Cléopâtre-Diane de Mérode (27 September 1875 – 17 October 1966) was a French dancer of the Belle Époque. She has been referred to as the "first real celebrity icon" and éodeMéthe "first modern celebrity". She was also the first woman whose photographic image, due in particular to photographers Nadar and Léopold-Émile Reutlinger, was distributed worldwide.
Biography
Cléo de Mérode was born in Paris, France on 27 September 1875 at 7:00 P.M. She was the illegitimate daughter of Viennese Baroness Vincentia Maria Cäcilia Catharina de Mérode (1850–1899). Vincentia was estranged from Cléo's father, who was the Austrian judge, lawyer, and pioneer of tourism Theodor Christomannos. Through Christomannos' marriage to Aloysia Wellzensohn, she had three half-siblings. Cléo met her father as a young adult at a train station in Merano, and upon seeing him jokingly exclaimed, "I really hope that you are wealthy, because I am used to luxury and the good life." Upon Christomannos' death in 1911, de Mérode left an inscription on his grave in German which reads, "The man who wanted everything for others and nothing for himself". She was raised Catholic and affectionately called "Lulu" by her family. At the age of eight, she was sent to study dance with the Sisters of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, and she made her professional debut at the Paris Opéra at age eleven. According to a 1964 interview with Cecil Beaton, she became a dancer because she was fond of music.
de Mérode became renowned for her glamour even more than for her dancing skills, and her image began appearing on such things as postcards and playing cards. At 16, she debuted her signature hairstyle, a chignon, which became the talk of Parisian women and was quickly adopted as a popular style for all. In Sweden, the hairstyle nearly instigated a strike against female workers when they were ordered to cease wearing the chignon to work. The hairstyle persisted in popularity for decades; as late as 1941, American newspapers called it the "Cléo de Mérode hairdo". At the same time, the hairstyle, which covered her ears, caused rumors to circulate that de Mérode was missing one of or both of her ears. She responded to the rumors by going out in public the following day with her ears exposed. de Mérode later said of the trendsetting hairstyle, "It wasn't thought out at all; it just happened. As a child I wore a square fringe. This would fall in my eyes when I was a coryphée at the Opéra ballet, and I kept pushing it back from the center; gradually the hair grew and, in order to keep it from falling forward, I knotted it in a bun. When big hats came in it was difficult to fix them on without padding, but I invented a little hidden crown." In 1895, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did her portrait, as would Charles Puyo, Alfredo Müller, Edgar Degas, Manuel Benedito, Georges Clairin, Friedrich August von Kaulbach (who painted her twice), József Rippl-Rónai, François Flameng, Carlos Vázquez Úbeda, Einar Nerman, Paul-Eugène Mesplès, Henri Gervex, and Giovanni Boldini. She was sculpted by the likes of Alexandre Falguière (who sculpted her twice), Mariano Benlliure, Alphonse Mucha, Ernst Seger, and Eugène-Denis Arrondelle. A sculpture of her done by an anonymous artist can be found at the Galerie Tourbillon, and a wax mask of her by Georges Despret is preserved at the Musée Fin-de-Siècle Museum in Brussels. Georges Goursat also drew several caricatures of de Mérode during the 1900s. Her picture was taken by some of the most illustrious photographers of the day, including Nadar and his son and successor Paul Nadar, Léopold-Émile Reutlinger and his son Jean Reutlinger, Charles Ogerau, Henri Manuel, and Otto Sarony.