Poiret's theatrical background also helps to explain his great interest in the Ballets Russes, whose first appearance in Paris in 1909 impressed him so much. The boldly designed costumes by Bakst, their bright colors echoing Russian peasant art, expressed for him not only the exoticism celebrated by painters such as Picasso, but the appeal of spontaneity, a concept at the heart of much modern art. Immediately Poiret began including Oriental motifs in his dresses, and the turban he created for his wife, Denise, became a classic. For "The Thousand and Second Night" event he created an "Oriental" costume for his wife that included harem trousers topped by his famous "lampshade tunic." Oriental motifs continued to be part of his designs until the end of his career [fig. 99].

Poiret's innate sympathy with artists, his employment of them, and his support of the artistic and fashion press gave couture, and his own designs, a new exposure. The perfecting by illustrators of the pochoir printing technique -in which colors were brushed onto the paper through thin zinc or copper cut-out stencils -was an important boost for the art of fashion illustration, and Poiret was one of the first to realize its possibilities. In 1908, he hired the young printmaker Paul Iribe, whose works in the pochoir technique appealed to the couturier because their simple line and broad, flat, abstract expanses of bright color perfectly captured the Empire dresses he was then making [see fig. 156, p. 181]. Iribe executed ten images of Poiret gowns, which were reproduced by pochoir in an edition of 250 copies, called Les Robes de Paul Poiret, racontées par Paul Iribe (Paris: 1908). It was the first time a couturier had looked to modern art to represent his creations, and it sounded the call for a redefinition of fashion illustration, while making a name for Iribe, who went on to a career in the graphic and decorative arts. In 1911, Poiret again published a brochure of his designs, this time created by another young artist, Georges Lepape, who had been trained in the atelier run by Fernand Cormon, where Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Sérusier, Matisse, and Picabia had all studied.(12) Les Choses de Paul Poiret, vues par Georges Lepape appeared in a larger edition: one thousand copies were printed (Paris: 1911). Lepape, too, had absorbed the lessons of bright color taught by the Ballet Russes, and his pochoir prints of Poiret's still high-waisted fashions in this brochure and later in the Gazette du Bon Ton used line drawings with large areas of blues, greens, reds, pinks, and yellows [fig. 100]. Photography was only just becoming a tool of the fashion press. The technology of reproducing a photograph on the same page as text had been perfected in the 1890s, but Poiret exploited it innovatively by hiring Edward Steichen to record his collections.

Poiret was also close to the fashion press as it developed in the early twentieth century. Lucien Vogel, a publisher of art books and a friend of Poiret who had been one of the guests at the "The Thousand and Second Night," was inspired by Poiret's brochures and by other works of young artists to begin a new kind of fashion magazine illustrated by modern artists. As an art publication, it would be totally different from other contemporary fashion publications, such as Vogue, which included literature and articles of interest to women on other subjects such as architecture, society goings-on, and travel. Vogel's Gazette du Bon Ton emphasized fashion and art with fine pochoir illustrations by Jacques and Pierre Brissaud, as well as Lepape and others.

Vogel, like Poiret with his Empire-waisted dresses, was looking back to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, when such fashion magazines as Galerie des Modes and Journal des Dames were charmingly illustrated. In the first issue of the Gazette du Bon Ton, Henri Bidou summarized the atmosphere in which it appeared: "Today, as at the end of the 18th century, the entire public pays attention to Fashion...Painters collaborate with couturiers. The dressing of women is a pleasure to the eye that is not judged inferior to the other arts."(13) Each number was to have fashion designs by modern artists, in addition to drawings by these artists of fashions designed by couturiers like Poiret, Paquin, Lanvin, and others who agreed to collaborate with the magazine. The Gazette du Bon Ton became a magnet for young illustrators, including Georges Barbier, André Marty, Charles Martin, Lepape, and in later years the Russian Erté. All of these artists produced fashion illustrations, but were variously talented as painters, commercial artists, and stage, furniture, or textile designers: yet another example of the close connections of art and design in the first decades of the century.