Mrs. Condé Nast wearing one of the famous Fortuny tea gowns.
This one has no tunic but is finely pleated, in the Fortuny manner, and falls in long lines, closely following the figure, to the floor.
Observe the decorative value of the long string of beads.
Clarisse Coudert, Condé Nast in 1917.
Clarisse Coudert, a fashion designer, was the wife of the owner of the fashion magazine Vogue, Vanity Fair, Condé Montrose Nast. The couple separated in 1919 and divorced in Paris in 1925.
Mrs. Condé Nast, artist and patron of the arts, noted for her understanding of her own type and the successful costuming of it.
Mrs. Nast was Miss Clarisse Coudert. Her French blood accounts, in part, for her innate feeling for line and color. It is largely due to the keen interest and active services of Mrs. Nast that Vogue and Vanity Fair have become the popular mirrors and prophetic crystal balls of fashion for the American woman.
Mrs. Nast is here shown in street costume. The photograph is by Baron de Meyer, who has made a distinguished art of photography.
We are here shown the value of a carefully considered outline which is sharply registered on the background by posing figure against the light, a method for suppressing all details not effecting the outline.
Mrs. Condé Nast in an evening gown. Here again is a costume the beauty of which evades the dictum of fashion in the narrow sense of the term.
This picture has the distinction of a well-posed and finely executed old master and because possessing beauty of a traditional sort will continue to give pleasure long after the costume has perished.
Mrs. Condé Nast in a garden costume. She wears a sun-hat and carries a flower-basket, which are decorative as well as useful.
We have chosen this photograph as an example of a costume made exquisitely artistic by being kept simple in line and free from an excess of trimming.
This costume is so decorative that it gives distinction and interest to the least pretentious of gardens.
Source: Woman as decoration by Emily Burbank. Publisher New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1917.
