Charles Frederick Worth was the founder of a fashion house usually credited with establishing the highest level of fashion creativity called Haute Couture. Originally the French phrase meant the highest level of sewing. He created different dressmaking techniques and produced new styles.
The Fashion House:
At the House clients could preview evening attire in rooms illuminated by various forms of light-natural light, candlelight, gas lamps, and later, electric bulbs. While the House maintained the usual fitting and modeling rooms, it also offered rooms for fabric selection that were distinguished by color. An understanding of the play of colors and textures was one of the enduring achievements of the House, and was successfully passed from generation to generation. Charles Worth's sense of color was particularly noteworthy. Charles preferred nuanced hues to bold primary Colours.
Charles Preferences on construction:
The Worth family preferred machine made lace rather than hand made lace so whenever a customers’ garment had their own lace (from what they had collected as investments) incorporated into their designs he would almost always remove It and then later return it to the customer. The same procedure was followed if gemstones were incorporated into a garment's design. An additional feature employed by the House was the use of selvage as a decorative touch as well as functional finishing.
Charles’s Career:
Following the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870, Worth became an even more important client for the textile and trim producers of Lyon and its environs. There is evidence that Worth used both preexisting yard goods and worked with manufacturers to come up with patterns for new materials. Charles Worth had begun his designing career by following the expansion of women's skirts in the 1850s, when they were supported by layer upon layer of petticoats.
In the later 1850s Worth draped yards of fabric over the skirts' increasing width, as the newly devised crinoline cage, or hoop, permitted expansion without increased bulk. Worth introduced hooped dresses with flatter fronts in the early 1860s. Charles was careful not to diminish the amount of material needed so he merely pushed the fabric to the back of the dress. During this decade Worth was credited with developing the princess-cut dress. These less expansive styles posed an economic challenge. Having been trained in dry-goods shops, Worth recognized the danger of weakening trades that contributed to the success of his own business and knew he had to either incorporate large quantities of material into his garments or support the production of costlier luxury goods. In order to maintain a high level of consumption, the House moved material throughout much of the 1870s and 1880s from draped overskirts to trains, bustled backs, and a variety of combinations of these styles.
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