Other magazines in the same vein as the Gazette du Bon Ton appeared in 1912. Le Journal des Dames et des Modes, published between 1912 and 1914, used many of the same illustrators -as did the journal Modes et Manières d'Aujourd'hui (1912-22) -and published short articles on fashion by many modern writers, including Claude Roger Marx, Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, and Jean Giraudoux, among others. Although many of these journals lasted for only a short period of years (the Gazette du Bon Ton merged with Vogue in 1925), they utterly shifted the direction of fashion illustration. Mainstream journals like Vogue, Harper's Bazar (which ultimately hired Erté), Vanity Fair, Les Feuillets d'Art, and L'Illustration continued to publish fashion images by modern artists after the demise of the smaller journals. As Elsa Schiaparelli has pointed out, until the Second World War such magazines encouraged the connections of fashion designers and artists in a way that has not been seen since, and she felt that their editors were among her main supporters. "It was not a matter of pure advertising interests: of who bought and how widely a model could be reproduced," she said, "but how creative the presentation of fashion could be."(14)

In 1911, Poiret established Barbazange, a gallery for the fine arts in the ground floor of his showrooms in the rue d'Antin, where he intended to display avant-garde artworks. A story recounted by Roger Shattuck about this gallery in his wonderful book on early modernism in France, The Banquet Years, illustrates perfectly the interpenetration of the arts at this period and the degree of involvement of Poiret himself. In March 1920, an event took place in Poiret's gallery that expressed all the creativity, all the experimentation, all the excitement, and all of the good humor of the days of early modernism. Actor Pierre Bertin sponsored a concert with music by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and by Les Six, the group of French composers surrounding Erik Satie. Also on the program was a play by Max Jacob with "furniture music" by Satie and Darius Milhaud to be played during the first intermission. The program directed the audience to treat the music "as if it did not exist, as if it were a chair on which one is or is not seated." When the musicians began to play, however, the audience sat down and began to listen. At this, Satie "rushed around the gallery exhorting them to appropriate behavior. ‘Talk, keep on talking. And move around. Whatever you do, don't listen!'"(15)

Although Poiret is the best known and most documented of the couturiers with strong connections to the art world, there were many others who were not only collectors, but also friends of artists and collaborators with them in the design of couture or in other artistic projects, especially for the ballet and the stage. Before Poiret, and no doubt an inspiration to him in his own collecting, was Jacques Doucet, Poiret's mentor, whose family fortune, supplemented with the profits from his hugely successful couture house, had enabled him to become a major art collector. Doucet had begun collecting eighteenth-century art in the late nineteenth century and by 1910 had amassed a large group of furnishings and textiles, as well as painting and sculpture. Concurrently, Doucet put together a library of books, reproductions, photographs, engravings, drawings, sale catalogues, and other documents for the study of art history.

In 1912, he sold his art collection and gave his library, which he had opened to scholars, to the University of Paris. Soon thereafter, he began commissioning decorative arts by such young modern artists as Paul Iribe, Eileen Gray, Marcel Coard, and Pierre Legrain for his apartment in Paris, and, later, his studio in Neuilly, while purchasing paintings by Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Derain, Braque, and Picasso. Interested in literature since 1896, when he had become involved briefly with the group of symbolist poets surrounding Paul Valéry, Doucet now had the idea of forming a library for the study of the origins of modern literature. He began collecting manuscripts and issues of small, short lived, but important modernist literary reviews and commissioning regular reports from poets such as Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and others then in cubist circles. Jacob's letters to Doucet, kept intact in this second important library, which was also eventually given to the University of Paris, are now of great importance for the study of literature at the beginning of the twentieth century.