Born into a modest family in Lyon, Michel Dubost entered the School of Fine Arts at the age of 15 and, at 17, the "flower class," which taught textile decoration. This class, created in 1807 to train "florist" painters, made no secret of its ambition to also train designers for the silk industry. Similarly, the "Flower Room" at the nearby Museum of Fine Arts, inaugurated among other rooms in 1814, provided them with models. The drawing school and its course on "flowers in the garden" already existed, at the request of the silk manufacturers, some forty years before the Revolution. The Palais Saint Pierre, which housed it, was near the Jardin des Plantes, then located on the slopes of the Croix-Rousse hill, where a flower garden was specially laid out (like the rose garden later in the Parc de la Tête d'Or). A professor of this class himself in 1917, Michel Dubost also taught textile decoration at the Higher School of Weaving in Lyon. Essential to the design of figured fabrics (where the design is reproduced by interlacing colored threads), printed and embroidered, textile designers are legion in Lyon whether they are independent and work on commission, whether they are employed by an external firm, or even in-house designers like Michel Dubost (or Raoul Dufy for Bianchini -Férier). He was one of the rare designers in the Lyon silk industry who ran a true design studio within a company, the one François Ducharne founded in 1920, employing some thirty artists. The company worked for several generations of couturiers, from Poiret, Patou, and Chanel to Saint Laurent and Guy Laroche. Dubost's artistic contribution is notably documented in an album of 28 of his compositions, prefaced by Colette, published by Audin in 1930. Dubost's creations, such as "The Blue Bird," "Arabesque," and "The Rose," are featured in the Lyon Textile Museum (School of Weaving collection) as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Michel Dubost's work has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices of up to 482 USD for paintings, and 168 USD for works on papers. Since 2017 the record price for this artist at auction is 482 USD for Bouquets de fleurs et fruits, sold at Artenchères in 2023.