Mariano Fortuny was a painter, engraver, stage-lighting engineer, photographer, inventor, and — almost incidentally — one of the most important couturiers of the early twentieth century. He was born in Granada in 1871 to a distinguished artistic family. He moved to Venice in 1889, bought the Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei in 1899, and never left. He ran his studio, archive, and factory from the Palazzo for fifty years.

The Delphos

In 1907, with his French-born wife Henriette Negrin, Fortuny developed a process for permanently pleating silk crepe de Chine — fine, regular, vertically-running pleats that did not release when laundered. He patented the process in Paris in 1909 as the Delphos gown. The dress was a column of pleated silk that fell from the shoulders to the floor, weighted by glass beads along the hem. It required no corset, no lining, no seams visible to the eye. It rolled up into a fist-sized ball and emerged uncreased.

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I am a painter who works with fabric. — Mariano Fortuny

Isadora Duncan wore the Delphos on stage. The Marchesa Casati wore it to her Venetian balls. Eleonora Duse wore it in La Città Morta. Ruth St. Denis danced in it in New York. Proust, who could not have been unaware of it, dressed Albertine in a Fortuny in Remembrance of Things Past. The dress, in production from 1907 until Fortuny's death in 1949, never went out of fashion; the method of its pleating remains, officially, a secret.

The Factory

The Giudecca factory, opened in 1922, still produces Fortuny's hand-printed velvets and cottons under licence. The Delphos itself was discontinued at Fortuny's death; surviving examples are in museum collections, and have sold at auction for between USD 10,000 and USD 80,000.

He died in Venice in 1949, at seventy-eight. The palazzo is now the Museo Fortuny, open to the public since 1975.