WORTH: THE ENGLISHMAN WHO TRANSFORMED FRENCH HAUTE COUTURE

High fashion has its roots in Paris and French culture.

- RICKY TOLEDO & CHITO VIJANDRE

But do you know that it was actually an Englishman who transformed Parisian couture by establishing practices that laid the foundations for modern fashion as we know it today? "Worth, Inventing Haute Couture," the exhibition co-curated by the Petit Palais and the Palais Galliera in Paris, shows just how revolutionary Charles Frederick Worth was in the second half of the 19th to the 20th century by protecting couture designs, being the first to create seasonal collections, using live models to present his pieces and shifting the power from client to designer - earning the title "The Father of Haute Couture" from many fashion historians.

With no less than Empress Eugénie as his top client, bringing in European royalty and the aristocracy along with her, Worth created the most exquisite gowns of the period seen at the most lavish balls from Paris and London to New York and Boston. At the House of Worth, "one can experience so viscerally the heady sensation of luxury, of sumptuous elegance, of the superfluous, at once fragile and triumphant," a writer observed in Le Figaro in 1905.

This was a world away from the beginnings of Charles Frederick Worth, born in 1825 in the Lincolnshire market town of Bourne to William and Ann Worth. Charles' father, described as "dissolute" for mismanaging finances, left the family in poverty in 1836. The young Worth had to work at a printer at age 11, later moving to a London textile store then finally to Paris in 1836, where he became a sales assistant in the prestigious firm of Gagelin-Opigez & Cie where he met Marie Vernet who became his wife in 1851.