René gruau fashion illustration
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René Gruau
Italian fashion illustrator
Count Renato Zavagli Ricciardelli delle Caminate,[2] professionally known as René Gruau (4 February 1909 – 31 March 2004)[1] was a fashion illustrator whose exaggerated portrayal of fashion design through painting has had a lasting effect on the fashion industry. Because of Gruau's inherent skills and creativity, he contributed to a change in the entire fashion industry through the new pictures that represented the already popular designs created by designers in the industry. The benefits, including economic stimulation and enhancement of advertising are still present in the industry today via a new way of fashion illustration, fashion photography. Gruau became one of the best known and favorite artists of the haute couture world during the 1940s and 50s working with Femina, Marie Claire, L'Officiel, L'Album Du Figaro and an assortment of "high-style" magazines.[3] Gruau's artwork is recognized and commended internationally in some of Paris and Italy's most prestigious art museums including the Lo
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“Elegance by its very nature is fluid and consequently difficult to distinct.” – René Gruau
The eye of the artist is a lens upon the world. The images absorbed through this lens are filtered through the artist’s personal vision shaped by upbringing, lifestyle and passion. René Gruau drew upon those experiences, capturing the world of fashion through illustrations that would, in turn, captivated the world.
Renato Zavagli Ricciardelli, born in 1909 in Rimini, Italy, was the son of an Italian count and more importantly, a fashionable French aristocrat, Maria Gruau de la Chesnaie. René’s passion for drawing surfaced as a child, nurtured by his mother, his first muse. At the age of three his parents divorced and he was swept up by his mother into her world of travel, art and fashion. He accompanied her across the globe gaining entry into the social, artistic and fashion worlds frequented by the aristocracy. Self taught, He continued to develop the skill nurtured by his mother, who also introduced him to the editor of a fashion publication, Lidel, which commissioned René’s
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The lofty couture elegance of the past is known to us through garments, as well as photographs and drawings. One of the preeminent documentarians of the time was the illustrator René Gruau. “His stature had been comparable to that of star photographers, although later he was nearly forgotten,” notes Joëlle Chariiau, a gallerist who worked with the artist for 40 years and is the editor of the just-released tome René Gruau: Master of Fashion Illustration (Prestel). “I can say that knowing his work better than anyone else, and having loved the person behind it, I felt I owed him a good book.”
René Gruau: Master of Fashion Illustration, edited by Joëlle Chariau, with a forward by Holly Brubach, (Prestel).Photo: Courtesy of Prestel
With an introduction by critic Holly Brubach, the book includes work spanning four decades. Gruau’s drawings from the late 1940s through the 1960s are the best known and also the most engaging. How could they not be? He was a member of a cultured coterie of talents, including Christian Dior, Pierre Balmain, and Jacques Fath, and others who, notes Bru
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