos dress.  You can see how a young woman, travelling in a hot country, wearing the restrictive corseted outfits of the day, would look at this and appreciate its simplicity.  You can imagine her thinking . . . . I wonder how I could make that.

By 1907 they had set up a printing workshop within the palazzo - first using woodblocks and then a type of photographic stencilling to decorate the edges of long scarves.  These were called the Knossos scarf and were the first item to be sold.

Here you can see one pinned for display - the elaborate Minoan inspired designs printed on the borders. 

The scarves measured c. 5 metres by 1 metre and were part of a general fashion for enormously long scarves inspired by dancers like Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan (Duncan was a good customer, though it was not a Fortuny scarf that strangled her).

And this shows them set up on cut out wood mannequins in a theatre in Paris (I suspect as a way of selling them to wealthy friends).

Behind the scenes Henriette was still working on a way of recreating a dress inspired by the charioteer - and in 1809 Mariano filed a patent in Paris, marking it clearly in the margin as belonging to and being the work of Henriette.  It has been suggested that it would have been difficult for a woman to obtain a patent in Paris, I do not know if this is true or if this was simply convenience of physically filing the paperwork.

There have been many attempts to recreate the pleating - and differing accounts from people involved in the making suggest that the technique may have changed over the years.  The best detailed analysis of experiments I’ve read is here.

The dress was, I think, always envisaged as for sale - Henriette posed in a prototype wearing evening gloves

and out walking

where the length is clearly shorter than the ones on display models

The silks were dyed with natural dyes - indigo, cochineal and hardwoods like logwood.  The pleats were set with egg white which also gave an extra sheen. The dresses were not easy to keep - they came with a special box, like a small hat box, and were twisted and coiled in between wears to preserve the pleats.  However wearing them in a time before antiperspirants caused the pleats to ‘soften’ under the arms and they could not be easily washed as water damaged the pleats, the dyes and the egg wash. 

Most people returned their dresses to the Fortuny factory for cleaning and re-pleating.  Some possibly simply put a tunic over the stains.

The dresses became very fashionable - worn by the actresses and dancers that the couple knew in Paris - and by 1920s they were growing into a range of co-ordinating pieces. 

The Delphos dresses themselves became sleeveless and a new range of jackets, tunics, and wraps were introduced.  They were worn by a lot of American wealthy women in their 40s and 50s, as a kind of elegant yet sumptuous ‘uniform’ of layer pieces.  A capsule wardrobe of sorts with interchangeable pieces. 

A very enviable capsule wardrobe.

When Mariano died, Henriette declared that, as it was her design, she wished to stop its production.  She may have still been making the actual dresses and the process was top secret.  She also threw the natural dyes used on the silk into the canal - cochineal, indigo and hardwoods - and destroyed all the recipes.

This was in contrast to the rest of the paperwork, paint pigments and archive which she spent the rest of her life getting into order so it could be preserved.

The Fortuny brand do still sell Delphos dresses in their shops - made from synthetic fibres that can be washed.  

I have put together a video about the Fortuny Museum, the Delphos dresses and the textile collection here.

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