'Before Coco Chanel, there was Emilie Flöge'
Week Twenty Eight is Periwinkle, Verdigris, Lilac & Pale Gold
We’re back home in England from our France trip, and on the long drive we listened to a podcast about the French Revolution. It’s July 14 tomorrow, a date famously associated with the storming of the Bastille, it’s also the birthdate of Gustav Klimt.
Instead of featuring this artist so well known for his iconic paintings, I opted to focus on the creator of the beautiful dresses that often feature in Klimt’s works. This week’s Coloricombo heighlights Emilie Louise Flöge, the Austrian fashion designer, businesswoman, life partner and muse of Klimt.
Flöge (1874-1952) was from a wealthy Viennese family where her father, Hermann Flöge owned a factory that produced popular premium meerschaum smoking pipes. (As an aside, he’s also the likely subject of Klimt’s portrait Old Man on his Death Bed.)
Twelve years younger than Klimt, the two met around 1891 when her sister, Helene, married his brother, Ernst. Ernst died the following year and Gustav Klimt effectively became part of the extended Flöge family circle, and spent almost every summer with them at Lake Attersee where many of his landscapes were painted. He painted Flögge’s formal portrait in 1902, and her Reformkleid designs and patterns turn up throughout his later work, including in The Kiss.
Klimt was by all accounts a womaniser who fathered around fourteen children, but his relationship with Flöge is generally described as something different — more equal, more intellectually intimate and built on mutual creative respect. Klimt and Flöge lived apart and led parallel careers during the day, with Klimt working at his studio and Flöge and her sisters managing their thriving business, but they frequently spent time together in the evenings including appearances together at society events.
Photographs of Flöge and Klimt, and of Flöge in a Reform Dress
I mentioned Flöge’s business: her first job was as a seamstress and she worked with her sisters Pauline and Helene at their dressmaking school. The three then opened Schwestern Flöge in 1904, a fashion design studio that quickly became the place Vienna’s most stylish women went to be dressed.
Whilst Klimt was reinventing Austrian painting, Emilie Flöge was doing the same for Austrian couture. Viennese fashion in 1900 still meant the corset and the cinched waist. Her salon specialised in Reformkleid instead: loose, flowing, un-corseted dresses that actually allowed movement, in the same bold geometries Klimt was putting into his portraits, several of which were of her.
Whilst most fashion houses at the time relied on sketches or word of mouth. Flöge posed in her own garments for the camera, controlling exactly how the clothes were seen. Klimt photographed her as well and looking at those images now gives the impresson of two people testing the same idea in different mediums. Her salon stocked Wiener Werkstätte textiles, the design collective Klimt was closely tied to, and she worked directly with its designers on patterns exclusive to her house.
Klimt died in 1918 and the fashion house ran for two decades after that, closing during the Nazi takeover in 1938. In that time, Flöge and her sisters built a modern business that set trends way beyond it’s time.
Read an article in Harpers Bazaar titled ‘Before there was Coco Chanel, there was Emilie Flöge’ here and another article from Vogue here. There’s a profile of Flöge here and an article that profiles both Flöge and Klimit for an exhibition titled Modern Couples here.
“Portrait of Emilie Flöge”, oil on canvas, Gustav Klimt 1908
Colour Combination
The colours this week are Periwinkle, Verdigris, Lilac & Pale Gold. Use them along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour to create an artwork in any medium or style. Know someone who might enjoy a weekly dollop of colour and creativity? Why not share this post with them?
Shapes
Along with the colour prompt I am including some shapes inspired by the artwork which you can download as a PDF and print out to use as you wish.
