The challenge: describe the role that fashion’s most creative thinkers have played in the major cultural advances of the past century without using the adjectives ‘groundbreaking’, ‘trailblazing’ or ‘gamechanging’.

We’re all familiar with the roll call — Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Miuccia Prada, Rei Kawakubo — the figureheads among fashion’s intelligentsia who have each changed the way we think about the world. But, when exactly did their leaps of creativity occur? How did they overrule societal norms? And, whose noses did they put out of joint at the time?

As all 27 editions of Vogue around the world unite under the single theme of creativity this month, we pay homage to the groundbreaking, trailblazing, gamechanging minds who foresaw the future and made it a reality. These are the 13 moments that changed fashion forever.

1911: ‘King of Fashion’ Paul Poiret and the birth of the fashion editorial

“More than any other designer of the 20th century, Paul Poiret elevated fashion to the status of an art form” — so goes The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s official strapline for the radical creativity of the Parisian couturier. The Costume Institute’s 2007 exhibition themed in his honour was aptly entitled Paul Poiret, The King of Fashion — his was an ultra-revolutionary reign.

When Poiret wasn’t staging decadent society balls as an ingenious means to show off his latest designs among his monied clientele, he was doing away with corsets, procuring celebrity ambassadors (enter French stage star Gabrielle Réjane) and officially becoming the first couturier to launch a perfume line. The lightning-rod moment that would change the face of fashion forever came in 1911 when fine-art photographer Edward Steichen shot Poiret’s designs for the April issue of Art et Décoration magazine, in what is now understood to be one of the earliest fashion editorials.

Later, in 1932, Steichen would take American Vogue’s first colour photo cover, depicting a swimsuit-clad model working out against an azure-blue sky for the magazine’s July issue. The 1929 stock-market crash would force Poiret to shutter operations for good, but his enduring creative legacy would remain the blueprint for a billion-dollar industry that was yet to emerge. 

1926: Coco Chanel’s LBD is introduced to the world in the October issue of Vogue

“These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black!” Chanel, ever the iconoclast, famously declared. The result was the LBD, a design that typified Chanel’s egalitarian intentions, announced to the world via an illustration in American Vogue. The artwork depicts a long-sleeved, knee-grazing black dress. The silhouette is demure, conservative even, by today’s standards. Rewind to 1926, however, and the dress epitomised the liberal spirit of the Roaring Twenties. Chanel had flipped the script, dismissing class-driven notions that black clothes were the uniform of house servants and funerals — a move that would become the key to her success. 

The 1930s: Elsa Schiaparelli headlines artist collaborations, humour and whip-smart ingenuity  

The Italian-born designer, who made fashion an indissociable part of one of the 20th-century’s greatest art movements, surrealism (epitomised by her 1937 ‘lobster dress’, a collaboration with Salvador Dalí) began with the utilitarian, sporty knit. “During the war, it wasn’t all glamour. She did Hollywood, but also sportswear,” Schiaparelli’s granddaughter Marisa Berenson told Suzy Menkes in 2003. Amid the prohibition era of the 1920s, the designer employed her wit and design acumen with fabled results — “that dress to hide a whisky flask,” Berenson remembers.

1947: Christian Dior unveils the ‘new look’ (and women everywhere want it)

You can’t help but imagine that Dior knew something enormous was about to happen while preparing to reveal his debut collection on 12 February 1947. History remembers the 90 silhouettes that made up the SS47 couture collection, a show that will forever remain one of fashion’s greatest premieres, simply as the “new look”. 

The couturier, who had established his atelier at 30 Avenue Montaigne, Paris, just weeks before, in December 1946, signalled a mood-raising fresh start for women everywhere, drawing a line under the austerity of the second world war with a silhouette that luxuriated in femininity and celebrated womanly proportions — the generously full skirt, hourglass waist and trim, sculpted shoulders. A new era had begun.

1954: Karl Lagerfeld begins his career in fashion as Pierre Balmain’s assistant 

Decades before Karl Lagerfeld would ascend to Kaiser status at the helm of Chanel in 1983, the young designer would learn the ropes in the shadow of Pierre Balmain — the architect-turned-master-couturier whose designs were described by Diana Vreeland as “the very quintessence of haute couture.” For Lagerfeld, Balmain’s atelier would have been an electrifying invitation into a creative epicentre where costuming stars, including soon-to-be global cinema sensation Brigitte Bardot, was part of his daily duties. 

1961: Roy Halston Frowick designs the pillbox hat Jackie Kennedy wears to her husband’s presidential inauguration 

The midwestern milliner who made a name for himself at Bergdorf Goodman in New York rose to become a household name thanks to one very high-profile client. As the world watched John F Kennedy take the presidential oath, his wife, Jackie Kennedy, would likewise be anointed global cultural icon status. 

Halston matched the pillbox design to the duck-egg blue coat by courtier Oleg Cassini — a strikingly ‘clean’ look that was specifically crafted to convey the first lady’s modern outlook. Viewers worldwide leapt upon the hat, an achingly straightforward design that Kennedy accidentally dented during the inauguration ceremony while warding off the wind. “Everybody who copied it put a dent in it,” Halston noted. Eight years later, in 1969, he would launch his mononymous fashion label, Halston, becoming the unofficial outfitter of the Studio 54 era through his signature ultra-luxurious, languid designs.