This close-up portrait of a woman’s face is centered within a thin orange border. Her light-toned skin is outlined in fine tan lines. She gazes slightly downward with lowered eyelids shaded in matte blue, lashes long and stylized, a small flat nose, and lips painted in flat rose pink. Her head is wrapped in a yellow-green turban dotted with black and white spots. A jeweled band with repeating oval medallions encircles the turban, culminating in a large golden gem at the center, from which rises a tall, white feather plume. Dark curls of hair peek from beneath the turban’s edges. Behind her, simplified garden terraces unfold symmetrically: orange stairs descend toward teal hedges, round potted trees, and white balustrades rendered in flat blocks of color. The effect is graphic and decorative, emphasizing bold color and line over depth.
This print is plate six from “Les choses de Paul Poiret vues par Georges Lepape,” the 1911 pochoir portfolio that introduced fashion illustration as collectible art. Working with Paris printer Maquet, Lepape used the laborious pochoir technique of hand-stenciled layers of pigment applied with meticulous precision to reproduce couture designs with unmatched brilliance. The turban and plume embody Paul Poiret’s embrace of Orientalism, drawing on stylized motifs from Middle Eastern and Asian sources to signal exotic luxury.
Lepape renders them as theatrical emblems: surfaces flattened, contours crisp, the face monumentalized like a poster. This stylization reflects Japonisme and the graphic power of fin-de-siècle poster art, bridging the decorative curves of Art Nouveau with the streamlined geometry that would define Art Deco after 1925. At once intimate and iconic, the woman appears both individual and archetype, a modern muse embodying fashion as art. It illustrates how early 20th-century couture and printmaking converged, redefining fashion as modernist spectacle and elevating women’s images into symbols of cosmopolitan elegance.
“Femme au turban persan” (Woman with a Persian Turban) by Georges Lepape (French) – Pochoir (hand-stenciled color) on paper / 1911 – Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode (Paris, France) #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #GeorgesLepape #Lepape #artnouveau #artdeco #MuséedelaMode #PalaisGalliera #1910s
