The stuff of heroines - The aura of women through their clothing

It's this pale woman with a red mouth at the wheel of a car, a mysterious icon who we imagine dressed in pearl gray silk, radiating 1930s glamour. It's Catherine de Medici and her imposing dress descending from a ship with majesty and grandeur. It's this other woman whose face we can't see but whose red-striped blouse attracts all the attention. It's Berthe Morisot, dressed entirely in black, whose face and gaze catch our attention. It is the delicate bust of my mother as a child, sculpted by my great-grandmother and from which emanates all the tender and sweet innocence of childhood. All these representations of women in Art have nourished in me an infinite image bank. I felt an intense need to know their story, to enter into the picture, to be part of their daily life. These women illuminated the works, suddenly made them attractive, alive, embodied. Draped, in fabrics, inhabiting their clothing with a posture, an aura, a grace or a manifest will, all their own.

Then it was their destinies that I discovered thanks to readings, films, and more recently series. The strong emotion surrounding their fight, the admiration for their journey and their achievements. The revolt against the injustice they sometimes suffered.

Then it was the clothing experience. A dress by Madeleine Vionnet that belonged to my great-grandmother, made of several layers of muslin, tinted with a purple gradient. Worth-style dresses that came from my grandmother's godfather's wife, in emerald green taffeta or gray damask satin. I had trouble understanding how to put them on because there was so much fabric and you could get lost between the skirt, the overskirt, the jacket, the bodice... Jackets from the Belle Epoque, found at second-hand dealers or at the Puces de Montreuil, with delicate embroidered collars, whose fabrics had not lost all their elegance, despite the patina of time and whose cut was impressive in style and becoming.

There must have been at some point a sort of fusion between these representations which had left their mark in the deep layers of my memory, the sensation of the fabrics, the visual memory of their changing colors and the scraps of stories of all these destinies of women, sometimes grandiose, sometimes just moving in their humanity.

All this sedimented for years until it formed an imperative necessity: to revive the spirit of these women through their clothing style. This is my project. This is the meaning of Bonâme. Make people understand that clothes have a soul, a history, a provenance, an ambition.

To transmit. Allow these women’s destinies to be seen and felt. Understand their footprint in fashion. Show that the style of these heroines of our history is timeless. It crosses time. Everyone can make it their own.