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Irudree, at first glance a simple evening dress, captures a turning point when fashion responded to history as it was written.

This dress acts as a bridge between traditional ideologies that celebrated artistic originality, artisanal workmanship, and historical reverence and the “structural modernity” and “functional rationality” of fashion as we know it today. [1] Created in the aftermath of World War I, it belongs to a moment when values and aesthetics shifted rapidly.

Poiret found immediate notoriety by liberating women from restrictive corsets and petticoats. This was a rejection of designs created by Worth, where he’d worked just months before opening his own house. Poiret was seen as “an anarchist of dress.” [2] A private presentation at 10 Downing Street resulted in an outcry of indecency so severe it was discussed in the House of Commons. [3]

Poiret left Paris in 1914 to serve in WWI as a military tailor and returned in 1919 on the brink of bankruptcy. [4] WWI accelerated the modernism movement then in its infancy. Many artists believed a defective culture prompted the war, and thus rejected narrative, decorative strategies, and historical references to start fresh.

This dress is firmly grounded in its present, when society was split between past and future. With an “emphasis on process and truth to materials,” as well as its dropped waist typical of the period, Irudree “stands as an icon of modernist design […] despite the historicizing tubular rouleau” that nods to the Renaissance. [5] This dress’s construction can be explored further in Engage.

As youth “became fashionable and with it, sports and simplicity,” [6] Poiret’s languorous, decorative, exotic style was replaced by “la garçonne” (“the flapper.”) Poiret referred to the new aesthetic, pioneered by Coco Chanel, as “cardboard women.” [7] It is rumored that Poiret once asked the black-clad Chanel who she was mourning. She replied, “You, Monsieur.” [8]

Irudree tells the story of Poiret’s personal and professional tumult. Once known as the “King of Fashion,” his career was brief and he died penniless. But his influence endures in both business—Poiret was the first fashion designer to create a fragrance—and in style. Irudree appears to have inspired look 34 of Christian Dior Haute Couture Spring 2026 designed by Jonathan Anderson. [9]

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