piece love; As patchwork hits the runways, Hamish Bowles looks at the quilting queen bees who inspired the trend.

Byline: Hamish Bowles

Enduring style maven Gloria Vanderbilt and the legendary outfits, environments, and collages that she concocted from antique quilts and fabric scraps in the sixties have proved a bit of a muse this season for designers wittily and giddily reinterpreting patchwork.

Working with designer Adolfo in the late sixties, Vanderbilt crafted pseudo-Elizabethan dresses from her collection of log-cabin patchwork quilts, which she also used to upholster her hallucinatory bedroom from floor to ceiling.

"The effect is a dazzling, personal cosmogony, a shimmery balance between things as remote and dazzling as the treasures of the Valley of the Urals, yet as lush and lyric as the vegetation of a Rousseau jungle," exclaimed Vogue at the time. She introduced her whimsical hobby of assembling elaborate collages from fabric scraps and everyday detritus to a wider public with her 1970 tome, Gloria Vanderbilt Book of Collage, in which she raved, "Collage can be the most personal, amusing, satisfying and immediate of art forms. You can create an exotic and special world out of the most ordinary objects."

Stepping into that world this season are Chloe's Yvan Mispelaere (who has since moved to Gucci) and his design teammates, who cited Vanderbilt as the inspiration for the intricate patchwork embroideries on their baby doll shift dresses, and Alexandre Herchcovitch, Ungaro's Peter Dundas, Veronica Etro, and Proenza Schouler, all of whom used seemingly random blocks of different prints in piecework-like fashion. The crafted effect of the pattern, which evokes both nineteenth-century Americana and counterculture hippies, lends personality to the runways.

While Vanderbilt was creating her fantasias on the Upper East Side, another great patchwork artist, Andree Brossin de Mere, was hopscotching across Europe plying the world's greatest couturiers, including Balenciaga, Givenchy, and Yves Saint Laurent, with her ...