Sonia Delaunay and her influence on modern design



On a recent trip to London, I was incredibly fortunate to visit an exhibition at the Tate celebrating the exuberant, avant-garde creativity of Sonia Delaunay. As a Delaunay neophyte, I was immediately struck by how relevant her work is to modern design.

Her work profoundly affected 20th century art, however her work in fashion is often overlooked. In fact, her work with fabrics and clothing design has left a legacy as indelible as that of her paintings; her lectures on women and fashion were progressive for their time and still resonate today.

The aspect of design for which both Sonia and her artist husband Robert Delaunay are best known is their use of colour. Theirs was an approach which focused on form, colour and rhythm to communicate, and employed the notion of "simultaneity" – seeing colours as having independent lives acquired when liberated from subject matter or combined with other colours.

This attitude was seamlessly incorporated into Sonia Delaunay's work with textiles, where she used exactly the same principles and philosophies of colour study as she did in painting, resulting in work that was simultaneously aesthetically engaging and philosophically utopian. Modern day designers like Roksanda Ilincic and Missoni have continued this thought process and incorporated it into their work.

A Roksanda Ilincic creation on Samantha Cameron

The technical construction of her clothing was designed to suit what Delaunay termed the real-life requirements of women; it allowed one to work, to dance, to play sport. In 1927, during a lecture at the Sorbonne titled The Influence of Painting on the Art of Clothes, she not only explored the rhythmic relationship between colours in her fabrications but also the reasons behind the move towards ready-to-wear during a time where couture was the norm.

Delaunay made imaginative waistcoats for Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, Rene Crevel and other Surrealist poets. She dressed Gloria Swanson and various French film stars, the unconventional socialite Nancy Cunard, and the wife of the Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer. She designed interiors in collaboration with the Paris architect Mallet-Stevens, and created costumes for the early films of Marcel L'Herbier. Her fabrics were sold by the most exclusive department stores in the world. Jean Cocteau and Blaise Cendrars wrote about her fashion designs. And her decorated scarves are known to have influenced the work of Paul Klee.

Text by Minoli Ratnayake