I'm Every Woman

An inspirational couturier and a badass matriarch prove that big Capricorn energy is real so you better put some respect on their names.

When you think of early 20th century couture, you probably think of Coco Chanel and her boxy suits, little black dresses, and strands upon strands of pearls. You might not think about another fashion designer – Jeanne Lanvin – who operated roughly around the same time as she did. Right now, SCAD FASH in Atlanta is trying to change that with "Jeanne Lanvin: Haute Couture Heritage", the first-ever U.S. exhibit dedicated to Lanvin's work. With more than sixty designs from the late-1890s to 1947, the show also traces Lanvin's humble beginnings as the oldest of eleven children in a modest Parisian family to the founder of the oldest Parisian haute couture house still in existence.

Born January 1, 1867, Lanvin got her start in fashion by working for a milliner at age 13 and then used her own hard-earned money to open her own shop by the age of 22. That was in 1889, when the Eiffel Tower made its debut at the Exposition Universelle. In a sense, the tower's gentle ascent mirrored Lanvin's own methodical rise through the ranks of a male-dominated profession. Soon, her hats were worn around town by the most fashionable women in Paris. When Lanvin's daughter Marguerite was born in 1897, she would become her mother's muse and inspiration, spurring her to create beautiful little dresses she could wear. Mothers coveted the little girl's frocks for their own children, and then wanted more grownup versions for themselves.

This mother-daughter bond became the core of Lanvin's work, and inspired its Art Deco logo by Paul Iribe.

After hats and children's and womenswear, Lanvin expanded into menswear, home goods, perfumes, and sportswear. She created her own dye factory, so that she could mix her own colors, among them Lanvin blue, which was inspired by the 15th century frescoes of Fra Angelico.

She also added images from her travels to her creations.

Where Chanel was photographed and talked about, Lanvin largely kept to herself, though she socialized with painters from the Nabis movement, who believed that color and shape represented experience, and that pictures only had meaning if they possessed style.

The colors and shapes of Lanvin's creations certainly possessed style, and they would create meaning for the people who sought an elegant, innocent way of presenting themselves to a world that was increasingly in turmoil. At one point, demand for her couture was such that Lanvin employed 1,200 employees, and had many stores throughout the world, all of them selling her idea of what it meant to be modern and chic.

“[Lanvin] was an advocator for women’s rights,” SCAD FASH's creative director Rafael Gomes recently told W Magazine. “She was a fighter. She stayed positive in very difficult times [working through the Great Depression and World War II]. She was such an inspirational figure, and we need this inspiration right now.”

Yes, we most certainly do.

Be sure to check out "Jeanne Lanvin: Haute Couture Heritage" at SCAD FASH until August 31, 2025. Also, Rizzoli's Lanvin is a big and beautiful look at the woman and the world she created.

Writing prompt: What are the ways in which you stay positive during difficult times?

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

-- Joan Didion

Endnotes

What I'm reading

Matriarch: A Memoir by Tina Knowles. The attentive reader will recognize that this is my second consecutive Oprah-anointed read, but, that's not why I picked it, even though I love Oprah very much. I picked it because I'm interested in the way that women who have been unjustly counted out, or overlooked, or shoved aside, or maligned (or what-have-you) reclaim and celebrate their own narrative. And oh my goodness, did Ms. Tina Knowles do just that in the most fabulous, wise, and unputdownable of ways. Born poor in segregated Galveston, Knowles was the scrappy and sassy youngest of seven children, born to a longshoreman father and seamstress mother who told her stories about her family history. "These people, my people – my ancestors and my parents when they were young – were characters in a long drama that I was now a part of," Knowles writes. "Their struggles were not mine, but their lessons could be...Just like she did in her work as a seamstress, my mother could take the stories of their lives that might have been discarded or lost, some precious scrap of information, and weave it into the tapestry of her storytelling as something precious and unique." Tina's mother taught her to love fiercely, and make a way out of no way, which served her well as she became an entrepreneur in Houston, and a mother to two total icons – Beyonce and Solange Knowles. But there were others she mothered and mentored along the way too. Matriarch is a story about a woman who fought hard all her life to help other people feel seen and loved, only to recognize she also needed to do that work for herself. Now in her seventies, Knowles recently told Michelle Obama that she is "feeling myself." I love that for her. And I challenge you to pick this book up and not be inspired by a fellow Capricorn's story. It's so, SO good.

And...

Writer Gray Chapman's beautifully done Bitter Southerner piece "Mothering at the End of the World," about the challenges of nurturing an infant in Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene hit. "I visited North Carolina two months after the storm," Chapman writes. "Less than two months after that, the Palisades and Eaton wildfires would ravage Los Angeles, with an estimated 28 direct fatalities as of late January and thousands of homes lost. In the aftermath of both disasters, all I could (and can) think about are the mothers. Delivering babies in a city with no electricity or clean water, or in a city engulfed in flames. Losing everything — clothing and furniture and a roof over one’s head, and also the stick-figure crayon drawings on the fridge, the beloved stuffies and favorite pajamas, the impossibly tiny hospital bracelets — to flood waters or fire. The terror of fleeing. The terror of staying. The precarity of bedtime routines, the bone-deep exhaustion, the mundane and the ecstatic of motherhood’s daily practice, all darkened by the question: What kind of world have I brought my child into?" Chapman explores how a group of mothers held it together through this crisis, while holding their babies, and their community too. Pour yourself a coffee and sit down for this very moving read.

Also...

Sometimes we get in reading slumps. Just ask Emily Johnson, who is working her way out of one by reading short, weird books. "I'm talking barely over 100 pages, genre-be-damned, far-out shit that is impossible to put down," she writes in her Point of Departure newsletter. "Not to mention that when you are teetering on the brink of a slump, a short, quick book does wonders in bringing you back from the edge." Here are some of the books that are getting her through her literary malaise. Maybe they'll help you get through your next one too!

What surprised me

Somehow Atlanta United went on the road to Austin this week, played in 100 degree heat, and two-stepped out of Texas without losing the match. It wasn't pretty (again), but at least they weren't totally cooked. So there's that.

What I'm listening to

"The Telepathy Tapes" podcast, which is about non-speaking autistic individuals with the power to read minds and tune in to frequencies that those with voices cannot. I'm a handful of episodes in to this, and I've been incredibly moved by the stories about parents who have just done everything in their power to help their kids, only to be told by the medical establishment that there's no one there, and therefore no hope in even trying to communicate with them. Through the help of a technology called letter boards, these parents have found that's not true. Their children, who have been written off in so many ways, have been empowered to communicate about their rich inner world with their parents, and even read their minds. For parents who have struggled and been beaten down in a multitude of ways, the ability to finally connect with their child is nothing short of miraculous. The scientific community, of course, is skeptical about these stories. The families on this podcast, however, want them to investigate these phenomena with the same rigor they'd use to research anything else. Fascinating. And apparently there's a season two in the works...

Where I hope you'll make your voice heard this week

Okay, it's not a financial donation request. It is a "let your voice be heard" request. And this week I am hoping you'll call your representatives or senators and ask them to do one or all of these things: 1. Save the National Endowment for the Arts, 2. Stop unlawful ICE detainment of immigrants, 3. Block an increase for ICE and mass deportation in the budget reconciliation bill, and/or 4. Fight the Trump administration's defiance of the constitution and courts. The easiest way to dive into this is by going to 5calls.org, typing in your zip code, and then calling the congresspeople that result from that search. The site provides easy scripts for you to follow if you are a little bit nervous about making calls like these. But it's important to make the calls (it doesn't take long to do!) and read the script if you need it, so these congresspeople can continue to know that things are not okay.