In the years before World War I, Paul Poiret's star rose like a comet—as his contemporaries Picasso and Stravinsky were reimagining art and music with their iconoclastic brilliance, so he redesigned the twentieth-century woman and became the first fashion designer to create a seductive lifestyle world to reinforce his exceptional vision. But hubris and financial incompetence were to prove his downfall, and his star fizzled ignobly.

"Fashioning the Century" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the May 2007 issue of Vogue.

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