Asymmetrical Dress Designs

This page from a French fashion gazette illustrates Raymond Duncan's controversial asymmetrical garment designs through three sketched figures. The text mocks Duncan's artistic pretensions, quoting his claim that objects appear beautiful when arranged with symmetry, yet defending asymmetrical dress through ironic praise of "beautiful shoes well-arranged" and "intelligent" placement of accessories. The hand-colored line drawings show the practical result: unbalanced silhouettes that struck contemporaries as militaristic and absurd. This fashion satire descends from the print caricature tradition—like Daumier's fashion plates—where illustrators used exaggeration and wit to expose vanity and social pretension. Here, visual distortion and deadpan text work together to ridicule modernist aesthetics filtering into haute couture.