Isabelle de Borchgrave, a Belgian artist and designer who made ravishing life-size paper recreations of period garments celebrating hundreds of years of sartorial history, from glittering Elizabethan court gowns to the beaded flapper fashions of Coco Chanel, died on Oct. 17 at her home in Brussels. She was 78.
The cause was cancer, said her son, Nicolas de Borchgrave.
Ms. de Borchgrave was already a well-known interior and textiles designer when she became captivated by period fashions in the painting collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art during her many trips to New York City in the 1980s and early ’90s. There, she pored over the Renaissance portraits, as well as the florid costumes in the paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Jean-Antoine Watteau. Back home, she decided to try her hand at creating a period piece for herself — but out of paper, a material she had worked with before, making clothing for children.
One of her first efforts was inspired by a Bronzino portrait of Eleanor of Toledo at the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, Italy. Painstakingly, she tried to recreate the gold-and-black brocade gown that Eleanor wore, although “it was very badly done because I had no technique,” she told the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2008.
“But every day I would learn something new,” she said, “and the technique arrived little by little.”
Ms. de Borchgrave had become friends with Rita Brown, a Canadian costume designer whom she had met on her trips to New York, and they decided to collaborate on a collection of paper garments, with examples from 300 years of fashion history, starting with the 15th century.
Ms. Brown constructed the pieces and Ms. de Borchgrave painted them, gaining skill and confidence as she worked. They plumbed the wardrobes of Marie Antoinette, Queen Elizabeth I and the Empress Eugenie of France; they sampled the oeuvre of Coco Chanel; they made Ottoman Empire caftans.
Their collection, which they called “Papiers à la Mode,” grew to more than 80 pieces and toured museums around the world, including the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Afterward, Ms. de Borchgrave continued with the project on her own.
“I went crazy,” she told The Telegraph. “I had no idea that I would do so many dresses. After I made one, I started a second and then a third. It is crazy and you never stop.”
In time, she became a trompe l’oeil wizard. Her medium: the pattern paper dressmakers use, or ordinary craft paper, “the cheapest you can find,” she liked to say.
First, she would crumple and iron the paper repeatedly, to give it the softness of fabric. Before painting a piece, she would construct it, cutting out and shaping all the parts: a poufy sleeve, a full skirt, a ruched collar. Then she would lay the pieces flat, using acrylic paint and gouache to simulate satin, silk and leather, the glint of light on a pearl, the delicate tracery of lace, the gold thread of an elaborate brocade. Finally, with a small crew of art school students, she would glue the pieces together.
A single garment, which might be composed of hundreds of pieces, could take a month to complete.
Among her greatest hits was a copy of Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding dress commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Ms. de Borchgrave worked from the original dress — a 1953 ivory silk-taffeta gown made by the couturier Ann Lowe — which had been preserved like a relic in black tissue paper, she said, and was so delicate, it couldn’t be touched.
In 2004, she made a paper coat, handbag and fan in pale lavender for Fabiola Fernanda María-de-las-Victorias Antonia Adelaida de Mora y Aragón — the Spanish-born Queen of Belgium, otherwise known as Queen Fabiola — to wear to the wedding of a nephew in Spain. On the day of the event, it rained, and a bodyguard shadowed the queen with an umbrella to keep Ms. de Borchgrave’s creation crisp and bright.
Ms. de Borchgrave also recreated 40 costumes from the Ballets Russes, using designs by Picasso, Leon Bakst and Coco Chanel, a passion project she undertook working solely from images she found in books.
When Ms. de Borchgrave was invited to do a residency at the Venetian palazzo where the Spanish couturier Mariano Fortuny had lived and worked until his death in 1949, she was so inspired that she not only recreated his well-known pleated Delphos dresses; she also fabricated an entire mise-en-scène that spread over three floors of the palazzo, which is now a museum. It included a paper Oriental tent, with paper rugs and cushions, as well as a paper recreation of Fortuny’s study, with a paper model of the designer seated at his paper desk and a paper hound curled up under a paper armchair.
“Borchgrave produces astonishing effects of scintillating color, weight, transparency and texture,” Roderick Conway Morris wrote in his review for The International Herald Tribune in 2008. “Her renderings of diaphanous gauzes are especially astonishing. Borchgrave describes herself as ‘Fortuny’s spiritual daughter,’ and her response to the Spanish artist’s extraordinary personality and exotically eclectic world is at once passionate and engagingly original.”
Isabelle Jeanne Marie Alice Jacobs was born on April 10, 1946, in Brussels. Her mother, Françoise Jacobs, who worked in public relations, was the family breadwinner; her father, Albert Jacobs, lived a more relaxed, bohemian life, Ms. de Borchgrave told The Telegraph.
At 14, she left secondary school to study at the Centre des Arts Décoratifs and then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, both in Brussels. When she graduated, she began making painted dresses for herself and friends, who clamored for more. But she wasn’t interested in being a fashion designer; instead, she focused on designing textiles and working as an interior designer.
She met Count Werner de Borchgrave, an “anarchist-aristocrat,” as he described himself in a recent interview, at a costume party in the late 1960s. She was dressed as La Goulue, from the Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec poster of the Moulin Rouge dancer. Mr. de Borchgrave had come as a cul-de-jatte, or legless person, and was scooting around in a wheeled contraption he had constructed. They fell in love, and he became her business partner. When they married in 1975, Ms. de Borchgrave became a countess, although she never used the title.
In addition to her son and husband, Ms. de Borchgrave is survived by a brother, Jean-François Jacobs; her daughter, Pauline Rombaux; and two grandchildren.
Some years ago, Ms. de Borchgrave was asked by a client to recreate Frida Kahlo’s Tehuana dresses, intricately embroidered costumes in the style of the traditional clothing worn by Mexico’s Indigenous people, the Zapotec, and favored by Kahlo. The client wanted just six pieces, rendered in black and white. The commission was eventually canceled, but by then Ms. de Borchgrave had become fascinated by the artist. She traveled to Casa Azul, Kahlo’s cobalt-blue house in Mexico City, now a museum, and photographed its interiors and gardens.
Over the next three years, she recreated the entire house and its contents — including the dishes in the kitchen, the plants in the garden and Kahlo’s parrots and dogs — along with 60 of the artist’s dresses. Altogether, there were more than 200 full-sized objects, which required some two and a half miles of paper to construct.
Ms. de Borchgrave called the collection “Miradas de Mujeres,” which is Spanish for “the gaze of women.” It was her fifth major collection. In addition to “Papiers à la Mode,” “Mariano Fortuny” and “Ballets Russe,” she created a collection of Renaissance work, “I Medici,” featuring the costumes of famous Florentines. She also collaborated with fashion designers like Comme des Garçons and Hermes, and designed housewares, furniture, jewelry and stationery.
“If I lived another 50 years,” Ms. de Borchgrave told Magazine Horse in 2022, “I would love to recreate the Silk Road: the costumes, the caravans, the horses.”
“This is the force of Isabelle,” said Christine-Aurore Magnée, Ms. de Borchgrave’s longtime assistant. “She had an idea every 10 minutes.”
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