The artists of the Vienna Workshops, of like mind with the founders of the Munich Workshops, wanted to develop a national style particularly expressive of Austria. They looked back to the Biedermeier period of the early nineteenth century as the last period of genuine Viennese design accomplishment. Unlike the Munich Workshops, however, the Vienna Workshops' concept was basically that of hand craftsmanship, in which the artist maintained complete control over what was produced, even though machines were used in its manufacture. The Wiener Werkstätte established textile and fashion departments in 1910, which would both borrow from and exert an immediate influence upon French design. These workshops were visited by Paul Poiret soon after their founding, and he brought back examples of their work for resale in his salon.(26)

It was in response to the challenges of Germans and Austrians that French designers banded together to form the Société des Artistes Décorateurs in 1901. Like the German and Viennese workshops, its members numbered artists in many media, including the couture. This gave the designers more visibility through annual exhibitions and provided a forum where they could meet to discuss their interests vis-à-vis Germanic theorists and practitioners. After 1910, when the Munich Workshops exhibited at the Paris Salon d'Automne, showing decorative arts with brilliant color schemes accompanied by contemporary German paintings, pressure on French designers increased. By this time, both the annual exhibitions of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs and the Salons d'Automne had assimilated the German practice of showing ensembles designed according to a single aesthetic, but French designers and critics continued to argue over the matter of style. One camp, which included mostly older artists and craftsmen, developed an approach based on the sinuous curves and muted colors of art nouveau and looked to the late eighteenth century prior to the Revolution as the last genuine French period of style. Their ensembles were luxurious and formal, appealing to aristocratic taste.

A second group included younger artists such as Süe, André Mare, and André Groult, all of whom knew Paul Poiret and his sisters and were patronized and encouraged by them. This group favored bright colors to create the ambience for their rooms: many designers of furniture, textiles, and architecture participated in making eclectic ensembles. They placed themselves within the French artistic tradition by looking to the Directoire, Empire, and Louis-Philippe periods as the last "true styles," to which they were the successors. Their sources ranged from French peasant and provincial art to cubist painting, and by 1912 they were collaborating outright with painters to produce an atmosphere conducive to the appreciation of cubist paintings, such as those which hung in Mare's Maison Cubiste at the Salon d'Automne of 1912. Collaborating on the projects of these so-called "coloristes" was a circle of young artists that included Laurençin, Raymond Duchamp-Villon (designer of the façade of the Maison Cubiste), Léger, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and others with impeccable cubist credentials.(27)

Paul Poiret was well aware of these issues when in 1907 he designed his first loose, elegant dresses with high waistlines and no corsets beneath, which looked back to the Empire period for inspiration. He claimed to have instigated the demise of the corset in these dresses, but the antecedents for this were many. Dress reformers had been urging the abolition of the corset since the mid-nineteenth century, but the movement did not penetrate high fashion, and the failure of the reviled bloomer is well known. "Reform dress," as it was called, did make headway among the pre-Raphaelites in England, and the loose gowns depicted in their paintings came to be known as "aesthetic dress." By the turn of the century, women were wearing at-home gowns, or tea gowns, with minimal corseting and a long, slim shape. Fashion designers took up this new, classicizing simplicity. In 1900, Paquin designed a ball gown in the Empire style and exhibited it at the Exposition Universelle, for which she was chairman of the couture pavilion. Variants of the Empire line were seen in 1905 in New York as well as Paris. By 1907, when Poiret released his versions, the Venetian painter Mariano Fortuny had already developed the pleated "Delphos" tea gown that clung to a woman's uncorseted body like the tunic of the famed Attic sculpture, the (male) Charioteer of Delphi. Fortuny pioneered the use of sheer silk-velvet coats that fell straight from the shoulder [fig. 104]. Isadora Duncan's corsetless tunics were also forerunners of the trend, as couturiere Madeleine Vionnet acknowledged in explaining her own uncorseted designs, which she launched in 1906 just before Poiret's designs appeared.(28)