Jeanne Hallée was a Parisian lingerie and couture house in operation from 1870 to 1924 with a reputation for making the finest lingerie coveted by both American and European clientele. In 1891 under the direction of two Jeanne Hallée employees, the successful lingerie house was reorganized into a maison de couture making made-to-measure garments that encompassed the full range of a woman’s wardrobe. As the business expanded to compete in the couture industry, over the course of its 54-year history, the house underwent five distinct changes in ownership, frequently passing almost matrilineally from directrice to protégée while maintaining the same label. This forever tied the identity of the house to the gendered nature of the lingerie industry from which it evolved, traditionally comprising women-led houses and a female-dominated workforce that produced the most feminized objects in a women’s wardrobe. The garments Jeanne Hallée created were notable for their delicate handwork and embellishments and helped usher in each successive stage of a woman’s life—from birth to marriage and motherhood and even unto death. The high standard of workmanship of these garments remained a hallmark of the house as its creative directors maintained partnerships with talented artists and designers, effectively creating some of the finest and most singular dress that survives from the period.
A House of Lingerie
Marie Jeanne Hallée (1831–1898) opened her eponymous lingerie house in 1870 at 15, rue Royale among the city’s high-end retailers of accessories, clothing, and jewelry. At that time, lingerie included anything that had historically been made from linen, including men’s and women’s undergarments, shirts, sleepwear, fashion accessories, children’s and infants clothing, and household linens. In the highly organized clothing industries of nineteenth-century France, each lingerie maker focused on one or several of these specialties.
Jeanne Hallée was at first a small-scale business producing ready-made undergarments, sleepwear, and fashion accessories for women and children, as well as infant clothing purchased before a child’s birth called a layette. The house quickly expanded and began making custom lingerie for women called lingerie fine, which included petticoats, morning dresses, tea gowns, and other articles of dress comprising a woman’s trousseau, purchased on the event of her marriage. These labor-intensive garments, enhanced by luxurious French fabrics and trimmings, were some of the finest pieces a woman could own. As Jeanne Hallée gained popularity producing the trousseaux of wealthy American socialites and European aristocracy, its growing clientele necessitated an expansion of its ateliers. The house relocated three times to ever-larger facilities: in 1871 to 6, rue de Faubourg Saint-Honoré; in 1873 to 408, rue Saint-Honoré; and finally in 1882 to 3, rue de la Ville l’Evêque in Paris’s expanding fashion district.
A House of Couture
On August 8, 1891, Mademoiselle Hallée sold her house to two enterprising employees. Marie Angenard (1859–1942) and Blanche Diémert (1857–1911) formed a partnership and expanded the business into a lingerie and couture house under the name Jeanne Hallée Diémert et Cie. While the majority of the couture industry was composed of women called les petites mains working in ateliers to create the garments, business management, financial backing, and even creative direction were often dominated by men. Lingerie was a lucrative industry that offered businesswomen entree into couture during this period. These women-led houses relied heavily on their established capital and name recognition, as business was typically regarded as a masculine purview, even in fashion. By the end of the nineteenth century, a wave of new female-directed firms, including Jeanne Paquin and Callot Soeurs, signaled a change in gender norms of the leading houses in the industry.
Angenard’s ascent within the world of haute couture exemplifies the opportunities that employment in fashion could provide to women. She was born Marie-Claudine Marché to a poor peasant family in Burgundy, traveled third-class to Paris at sixteen with only a hundred francs in her pocket, and began her career at Jeanne Hallée making just twenty-five francs a month. As the house expanded, Madame Marie, as she would come to be known, became second to Mademoiselle Hallée, eventually becoming the driving force of the house, involved in some aspect of its management and direction until its closure. For more than thirty years, Madame Marie fought for Jeanne Hallée’s space in the couture industry, becoming a millionaire in the process.
While lingerie continued to be a lucrative portion of the business, Angenard and Diémert together provided the creative direction of the couture designs each season. Now making the full range of a woman’s wardrobe, its ateliers excelled in creations using techniques refined in the construction of their lingerie, including fine pintucking and delicate lace insertions (2009.300.3098a,b). Noting the increasing popularity of portraiture and fine art in fashionable circles, Angenard studied paintings and engravings to find charming silhouettes, colors, and ornaments for the house’s designs. This widespread trend led to the production of overtly historicized accessories and embellishments that took inspiration from French traditions in art and fashion. Jeanne Hallée embraced the Louis XIV style in its day ensembles, with rich textures, a deep color palette, and references to seventeenth-century accessories like the lace ruffles at the neck called jabots (2009.300.374a,b). The house also excelled in the Louis XV and Louis XVI styles, with exquisite rococo and neoclassical beading and embroidery (C.I.62.36.1a–d; C.I.50.40.4a, b) on evening gowns with silhouettes evocative of late eighteenth-century portraiture, complete with faux stomachers, fichus, and lace engageantes.
As head designer, Diémert sketched and directed the talented premières and petites mains working in the ateliers to translate her drawings into garments. Madame Lefranc (1878–1914), who later took over the house of Premet, was one such notable designer to have gotten her start as a première in the workrooms at Jeanne Hallée. Following the death of Diémert in 1911, Angenard took full control of the house and its creative direction, employing additional artists and designers. Angenard was also involved in creating custom fabrics with textile manufacturers, an area that Jeanne Hallée particularly excelled in during the 1910s. One such voided velvet (1981.328.9) with a bronze-shaded chiffon ground named “velour frappé” was woven for the house’s fall 1912 gowns. The textures and motifs of the fabrics from that season were reminiscent of Italian velvets of the Renaissance and were layered with embroideries patterned after bold Venetian laces (C.I.64.7.5a–c). These more muted “historic” shades were soon replaced by brighter palettes inspired by the sets and costumes designed by Léon Bakst for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (2015.787.6), which presented enthralling visions of the Orient to Parisian audiences beginning in 1909.
The increasing vogue for an idealized globally-inspired style of dress throughout the first decades of the twentieth century led couturiers like Paul Poiret (1879-1944) to embrace the fantasies of the ballet and dramatically changed the shape of the fashionable silhouette. Jeanne Hallée’s departure from typically French styles and decoration, as well as from the traditional dressmaking techniques of the nineteenth century, allowed the house to maintain its relevance. Angenard drew inspiration from numerous medieval, Renaissance, Near and Far Eastern textile traditions and modes of embellishment (C.I.49.2.5; 1981.328.4; 1981.328.10) and excelled at the harmonious fusion of these influences. The rapid evolution of the silhouette in fashionable dress necessitated an equally rapid transformation of dressmaking techniques in the ateliers of the established couture houses, a transition that Angenard expertly navigated between 1907 and World War I.
While Poiret was simultaneously lauded and derided after introducing “harem” pants in 1911 and “lampshade” tunics in 1913, Jeanne Hallée was praised for the relative austerity of its interpretation of these styles. In April 1911 American Vogue highlighted the “picturesque” Jeanne Hallée variations on harem pants (1981.328.3), and in 1913 the house was applauded for its restrained interpretation of the lampshade tunic (1981.328.8). Both boasted a richly layered yet effective combination of delicate materials, decoration, and conventionally pleasing silhouettes, and both were emblematic accomplishments of Angenard’s tenure at the house of Jeanne Hallée during its most influential period.
Jeanne Hallée Successors
Jeanne Hallée remained open during World War I, but it suffered the same losses as other couturiers when foreign buyers fled Paris with the onset of war. To remain solvent, the house continued to be involved in the production of custom and ready-made lingerie, while its designs continued to fill the pages of fashion magazines, maintaining impressively high standards in materials and promoting fashionable new silhouettes. Nevertheless, Angenard grew tired of business and fearful of even greater losses. Having already amassed a large fortune by 1918, she looked to her protégée and second-in-command, Madame Madeleine, to purchase the house of Jeanne Hallée. Madame Madeleine had, however, already begun the process of forming her own eponymous couture house, Madeleine & Madeleine. In support of this venture, Angenard joined the new house as a member of its board of directors and sold her shares in Jeanne Hallée to an outsider. In the few years between 1918 and 1924, three successive couture houses—Madame Suzanne, Madeleine & Madeleine, and Anna—each maintained the Jeanne Hallée name and label in conjunction with their own and fought to revive the label’s long-established place in the industry. None succeeded, however, and the house of Jeanne Hallée closed its doors on July 15, 1924.