Doucet hired essayist André Suarès as his library's curator. Suarès was succeeded in 1920 by the surrealist poet André Breton. Breton, in the modernist spirit, believed that literature and art were intimately connected, so closely connected that they could not be separated. He advised Doucet to add to his collection of paintings what Breton considered to be the great landmarks of modern art: Seurat's Le Cirque; Picabia's La Musique est comme la peinture; La Charmeuse de serpents by Douanier Rousseau; Marcel Duchamp's Deux Nus; and paintings by Matisse, Max Ernst, and Giorgio DiChirico, among others. Breton also guided him to the purchase of African art. Perhaps the most famous acquisition Breton counseled Doucet to make was Picasso's controversial Les Demoiselles d'Avignon with its images derived from African art (now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York).(16) Following Breton's departure as curator, Doucet continued to add to the collection until his death in 1929. Much of it was sold in the 1930s. Exceptions were made for Rousseau's La Charmeuse de serpents, promised to the Louvre in accordance with the wish of Robert Delaunay, from whom Doucet had purchased it, and a substantial legacy to his nephew, which now forms the collection of the Fondation Angladon-Dubrujeaud in Avignon. Doucet's library of modern literature, however, went to join the Library of Art and Archaeology at the University of Paris.

Doucet's contemporary, Jeanne Paquin, while never a patron of modern painting, collected old master artworks, which she left to the Louvre after her death. She did, however, acquire contemporary jewelry, mostly by Cartier and Lalique, and employed Louis Süe to design her villa at St. Cloud, called Les Treillages. Robert Mallet-Stevens built her villa at Deauville, and Lalique did the interior decoration of her dining room in Paris as late as 1931.(17) Paquin in turn designed and executed costumes for the theater and the ballet. Very prolific before World War I, she produced costumes for more than thirteen works in 1913, including Jeux, choreographed for the Ballets Russes by Vaslav Nijinsky to Debussy's music with costumes designed by Léon Bakst.(18)

Paul Poiret's sisters Nicole Groult and Germaine Bongard also designed clothing and possessed the Poiret family's interest in the art world. Nicole, the wife of André Groult, a designer of modern furniture and a member of the Artistes Décorateurs, had a couture salon in the rue d'Anjou, where she created "artistic" fashions. Her brother accused her of "borrowing" his designs. An article in American Vogue in April 1912 made her famous in the United States. Through her husband, she knew the coloriste artists: cubist painters, architects, and designers including Van Dongen, Laurençin, and Picabia. Dufy, Martin, and Süe also belonged to the circle around André Groult. Van Dongen, Laurençin, and Süe each painted Nicole Groult's portrait.(19) After World War I, Groult reopened her salon in 1919, commissioning her friend Gabrielle Picabia, estranged wife of the painter, to introduce her creations in the United States. By coincidence, the future couturiere Elsa Schiaparelli, then a struggling young mother who had just been abandoned by her husband, met Mme Picabia in New York and assisted her in selling Groult's designs. Like her brother, Nicole Groult also designed theater costumes. Groult's couture business continued throughout the Depression years, while her brother's was in desperate straits. Her clients were an international "who's who," including Dorothy Parker; Virginia Woolf; the Comtesse Marie Laure de Noailles, perennial best-dressed of Frenchwomen; and the actress Madge Garland.(20)

Despite the war, Germaine Bongard set up a couture salon for children in 1916. At this time, cubist painter Juan Gris commissioned an outfit from her for his wife, offering a painting of Bongard's choice in exchange. With her connections to the avant-garde and the assistance of purist painter Amédée Ozenfant, she opened her salon to exhibitions of paintings for the benefit of "the painters at the Front," like Léger, whom she counted among her friends, along with Derain and Ozenfant. After the war, she established an avant-garde art gallery, which she managed in addition to her couture house. In 1921, she constructed the costumes Picasso had designed for the ballet Cuadro Flamenco. She herself composed a ballet that was to have music by Francis Poulenc and costumes by Marie Laurençin. The project did not come to fruition, but it demonstrates once more the degree of openness to collaboration that was one of the most novel and exciting characteristics of early modernism.(21)