Vintage Poster Archives
Domergue Bagheera c.1950 | French Fashion Poster
Domergue Bagheera c.1950 | French Fashion Poster
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A slender figure turns to the viewer over one shoulder, her back bare above a leopard-spotted strapless garment, one hand resting on her hip. Red lips, wide eyes, black wavy hair set against an unbroken cream-white ground. The bold red sans-serif logotype BAGHEERA anchors the lower third. Nothing in the composition competes with the figure or the name.
Designed by Jean-Gabriel Domergue (1889-1962), trained at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and a Prix de Rome laureate, Domergue spent his career from the 1920s onward as the pre-eminent painter of the Parisian woman: long-necked, wide-eyed, and possessed of a particular mid-century Parisian self-assurance. He designed clothes for Paul Poiret, exhibited from the age of seventeen, and later served as curator of the Musee Jacquemart-Andre. Bagheera was a French fashion textile brand; the name references both Kipling's panther and the velvet-surfaced leopard fabric the brand produced. This poster was printed by Girbal of Paris.
The Bagheera poster belongs to the lineage of single-figure French fashion advertising in which the model and the brand name share equal weight: no background, no narrative, no scene. The whole argument is the woman in the fabric.
A natural fit for anyone drawn to mid-century French graphic design, post-war Parisian fashion advertising, or the work of Domergue as painter and illustrator. Reproduced on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper to retain the flat, high-contrast graphic quality of the source lithograph.
