All photographs courtesy of The Dixon Gallery and Gardens
Perhaps the world’s foremost craft artist in the historical fashion field, Isabelle de Borchgrave working in her Brussels studio in the late 1980s.
Four thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean, on Chaussée de Vleurgat in Brussels, Belgium, an unassuming art studio exists quietly amid a row of apartment buildings. Past a pitch-black window front with a splash of red lettering that reads “Isabelle” and through a darkened garage where motion lights flicker on to lead the way lies a wonderland of animated characters in elaborately adorned period clothing, alive with color and all hand-made with one simple material — paper.
Inside the studio, sunlight streams through high glass windows, illuminating stacks of painted fabrics, paper chandeliers, and kaftans, marked with vivid yellows, blues, and purples, that hang overhead. A wire mesh ballerina dangles from the ceiling, poised for a pirouette, in a lime-green paper-crafted tulle tutu. Color explodes against the white-wall backdrop of the studio — a living thing itself, astir with the sounds of shuffling paper, the whir of hair dryers, and hands and minds in motion.
courtesy of The Dixon gallery and gardens
This whimsical world sprung from the imagination of 71-year-old artist Isabelle de Borchgrave. On this sunny day in late July, she sits at a table with a paintbrush in hand. With quick, even strokes, she brushes black on the edges of gold patterns stamped on strips of white paper. These will soon become ribbons on a garment modeled after one worn by King Francis I, France’s first modern king. She and her team of collaborators — just three others at work in the studio this day — busy themselves with this and other projects that will be on display at upcoming exhibitions. Soon they’ll start on a Memphis-themed commissioned piece for The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, the first stop on an American tour that kicks off in October.
Isabelle’s trompe l’oeil paper recreations of historically significant clothing — representing Marie Antoinette, the House of Medici, Ballet Russes, the designs of Mariano Fortuny, and more — have become renowned the world over. “I love fashion through history; the story about fashion,” she says, sharply focused on her brush strokes though it’s clear her hands know what to do with little effort. “It’s very interesting to see how people dressed in [past centuries] and how the fashion changed.”
Born of Art
1 of 4
courtesy of The Dixon gallery and gardens
Large strips of plain white paper are painted, braided, and shaped into embellishments for costumes.
2 of 4
courtesy of The Dixon gallery and gardens
Large strips of plain white paper are painted, braided, and shaped into embellishments for costumes.
3 of 4
Courtesy of The Dixon gallery and gardens
Large strips of plain white paper are painted, braided, and shaped into embellishments for costumes. The above images show the creation process for the Princess of Condé, inspired by a Peter Paul Rubens portrait. Isabelle’s team helps her bring her visions to life. Each detail, from embroidery to accessories, is paper.
4 of 4
Courtesy of The Dixon gallery and gardens
Large strips of plain white paper are painted, braided, and shaped into embellishments for costumes. The above images show the creation process for the Princess of Condé, inspired by a Peter Paul Rubens portrait. Isabelle’s team helps her bring her visions to life. Each detail, from embroidery to accessories, is paper.
Isabelle’s love for art came early; as a child, she filled sketchbooks — and walls in her home — with drawings. Her mother enjoyed painting, and once Isabelle learned that art, “I never stopped painting,” she says. She started art school at 14, pursuing studies at the Centre des Arts Decoratifs in Belgium and later at Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts, where she mostly sketched models with charcoal. “It wasn’t art in the sense of ‘teach me color,’” she says through the accent of her native French tongue. “But it was interesting, the fact that I had to draw all the time. After, you can find your way, but you know to have something in your hand.”
Her love for fashion, on the other hand, was almost happenstance. During an inspirational trip to Sidi Bou Said in northern Tunisia, she observed a workshop with young girls learning to paint designs on silk, and she took the techniques back home with her.
“I was around 17, 18 — at that time in Belgium, you have a big ball, a big evening, [and wear] long dresses,” she remembers. “We had three balls a week, and I had no dress, so I decided to make my own dress.”
She’d had no training in “couture fashion,” but with her painting experience and the methods she’d learned in Tunisia, the process came naturally. Rather than painting on paper, she used fabrics — silk and cotton — and decorated them with scenes inspired by her travels: country landscapes, the seaside. Soon, she says, “Everybody wanted to have my dress because it’s so colorful; it was like a painting, moving.”
While the dresses she created were originally intended for herself and friends, she soon developed a client list and opened a studio. She started a fashion line — cocktail dresses, evening gowns, and jewelry — and displayed her work in fashion shows.
But as hand-crafting dresses became an expensive endeavor, she says, “I abandoned fashion, but I kept the [practice of] painting on fabrics.” She directed her focus to “decoratives” — table linens, pillowcases, curtains, and ceramics — and spent the next decades designing home furnishings and textiles.
In 1994, however, a chance encounter changed her path yet again. During a trip to New York for the Metropolitan Opera’s premiere of La Traviata, a production for which fellow Belgian Thierry Bosquet had designed sets and costumes, Isabelle met with Rita Brown, a costume historian and conservator. The two visited the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and there, Isabelle says, “Fashion came back in my blood.”
Photograph by Travis Hutchison
Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency, Princess of Condé, 2017
Isabelle de Borchgrave, Inspired by a ca. 1610 portrait by Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577-1640) in the collection of the Frick Art & Historical Center, Pittsburgh. Mixed media, primarily acrylic, ink, metallic powder, and adhesive on paper mounted on wire armatures or mannequins. Frick Art & Historical Center, Pittsburgh
Paper Dreams
In Isabelle’s Brussels studio library, books on fabrics, art, and design occupy the shelves: Book of Silk, Quilts: Masterworks from the American Folk Museum, Arts & Crafts: Carpets, L’Art Persan, Ceramica Italiana, 1800 Woodcuts, Art India. Buckets of paint, jars of powdered pigments, and bundles of paintbrushes rest on nearby storage carts waiting to bring life and movement to sheets of plain white paper.
Isabelle points to a large, wide roll of white paper — much like those used by teachers to cover bulletin boards. “Everything is done with the same paper,” she says, tearing off a bit and rubbing it between her fingers. “I play with paper to try to give back the spirit of the fabrics.”
Through her work — wetting, drying, folding, braiding, crumpling, painting — paper is magically transformed into lace, fur, embroidery, silk, or chiffon; made into dresses, hats, shoes, purses, pearls, and scarves. Anything one can dream, or see in a painting or photograph, Isabelle can fashion, using a bit of imagination, with a roll of paper, scissors, glue, and paint.
“Paper costs nothing and you can find it everywhere,” says Isabelle. “Maybe you can’t find good lace — because you have an idea in your head and you want exactly that. With paper, you can have it.”
Scrapbooks in her library show samples and first-tries at recreating specific fabrics, patterns, and colors. Each time she travels, she paints what she sees and adds to her scrapbooks. “Travel is of big importance to drive some new ideas,” she says. “Otherwise, you stay with the gray sky and green river and nothing arrives.”
Delphos Dress and Knossos Shawl, 2008
Isabelle de BorchgraveBased on a photograph of a model taken by Fortuny in 1909Mixed media, primarily acrylic, ink, metallic powder, and adhesive on paper mounted on mannequinCollection of the artist
Next to travel, art and history have been her biggest influences. Her vision for new work often comes “through the paintings,” she says. “I visit all the museums and try to see all I can see.”
Isabelle’s creations in recent years are not exact replicas but artistic impressions of costumes worn through history, such as a court dress worn by England’s Queen Elizabeth I, depicted in a 1599 portrait by Nicholas Hilliard; royal garb worn by Cosimo I de’ Medici, based on a portrait by Ludovico Cardi; and a sumptuous gown inspired by Francois Boucher’s 1756 portrait of Madame de Pompadour.
“Very often they don’t exist anymore — the fabrics you can see in the painting — because [they have been] destroyed, but the paintings stay. I want to give back what I receive from the painting — to a costume,” says Isabelle. “Often, you have someone sitting, and I put them standing, and I have to make the shoes and the hair; I do it in three-dimension. [The process] is like un jeu — to play.”
Love Letters to the Past
I think you have to never forgetwhat’s happened in the past,” Isabelle says. “If you are able to see and understand [the past], you can discover, and if you’re not able to to do that, maybe you are not able to do something new.”
Some of Isabelle’s most lauded works have been from her four major collections — Papiers à la Mode, The World of Fortuny, Splendour of the Medici, and Les Ballets Russes, each inspired by costumes and fashion through the ages.
“I am very interested with the turn of the last century, when you had all of the artists come together in Paris,” she says. Her Ballet Russes pieces focus on costumes — many of which she reimagined from photographs — used by the Paris-based ballet company, which performed throughout Europe and North and South America from 1909 to 1929.
“When I discovered Ballet Russes — j’adore,” she says. “[Sergei] Diaghilev left Russia for the revolution and arrived in Paris with no money. He gathered dancers, musicians, and painters. He worked together with big artists in Paris — Picasso, Matisse.” With little money for production purposes, the collaborators initially used potato sacks to create costumes, says Isabelle — “very ugly fabrics.” The ballet company would go on to be considered the most influential of the twentieth century. Isabelle’s intricately detailed Ballet Russes costumes mimic the colorful creations designed by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Léon Bakst, and others.
Another of Isabelle’s greatest loves is iconic designer Mariano Fortuny, who worked with couture fashion from 1906 to 1946. “He was very important for me because I really love the fabrics, the dresses, the life of the man,” she says. Fortuny’s delicate Delphos gowns, dresses made of finely pleated silk that flows along the natural curves of the body, have greatly inspired Isabelle’s work, both in creating costumes and in her paintings.
“The difficulty to arrive at the [paper] pleat was really a challenge, but when I found that, I began to make my pleated paintings and I never stopped,” she says. “Fortuny gave me an incredible present; without him I never would have pleated paper.”
Her awe-inspiring Fortuny collection extends the illusion of pleated silk, with airy Delphos dresses and silk gauze shawls crafted with nothing more than manipulated paper.
“That’s the challenge; that’s what I like,” says Isabelle. “When you see a painting, it’s silk, it’s velvet, it’s lace; you may have no idea, but little by little you discover, and try to give back that spirit.”
Isabelle’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the world, with permanent installations at the Palace of Versailles (a depiction of the living room of Marie Antoinette), the Tsarskoye Selo Museum in Saint-Petersburg, Russia (a paper gown inspired by Empress Elizabeth Petrovna), and the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona (paper creations representing Papageno, Billie Holiday, and the Chinese Tang dynasty).
A retrospective selection of her work will be on display this month at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens. To commemorate her first exhibition in Memphis, she and her team are creating a special Elvis-inspired paper costume.
“It’s not just a question of, ‘I would like to make a dress’ — no. It’s alive, it’s big, it’s a story,” says Isabelle. “I would like people to feel how passionate I am with what I do. And I really want to do more. I’m not finished.”
Isabelle de Borchgrave: Fashioning Art From Paper runs October 15, 2017-January 7, 2018 at The Dixon Gallery & Gardens.
Memphis magazine wishes to thank a Dixon benefactor for providing travel resources that allowed us to undertake this very special story.
