Madeleine Vionnet signed every dress with her thumbprint
It wasn't a flourish, it was evidence. Every model that left Madeleine Vionnet's studio was photographed front, side and back, and filed as proof of authorship; every label carried an imprint of her own thumb. In 1921 she backed an association to pursue copyists in court, and in 1924 her 'Little Horses' dress was copied and sold anyway. The gap she was fighting sat in the law: interwar France treated a dress as copyrightable art, America didn't, so New York manufacturers copied Paris freely. In 1952 she handed the whole regime to a Paris archive, 122 dresses, 750 toiles, 75 albums of copyright photographs. The paper trail outlived the copies.