Madame Grès

Germaine Krebs was already well known as a couturière in the 1930s under the name "Alix," but in 1942, in the middle of the occupation, she opened a new house under the name Grès - taken from a partial anagram of the first name of her husband, the painter Serge Czerefkov. It's hard to overstate how unusual that is: opening a couture house in occupied Paris, with fabric scarce and the clientele politically fraught, is not the sort of move a cautious person makes. Nothing about Grès was cautious.

Her work is the high point of the draped evening silhouette. She worked directly on the body or a dress form rather than from sketches, pleating silk jersey by hand into tiny, precise folds - sometimes only a few millimetres wide - so that a gown fell like fluted stone and then moved like water when the wearer did. The effect is so obviously inspired by Greek sculpture that the gowns are often just called "Grecian," but what always strikes me when I look at them closely is how much construction discipline is hidden in something that looks effortless. A single dress could take many metres of fabric and hundreds of hours of handwork. It's the opposite of wartime economy, and she did it anyway.

Her wartime defiance is the other part of her story. Grès clashed with the occupying authorities more than once, and at one point showed a collection in blue, white, and red - the colours of the French flag - which is about as pointed as a fashion statement could get in 1940s Paris. Eventually the Germans ordered her house closed - officially for using too much fabric - and she left Paris for the Pyrenees until the Liberation. It makes a striking contrast with the careful negotiation of Lucien Lelong: two very different answers to the same impossible question about what couture should do under occupation.