SCAD Fash Celebrates Jeanne Lanvin’s Haute Couture Heritage

Founded in 1889, Lanvin is the oldest haute couture house still in business, and the esteemed maison’s founder is the focus of her first American exhibition at the SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta. ‘Jeanne Lanvin: Haute Couture Heritage’ is open to the public until August 31, 2025, spanning the years between 1910 and 1947 the show features more than 60 pieces of haute couture history.

“In archival pictures from the house of Lanvin you can see all the ladies working in the studio, in the atelier,” SCAD FASH creative director Rafael Gomes said to me. I met with him and his co-curator, Gaël Mamine of Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, in collaboration with the Lanvin Archives to discuss the SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film’s latest exhibition, which is the first time that Jeanne Lanvin (1867-1946) has ever been the sole focus of a museum show in the United States. It is beautiful work.

“It’s very inspiring because she was an entrepreneur and she was really supporting women,” Gomes continued. “She was so modern, really the epitome of the modern woman at the time and it’s a remarkable story. She started from such a humble background.”

Jeanne Lanvin was born in Paris, her family was poor and she began working when she was about 13. After an apprenticeship, possibly with a house called Talbot, Jeanne began working as a milliner. In 1889, with the financial backing of a client who understood what was possible, a 22-year-old Jeanne opened a small hat shop. Lanvin Modes was tucked into the upper floor of a larger store at 16 Rue Boissy d’Anglas, but she would not stay there very long.

Two years before starting her brand, Jeanne had a bad, quick marriage. But it produced a daughter that she adored, and for whom she created one gorgeous gown after another. What Jeanne Lanvin could do, and what would soon finance a move (to the much more fashionable Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré address) four years later, was make beautiful, exquisitely feminine clothing. She started with childrens clothes, soon expanding to clothing for young ladies and mothers. A year after dedicating a section of the hat store to apparel, the vêtements overtook the chapeaux and the business model changed. Mother and daughter, to this day, adorn the brand’s logo.

“She was literally a single parent,” Gomes said. “She managed to open this millinery shop, and this was her business. She would create the most beautiful dresses for her daughter, and the customers would see and would want her to create something for their daughters as well. Then she was dressing the daughters, later the mothers, then the fathers, then the interiors. By the middle of the 1920s she had more than 800 employees, it’s so inspirational what she did.”

More than once, while walking through the exhibition, you will be treated to seeing a garment and then an illustration of the same piece of clothing. It is an unexpected experience, to have this sensation multiple times, of looking at both and seeing the infinite and finite ways that the highpoints of a concept can be passed on through a gestural drawing. Or the opposite, how a finished piece of clothing can be artfully and efficiently explained on paper.

“We have some replicas,” Gomes told me when I asked about the illustrations. “Those came from the Lavin archives directly because they were lookbooks they scanned for us. Illustrations just show the three-dimensionality, the love and the passion that was put on those illustrations and those would have been given to clients or were for the press while the others were recording in books what they had created for the season.”

“The ones from the Lavin archives are almost like a register for the collection,” Mamine explained. “They were more for internal communication, like sketches made with paints, a really chic object to communicate ideas with.”

“Illustration was seen more as a masculine job back then,” Gomes said, “and Lanvin would hire mostly women to do it. Unfortunately, many of the artists are unknown, you see some names on the drawings, but those are the names of the gowns. Many of the illustrators, unfortunately, are unknown.”

One of Jeanne Lanvin’s most famous innovations was the robe de style, which could be seen as an ultra feminine response to the garçonne look embraced by flappers. The Balenciaga to Dior’s New Look, if you will. As an example, included in the show is both a photograph and an actual gown in black, with a peacock motif down center front, and it is the perfect example of Lanvin at the height of the roaring twenties.

“At that time when the robe de style was created, it was really something new,” Mamine explained. “You have the 1920s silhouettes with the long lines and shorter dresses. But she created something that’s really based on the 18th century, not only the style, but also the embellishment of the embroidery. There was something really joyful to that kind of silhouette. On the peacock dress, the embroidery is really work she developed through references she had in a scrapbook. She had a book from all her travels. Or from the visit she did in some church, or in some museum, and she was also close to some painters and artists. Through this peacock embroidery you can see how far she can go with one idea, and it’s really subtle, it’s really elegant and light, it’s a dress you could wear today.”

We didn’t have synthetic fibers until after WWII, DuPont figured out nylon for the first time in 1938, and synthetics survive a lot longer than natural fibers like cotton or silk. Clothing is also created to be worn, which means we tend to wear out the pieces we love the most. The very act of donning a garment, and definitely the wearing it part, cannot help but be destructive.

There are a lot of reasons why historic clothes sometimes cannot be worn, not even by a mannequin. If you are more mechanically inclined, think of it like welding. The seam is always going to be stronger than the pieces you are connecting. And if you perforate the material enough in the right places, you have made a cut, regardless of intention. In its Jeanne Lanvin exhibition, SCAD FASH makes a point of including pieces that are no longer in any condition to be worn. Under slender glass boxes that top unobtrusive pedestals, the oldest gowns and most fragile silks lay in gentle repose.

“The design she developed in her own couture house,” Mamine explained to me when I asked about the choice to include the glass boxes. “This is really inspired by that, and that’s the work that SCAD FASH and our design team developed. This is how we work together, we share ideas, about the exhibition but also about the display. It’s very important to work from the idea to the 3D aspect of it. It was a way also to show the garments which were really fragile and we couldn’t get on mannequins and it’s something developed with CAD. One dress from 1910, which is in silk, thin silk, it’s a dress with a gilet made for the beach. It’s like beachwear, it’s really chic.”

Surrounded by Lanvin in the gallery space, it feels odd to this writer that no museum in America has thought to do this before, to focus on Jeanne Lanvin’s story. “I think we started to talk about it two years ago,” Mamine told me. He had been working on the inventory for the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa’s collection of Lanvin pieces; it felt obvious to him that they needed to do something special with what they had. “I asked Rafael if he would be interested in that kind of subject and he said yes.”

“For us, at SCAD,” Gomes explained, “our president and founder, Paula Wallace, created the museum as a teaching tool for our students. There is so much that can be learned from it, like techniques of embroidery, top stitching, pattern cutting, and we can use it to teach fashion history. We covered so many decades here, I think it’s a great experience for higher learning. And it’s not just the fashion students, there are so many majors that can really benefit from it, as well as our community in and around Atlanta.”

Curation is as much about what goes where as it is about the space as a whole and how people will move through it, and what they will experience when they do. Thoughtfully executed, this show feels cohesive, and exhibit-goers should expect to leave feeling curious and stimulated. This is a teaching museum, but it has been purpose-designed to transcend discipline specific interests, and the museum works hard to be a resource for SCAD students, yes, but also for the larger community.

Most of the apparel in the exhibition, and most of the gorgeous illustrations (all from Lanvin’s Autumn/Winter 1928 collection) were lent by the Museum’s longtime curatorial partner, Fondation Azzedine Alaïa. The foundation is named for its ingenious couturier-founder, a gentleman whose love for fashion history inspired him to collect the historic and modern work of the masters of haute couture. The Parodi Costume Collection in Miami also contributed to this historic exhibition, lending SCAD FASH three pieces, two from the 1930s.

“Because we have pieces from 1910 until 1947,” Gomes said, “and 1946 was when Jeanne Lanvin passed, we have three her daughter designed that are from 1947. The composition that Gaël created, you have all these other dresses, and then this one, it’s so different. It’s this touch of hope, progress, of happiness as celebration and it’s very clever how he curated this vignette.”

“One of the highlights that I get goosebumps from,” Gomes said to me, “it’s a celebratory dress from Spring 1945, when the War finished. It’s Tricolore, the colors of the alliance of the United States, France and Great Britain. Of course, we all shared the same flag colors and they were the colors of the resistance. We see other dresses in this time of austerity and then this one, of course, faded. But it was also celebrating, and celebrating finding creative solutions to the scarcity of materials.”

“The blue,” Gomes said, “it’s faded because time takes away color, but it’s very sparkly in white, blue and red and it’s a very happy dress and it’s so different from the others in this vignette.”

We all know that we can study history to learn from its mistakes, but we can also look for the successes, the solutions found when things were at their very worst. Our past can be a tool if we choose to see it that way. Material culture, like extant examples of historic haute couture, they are a doorway into the past for those of us who live in the future. A way in to all the stories. Right now, perhaps more than ever, we need work like this, work which joyfully inspires curiosity and which encourages us to dream about what could be done. Good work done well, made by people who care very much about what they are doing.

Jeanne Lanvin: Haute Couture Heritage is open to the public at SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film in downtown Atlanta, until August 31, 2025. The exhibition features more than 60 pieces of haute couture history, spanning the years between 1910 and 1947.

MORE FROM FORBES:

ForbesSurface Tension: A Conversation With Textile Artist Linda HallBy Rachel Elspeth GrossForbesFashioning Wonder: Colleen Hill’s Immersive Cabinet Of Fashion CuriositiesBy Rachel Elspeth GrossForbesBirthplace: Remember Louisiana’s Forgotten Women With Carrie Ann BaadeBy Rachel Elspeth GrossForbesImane Ayissi: Haute Couture From Africa To SCAD FASH By Way Of ParisBy Rachel Elspeth Gross