Charles Frederick Worth Research Paper
140 Words1 Page
Charles Frederick Worth is generally thought to be the first couturier to use live models. However, many nineteenth-century dressmakers had a young woman available to put on a dress for a client, although their primary mode of display was a wooden or wicker dummy. Indeed, Worth met his future wife, Marie, while she was employed to model shawls to customers on the shop floor of their mutual employer, the mercer Gagelin et Opigez. The couple set up their first maison de couture in 1858, and Marie modeled in the Worth salons until the 1870s, after which she remained responsible for training the house mannequins. Maison Worth's real innovation was thus to institutionalize the profession within the increasingly bureaucratic structure of a couture