Jean Patou

Patou is one of those designers whose name survives mostly on a perfume bottle, which undersells him badly. If I had to name the single person most responsible for the moment the 1920s silhouette ended, it would be him rather than anyone more famous.

His reputation was built in the 1920s on sportswear. From 1921 he dressed the French tennis champion Suzanne Lenglen, on court and off, in pleated knee-length skirts, sleeveless cardigans, and a bandeau around her head, and the look was copied by women who had never held a racket. He sold knitted sweaters with his "JP" monogram on them, which makes him one of the earliest designers to put a visible logo on clothing, and in 1924 he brought six American models to Paris to show his clothes on the long-legged, athletic figure his American customers actually had. He was a rival of Chanel in exactly the same territory - easy, sporty, modern clothes for an active woman - and the two of them did not get on.

Then, in his 1929 collection, he did something that looks obvious in hindsight. He lowered his hemlines toward the calf and raised the waistline back up to the natural waist, after almost a decade of low-slung, dropped waists. Other houses were experimenting in the same direction, but Patou's collection is the one fashion historians usually point to, and the press at the time treated it as a turning point. Within a couple of seasons, the return of the natural waist was simply how fashionable clothes were cut, and the flapper line looked instantly dated.

His 1930s work is more restrained than his 1920s peak - the Crash hit his American business hard - but he stayed tied to the new cult of sport and the suntan, with swimwear and beachwear alongside his couture. In 1930 he launched Joy, marketed as "the costliest perfume in the world," which was a gloriously cheeky thing to sell in the middle of the Depression and worked anyway. Patou died suddenly in 1936, still in his forties. I think of him as the hinge between two decades: the sportswear pioneer of the 1920s who, almost as his last big act, drew the outline that the 1930s filled in.